Homestar Runner: The Flash Cartoon That Refused to Die

Homestar Runner is a cartoon website from 2000 that never sold out, never ran an ad, never got bought, and is somehow still posting new episodes a quarter of a century later. It is the last surviving building from the Flash era, and the lights are still on.

What is Homestar Runner?

It began as a children’s book. In 1996 Mike and Matt Chapman, two brothers from Georgia who would become known as The Brothers Chaps, made a deliberately terrible picture book called The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest. The website followed in 2000, animating the book’s characters in Flash and immediately going somewhere much stranger.

The cast is the point. Homestar himself is a legless, armless, relentlessly cheerful idiot. Strong Bad is a boxing-glove-wearing self-styled villain who is actually the star of the show. There is also Strong Mad, Strong Sad, The Cheat, Marzipan, Coach Z, Bubs, Pom Pom, and Homsar, a character created by a typo in a viewer email who speaks entirely in non sequiturs. None of it was explained. It just accumulated.

The engine that made it enormous was Strong Bad Email. Viewers wrote in, Strong Bad answered on screen, typing the response on a beige computer while insulting the sender. Over two hundred of them exist. They are dense with running gags, hidden Easter eggs, and asides that spun off into their own cartoons, songs and games. The most famous produced Trogdor, a dragon Strong Bad drew badly on a whim, who became a genuine internet folk figure with his own song, his own game and eventually his own board game.

At its mid-2000s peak this was one of the biggest things on the web, spread entirely by word of mouth and quoted relentlessly in school hallways. The Brothers Chaps kept it free and kept it independent, funding the whole operation with T-shirts rather than advertising, which is why the site never developed the desperate quality that consumed most of its contemporaries.

Then it stopped. Updates slowed around 2009 and effectively halted in 2010. Flash itself began dying. It looked like the end, and for four years it was. In 2014 an April Fools update appeared with no warning, and the site has been intermittently alive ever since, with new cartoons arriving in irregular bursts. When Flash reached end of life, rather than let the archive rot, the cartoons were made playable through browser-based emulation. Twenty-five years of animation, all of it still one click away.

What can you do on Homestar Runner?

• Watch the Strong Bad Emails. Start at the beginning or jump around. This is the core of the site and the reason most people are here.
• Dig through the Toons archive. Holiday specials, Teen Girl Squad, Puppet Stuff, Marzipan’s Answering Machine, Sbemail spin-offs and a lot of one-off oddities.
• Hunt the Easter eggs. Nearly every cartoon hides clickable extras in the final frame or the credits. Missing them means seeing maybe two thirds of the site.
• Play the games. A surprisingly large arcade of original Flash games, including several deliberate parodies of 1980s cartridge games, plus Trogdor.
• Read the Sbemail Songs and downloads. Wallpapers, ringtones and other genuinely 2003-era ephemera, preserved intact.
• Check the front page. It changes with seasons and updates, and the characters on it are usually clickable.
• Watch on YouTube instead. The official channel carries much of the catalog if you would rather just queue things up.

Tips to get the most out of it

Always click around after a cartoon ends. The Easter eggs are the culture of the site. When the toon finishes, move your cursor over the final screen and look for anything that responds. Half the best jokes are hidden there.

Start with Strong Bad Email, not with Homestar. The show is named after Homestar but Strong Bad carries it. The emails are shorter, funnier and get you fluent in the running gags fastest.

Do not start at episode one and grind forward. The early emails are rough. Jump into the middle of the run where the animation and the writing had both found their footing, then go back if you want the archaeology.

Watch Teen Girl Squad. It is a crudely drawn stick-figure comic-within-a-comic supposedly created by Strong Bad, and it is one of the funniest things on the site and easily missed.

Use the Homestar Runner Wiki when a joke goes over your head. The community wiki documents this site to a genuinely absurd depth: every Easter egg, every reference, every callback. It is a reasonable way to catch up on twenty-five years of in-jokes.

Check back occasionally. Updates arrive without schedule or announcement, often near Halloween, Christmas and April Fools. The site does not notify you. That is part of the charm.

If you like Homestar Runner, also try…

• Space Jam 1996: another web page that simply refused to be taken down, preserved exactly as built.
• Cameron’s World: a collage assembled entirely from salvaged GeoCities pages, in the same archaeological spirit.
• Zombo.com: the purest surviving artifact of Flash-era internet humor.
• My90sTV: if this triggered the nostalgia, here is a whole simulated channel of it.

There is more of this sort of thing in Entertainment & Fun, and the deeper old-web excavations are filed under Weird & Wonderful.