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HOMESTAR RUNNER: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

The year is 2003. It is a kinder time, a simpler time.

Every single one of your classmates knows how to draw Trogdor the Burninator - first, you draw an S, then you draw a more different S.

"Everybody to the Limit" is a staple at middle school dances.

Your best friend’s little brother owns a plush The Cheat, and you can kick it, and it makes noise.

The year is 2003, the golden age of Homestar Runner.

Basically, every online content creator, every webcomic artist, every YouTube entertainer, owes Homestar Runner a shitload.

Once upon a time, Homestar Runner was the definitive Flash site, an online destination for kids and immature grown-ups alike, fielding millions of hits and thousands of e-mails a day.

Homestar Runner, the earnest athlete with a pure heart and a love for mankind, and his arch-nemesis, Strong Bad, a wrestler with a penchant for issuing snarky responses to fanmail, defined a generation through weird, surrealist Flash cartoons tinged with outdated pop cultural references.

Ten years later, there’s a new generation of Internetters who have never experienced the pure, unadulterated joy of H-Star-R, and that breaks my heart.

So, here, I’ve compiled this beginner’s guide to Homestar Runner. Every cartoon on this list is shorter than five minutes. Get into it. Do yourself a favour.

STEP ONE: STRONG BAD E-MAILS

dragon

techno

comic

japanese cartoon

caper

stunt double

kids’ book

caffeine

army

different town

crying

for kids

montage

bedtime story

hygiene

STEP TWO: TEEN GIRL SQUAD

Episodes #1-15 are available here. Watch them all.

STEP THREE: SHORTS

An Important Rap Song

Where My Hat Is At?

Best Caper Ever

Play Date

The Homestar Runner Gets Something Stuck In His Craw

One Two, One Two

Fluffy Puff Commercial

STEP FOUR: TOONS

A Jorb Well Done

Cool Things

Date Nite

DNA Evidence

A Folky Tale

Justin Timberlake...

...making love to his own music

Thousands of Women sitting at home...

...waiting for you to call.

You've got the spirit, don't lose the feeling.

Kandinsky -- Several Circles

http://tars.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/kandin.html

As if they deserved honors for their serious intentions.

Try to abandon everything every day.

Infrarealist Manifesto

#infrarealist #bolano

A new lyricism, which is starting to rise Latin America, supports itself in ways that never fail to amaze us. The way in to matter is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes. Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breathing and heat. The shotgun experience, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions.

The Infrarealist Manifesto

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren’t drawing an audience— they’re inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie.

Nobody, really, has done a very good job of writing on a sustained level about the way movies affect people erotically, and about the fact that they became popular because they’re a dating game. People love movies for that reason, because they excite them sexually. They go to them on dates, and they go to learn more about how to behave. I never got a real crack at writing about that. It was awful having to fight with Shawn, someone who was so revered and whom I admired. But I was writing about a popular art form, and the magazine had gotten a little stiff.

“If you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet . . . may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael

Well, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences once did call me “a miserable bitch.” But generally it was because I didn’t agree with the consensus of criticism that had formed about a movie. This cycle usually begins with a studio’s marketing department and wends to the press. By the time a movie is authenticated in The New York Times, it’s accepted as a wonderful work. Then if my review says, “This is a pathetic tissue of moldy ideas,” it deeply offends those who came out for it.

Pauline Kael

I was told that I belonged to the older generation, that Agee-alcohol generation they called it, who could not respond to the new films because I didn’t take pot or LSD and so couldn’t learn just to accept everything. This narcotic approach of torpid acceptance, which is much like the lethargy of the undead in those failure-of-communication movies, may explain why those films have seemed so “true” to some people (and why the directors’ moralistic messages sound so false).

Pauline Kael

reason = lack of feeling and imagination = hostility to art = science = the enemy = Nazis and police = the Bomb

The art-house audience accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as “ambiguity” and as style.

“Who knows what’s a comedy any more?”

In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along, perhaps because of nervous impatience or a primitive notion that the real things are physical, perhaps because people take from art and from popular entertainment only what they want; and if they are indifferent to story and motive and blank out on the connections, then a movie without physical action or crass jokes or built-in sentimental responses has nothing for them.

Pauline Kael

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