Everybody! Everybody!
by Sam Thielman
Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past.
“We can't believe that many people want to wear T-shirts with our dumb animal characters on them,” Homestar Runner’s Matt Chapman told WIRED in 2003. Back then, internet users in the U.S. numbered about 66 million, and Chapman casually told WIRED that “a few million” of them were visiting HomestarRunner.com each month. Not coincidentally, a disproportionately large number of those 66 million were college students in dorms kitted out for the first time with high-speed data connections; at some point it occurred to us that pirating Ben Folds and watching porn were but two of the internet’s potential use cases, and here were Matt Chapman and his brother Mike (the Brothers Chaps, as they call themselves) with the third: a series of absurdist cartoons they made using a now-defunct multimedia platform called Flash.
It’s hard to explain the generational importance of Homestar Runner without sounding insane. What’s it about? Not sure. What is Homestar, exactly? How does he type emails without hands? Or arms? What is that little Pikachu-looking thing called The Cheat? Why is he called The Cheat? Why is Strong Bad, the series’ kindasorta villain, wearing a luchador mask and boxing gloves? Is his accent…Mexican?
The story takes place in a sort of children’s-picture-book world (Free Country, USA) where a series of nonsensical but highly specific characters try to befriend, one-up, and pester one another. Where do you get it? HomestarRunner.com, still, after twenty-four years. Where you always got it.
What makes it so influential?
Man, that’s where I really hit a brick wall. I have been struggling for, I’m not kidding, several hours to bloodlessly describe this thing without adding in a bunch of profoundly alienating in-jokes that would compel even the nerdiest Simpsons fan alive to give me a wedgie just on general principle. It’s especially hard to pinpoint from so far deep in the fanhole. These cartoons are often, and intentionally, very annoying—the old intro to the show is just Homestar and a chorus of happy children singing “Everybody! Everybody!” over and over again. The site’s interface is clunky and old-fashioned. If it charms you, I suspect that that very annoyance and obscurity are part of the reason.
We’ve already established that the internet of the early 2000’s was a far smaller place in terms of the sheer number of people, but it felt much larger than it does now. There were a dozen competing blogging and quasi-social-media platforms—Livejournal, MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, and on and on—and the conventional wisdom at many burgeoning news and fan sites was that the best way to gin up readership was to encourage people to post their own comments under articles and/or talk about them ad nauseam on the sites’ message boards. Many participants found themselves at home in these spaces and set up shop there; the more vigorous communities still exist, many of them largely unchanged. (They weren’t all good, either. There’s a reason 4chan still looks like that.)
The internet is now, more or less, two websites—Google et al. and Facebook et al.—and while it’s probably too easy to feel wistful about shit like SomethingAwful and Rotten.com, where today’s loaf of griefers, shitposters, and trolls was already beginning to congeal, there was a sense at least, back then, that you were interacting with people, rather than corporations. You weren’t yet bombarded with ads purchased by automation, made with AI, and targeted using data sucked from phones and televisions and watches that exist mainly to snoop on you and then narc to Unilever about what specific kind of surgery videos you watched until 2:00 a.m. the night after your grandmother died. Our phones couldn’t even get on the internet back in 2003. They didn’t even have cameras.
And so some, or really a lot, of those real people, like the Chapman brothers, were talented entertainers, and their work existed in parallel to corporate entertainment.
The other thing that was happening was that some guys had flown three passenger jets into major landmarks in New York and D.C. and the president at the time was a sort of chortling dimwit who had let the Republican Party stock his cabinet with the last survivors of the Nixon administration, and this little crew decided together that the best response to national trauma and public grief would be to line their own pockets by invading Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that none of the hijackers were from either country. Friends of mine who’d enlisted in ROTC programs in the hope of a college scholarship and a solid job after graduation were suddenly yanked away and ground into the paste of suffering and illness that the engines of the American war machine use for fuel. Unmoored from any need for justification, the new war was, apparently, permanent.
The entertainment world was not set up to respond to this sudden shift, especially its disproportionately alienating effects on young people who were suddenly going to war, or watching their friends go to war. When we remember pop culture from the period fondly it’s because of shows like Arrested Development or Venture Bros. that were either summarily canceled because of low ratings, or persisted because nobody cared enough even to cancel them. (Cable TV economics are weird.) What passed for counterculture was anemic stuff like Team America: World Police and Family Guy. And then, the mainstream, popular film and TV was stuff that’ll make your skin crawl: Donald Trump debuted The Apprentice, the first step in the lengthy process of bartering cameos from bad 1990’s movies into the presidency of the United States. Rush Limbaugh’s buddy Joel Surnow made 24, a series about how great it is to torture Muslims. Crash won Best Picture. The Boomer death grip on entertainment media was, in other words, absolute; it made sense for people like the Chapmans to simply opt out of the conventional entertainment landscape completely and create something new.
Even addressing what it was like to be a young person felt genuinely subversive, especially when leaning hard into the absurdity that everybody else seemed determined not to recognize. At Homestar Runner, Strong Bad “drew” the “Teen Girl Squad” series, in which one of the Teen Girls might put everybody’s Christmas—sorry, Decemberween—presents in a lion’s mouth and peer pressure her friends into getting eaten so they can all open their presents together. There’s a running gag about commas. It does not make sense, and so it was much more directly representative of the world we were living in, in which a college kid in Alabama had to go get shot in Kabul because somebody in Saudi Arabia hijacked a plane that killed people in New York and somebody else in Northern Virginia saw that as an opportunity to quintuple the value of his Halliburton shares.
The trick, it turned out, was to be silly, and weird enough to cut against the grain; to create an absurdist escape hatch. Think Bob McKimson and his portable hole. A number of entertainers pulled this off: There was Tenacious D, which started out as an extended joke about a heavy metal combo that uses acoustic guitars, and Lonely Island’s song explaining what was, or was not, “Ka-blamo.” In 2004, when Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace opened with the title character explaining that the show was only being played because of “the worst artistic drought in broadcast history,” it was barely a joke. And there was Homestar Runner, and it was massive, a show that never aired on television or became a movie or a series of action figures or anything. Its success took other forms. The brothers sold enormous quantities of merch on the Homestar website; a Kickstarter for Trogdor!! The Board Game, based on the show’s badly-drawn dragon character, raised more than $1.4 million from more than 23,000 backers, and Trogdor’s unforgettable theme song is featured in Guitar Hero II. The brothers collaborated with the band They Might Be Giants on a video, and they went on to write for TV shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! and develop animation at Disney. They’ve done voice work for kids’ cartoons and directed music videos.
Most of the people I talk to who love Homestar Runner are between the ages of 30 and 40. A fair few of them grew up evangelical Christians. A lot of them are from the American South, but not all; it may simply be that the loci of evangelical culture are mostly in the South, as are the Chapman brothers, as is the Elephant 6 collective (you know, Neutral Milk Hotel), as is the home of most of the extremely weird animated comedy that came out of that same period, the cable channel called Adult Swim. Homestar Runner was never as aggressively countercultural or as mean as Adult Swim, but if you ever liked The Brak Show or Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law—or even Late Night With Conan O’Brien—you’re temperamentally suited to what’s going on here.
As this century wears on, film and video entertainment—even comedy—has once again listed away from non sequiturs toward material that is schematic and carefully engineered. Callbacks, perfectly threaded plots, and jokes with an arc and a crescendo are the order of the day. Homestar Runner is internet-native media that (perhaps alone) purely embodies the aesthetic of the old internet: witty but not oppressively clever; ideologically opposed to trying too hard; calm.
Has our culture moved past a need for this kind of lo-fi absurdity?
Short answer, no.
Long answer, nooooooooooooo.