homage to Strong Bad
The Elder Millennial Nostalgia Tour
Over on Bluesky, the social media methadone clinic for Twitter addicts like myself, there was some primo Let’s Remember Some Guys discussion of Homestar Runner, the webtoon popular in the early 2000s. All the classic lines were quoted: “I can do it nine times.” “I’m the captain of the gravy train!” “I’m totally crushing!” As millennials like myself inch toward decrepitude every day, it appears inevitable that there will be legions of us in AI-run nursing homes, endlessly singing “The system is down!” as we take our medication along with our jello.
The whole thing got me thinking about how differently the internet functioned back then, from 2000-2007, say, roughly coterminous with the Bush Administration. Social media, retrospectively, was in its larval stage. Friendster didn’t really catch on, but MySpace sure did for awhile there. Indeed, one strange thing to realize, looking back, is that in about 2006, MySpace appeared arguably more durable, and cooler, than Facebook. That was the site that got namechecked by Clipse and the movie Superbad, which is basically the whole breadth of youth culture. Little did we know that Facebook’s relative uncoolnness was its secret weapon, the trait that would allow it to become the medium of choice for Aunt Ednas the world over.
The internet of that era, when Homestar was at its peak, was an era of compartmentalization. Corners of the internet were much robust, and more walled off from other corners. Indeed, perhaps it was that every walled-offness that made them so robust, that providing a sense of being in on the joke when others weren’t. That’s what Homestar was, above all else; a joke that a select few got, and everyone else didn’t.
Start off with the basics: simply getting to the site. Way I did it, I’d get on one of the computers in the student newspaper office and type in the address, whisking me direct to the site. There, I would point and click around, seeing if there was a new cartoon if it was a Monday, or checking the archives otherwise. Let me emphasize how integral pointing and clicking were to the whole affair. Come to the end of a cartoon, and often there would be an object onscreen—a bottle of Mountain Dew on Strong Bad’s desk, say. Click on it, and you were treated to some further nugget of hilarity. It was not unlike playing Myst with jokes about ThunderCats, to further date myself with yet more obsolete references.
Looking back, there was a sense of enclosedness particular to those lazy afternoons after class, of finding oneself holed up in one corner of the internet, unreachable from the rest of it. This contributed to what Homestar so much fun: it never broke containment. It never, in contemporary terms, went viral.
Allow me to paint a nightmare scenario: imagine Tik Tok exists in the year 2006, and the latest dance craze is Strong Bad and The Cheat grooving to “The System is Down,” that feel-good techno anthem, to the point where users everywhere film themselves performing the same dance, eventually reaching such a level of ubiquity that some California influencer gets invited onto Jimmy Fallon to perform the dance with something approaching, yet never reaching, human expression. Imagine Jimmy’s dumb face breaking as he tries to impersonate Strong Bad. Are you cowering under the desk right now? I sure am.
Fear, thy name is Fallon.
But that never happened, back in the Long 2006. No one outside of its intended audience even knew Homestar existed. It was ours, and no one else’s.
And that sort of sense of being in on the joke seems less present, now. I mean, I could be wrong—I’m a 40-something fuddy-duddy, and so have little idea what the Youth are up to today on their devices. Yet the containment is still broken. One doesn’t simply check homestarrunner.com in the office after history class. The internet is always with you, in your back pocket, bleeding content down your pants leg.
If something fails to go viral, it does exactly that—it fails. Didn’t hit those metrics. Didn’t reach these users. But not going viral is exactly what allowed Homestar Runner to flourish, to succeed. And it did succeed, financially, by the way: the Chapman Brothers, creators of the site, made bank by selling T-shirts they produced in-house. Quality merch for a devoted fanbase: it’s the recipe for success. But they were able to maintain control over their creation, in artistic and financial terms, because they refused to let it too big. They didn’t sign a network deal. They didn’t syndicate a comic strip. They cultivated a cottage industry, and made certain not to get any bigger.
As superhero movies lose steam and once-prestigious networks get scrapped for parts, such a no-viral approach isn’t just attractive. It’s a necessary adaptation to survive.