An Ode to Homestar Runner

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Let us now praise Homestar Runner. Everyone who lived through the days of dial-up has a core memory from the early internet; this is mine. Middle school computer lab, lunch period, me and the homies huddled around an iMac G3 watching flash videos. For some reason online content in those days tended neither to be particularly edifying nor particularly sinister: it was just wacky. Really, really wacky.

Recently I was humming a silly jingle I had made up in my head, when I realized I was using the tune from Strong Bad’s apostrophe song: “oooooh, if you want it to be a possessive, it’s just ‘i-t-s,’ but if it’s supposed to be a contraction then it’s ‘i-t-apostrophe-s. Scalawag.” It’s vintage Homestar in that it has the form of one of those cute lyrics your teacher would sing in grade school, but with the absurdist kicker that it has absolutely no metrical form or rhyme that would actually help you remember the rule.

And yet…it’s obviously lodged more firmly in my memory than any of the actual mnemonics I learned in school, which I have to work much harder to excavate. I actually do sometimes sing the Strong Bad song when I’m trying to get the grammar right, and comments on YouTube indicate I’m not the only one. For a certain kind of affable nerd, sites like Homestar Runner and eBaum’s world were an almost personality-defining fixation. They gave you that feeling that the internet used to give you all the time, of discovering that some other weirdo somewhere was just as offbeat as you.

They also had the feature, similarly typical of early-2000s content, of being pointedly irrational. They were almost dadaist in their hilarious refusal to make any sense. Except they were actually more effective than dadaism. Because whereas dadaists were always trying hard to subvert narrative structure (which is just fixation on structure by other means), flash dorks like the Brothers Chaps didn’t care particularly at all about their place in the history of art one way or another.

So the point was that there was no point. Why does Trogdor the dragon have one muscular human arm? There is a reason why somewhere in the backstory, but it was itself so zany and random that we all forgot about it almost instantly. Yet there was such an indelible freshness to the character itself that the word “burnination” is still part of a certain generation’s lexicon.

Compare this with Star Trek: Discovery, the show that famously cast failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as president of planet earth. It’s almost beyond parody, and yet it’s back, incredibly, for another season. What’s interesting about it is how much it already feels like a holdover from another time—from the fever pitch of the COVID years when absolutely every existing piece of intellectual property had to be colonized and repurposed in the name of maximal “visibility” for the favored demographic groups du jour.

This was programming so derivative that it took a spinoff of a reboot of a 50-year-old T.V. show to make a political point that every English speaking person was already being pressured to make. It’s not as if that moral panic is entirely over, but the passion has definitely cooled a little, and the academy is giving oscars to movies like American Fiction (which by the way is very good) so that the chattering classes can pretend they were the first rather than the last to point out the absurdities of 2020 logic. So like all ham-fisted social commentary, Discovery has come to feel hopelessly dated within just a few years of its creation. While Homestar—who never tried to be “edgy” but always defied your expectations—endures.

It makes me think that when critics look back on this transitional period in our history, they’ll tell one story of death and another of birth. There’s definitely something brittle and old in our culture: doddering studios, all out of ideas, pumping out remake after insufferable remake. But there’s also an antic spirit of wild abandon moving somewhere through the wiring, and though it no longer lives on flash websites, it hasn’t been killed either. It’s just migrated and mutated into meme culture and renegade online art. It might be that Homestar was just the beginning—that he runner’d so others could fly. I sure hope so. Because I can’t take another season of Discovery.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

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