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Strong Bad Email Reviews

SBEmail Review #1: some kinda robot

Two hundred SBEmails,

Exhausting just to think about.

How can we face two hundred SBEmails?

The thought of all those SBEmails makes me weak!

-John Linnell as the Poopsmith, Strong Bad Email #200, “email thunder”

And so, I begin the herculean task of reviewing over two hundred Strong Bad Emails. But who am I? Well, I’m Eric “Raging” Levine, the owner of this here website and the possessor of a pretty darn good Strong Bad impression, if I do say so myself. My qualifications? Well, I already review things professionally over at ChannelFireball.com, specifically Magic: the Gathering cards, and I’ve watched every Strong Bad Email cartoon (along with many, many, many supplemental materials) probably dozens of times.

“But Eric,” you ask, in your most high-pitched and plaintive voice, “What the dump is a Strong Bad Email anyway?” Well, since you were clearly born at least ten years after me, I’m going to drop a cargo train full of infotainment on you real quick-like.

The Stro-Bro himself!

[image c/o HRWiki.org]

This is Strong Bad. He’s part of the Homestar Runner canon, a magical world of flash cartoons created by Matt and Mike Chapman (aka “The Brothers Chaps”) spawned by a goofy fake kid’s book (available to read in the Homestar Runner Museum) they wrote about “the Homestar Runner.”

Tiny-Handed Strong Bad, or “THSB”

[image c/o HRWiki.org]

Strong Bad was introduced (in tiny-handed form) in that book as a villain who cheats to win, along with his aptly named sidekick, “The Cheat”, as well as other enduring characters like Pom Pom and total non-characters like Mr. Bland. On the website, Strong Bad was just one member of the large cast of characters in various Flash cartoons who ended up getting his own little feature, Strong Bad Emails, where Strong Bad would, predictably, answer viewer emails and make some jokes, usually at the emailer’s expense. Eventually, Strong Bad transcended his status as a mid-tier villain character and became the website’s real draw, with Strong Bad Emails (SBEmails, for short) starting off at a crisp forty-five seconds and eventually growing to be around three minutes on average, with the longest lasting about seven minutes. If you’ve ever seen a dragon named Trogdor, heard somebody talk about Fhqwhgads, or been told something like “Virus equals very yes”, you’ve been SBEmail’d.

SBEmails also often contain little “easter eggs” – clickable elements in the Flash video that pop up an image, play a sound, or even sometimes show another short vignette. Finding these while watching a newly released SBEmail was a lot of fun, and I’ll be talking about each of them.

So let’s get one thing perfectly clear: we’re going to have some unimpeachable, Senate-approved, Illuminati-confirmed criteria for rating Strong Bad Emails. Wait, what? Okay, they’re just going to be my criteria. Leave those other guys out of this. They don’t have anything to do with this.

S-Tier: This email is a full-on classic. Plenty of quotable lines, a sweet concept, and tons of rewatch value. When I think of Strong Bad Emails, I think of this one. There’s not much to complain about in an S-Tier SBEmail. In this particular case, the S is not for “sucks”.  

A-Tier: This is a good email. Not a classic, but it has a few quotable lines and is still funny after multiple viewings. It might rely on a gimmick without fully realizing its potential, or it may just be good without leaving me wanting more.

B-Tier: This email is fine. There might have been one or two quotable lines, but there might also be some dry spells where I don’t find the email particularly amusing. Emails in this tier probably lack dynamism or unpredictability.

C-Tier: This email doesn’t make much of an impression. There’s nothing to quote, no jokes that really stand out, and no theming that really does much for me. It’s part of the overall tapestry of SBEmails, and I still love it, perhaps in spite of itself.

It’s finally time – let’s take a look at the first ever Strong Bad Email! This one’s titled “some kinda robot” and clocks in at a healthy 45 seconds. You can watch it right here!

Look at all this… majesty.

[image c/o http://www.hrwiki.org/]

This email is kind of a classic definitionally. While it has some elements that future emails lack (Strong Bad’s moving mouth reflected in the screen, as well as the “original version” of his voice) and similarly lacks some elements that appear later (the movement of his head that replaces the moving mouth), it establishes some of the baselines that will pervade Strong Bad Email for years to come.

Right off the bat, we see that Strong Bad checks his emails on a Tandy 400, a computer that, as far as I know, does not exist. It is, however, based on real computers by a real company, the Tandy Corporation, and sold through – you guessed it – Radio Shack.

I assume the two disk slots was so you could copy disks your friends gave you, like recording a CD onto a tape with your boombox.

[Image by Blake Patterson, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25259957]

This is the TRS-80, seen here with Radio Shack branding. While this looks somewhat like what Strong Bad has, the monitor built in next to the disk drives is pretty different than what we see on the screen. It’s likely that the Tandy 400 Strong Bad uses is more in line with the Tandy 1000 or 2000 models, which were compatible with software and expansion cards for IBM PCs. This was a big deal at the time. The folks on HRWiki.org also suggest that the Tandy 400 might be based on a few other computers, like the Atari 400 and the Lear-Siegler ADM-3A – check out what they have to say here.

Strong Bad has an affinity for old, terrible computers that possess more of the characteristics of typewriters than actual computers, and this will become more and more relevant as time goes on. For now, you can help Strong Bad out by fiddling with the contrast knobs in the lower left – the one on the right greens the screen up real nice, while the one on the left just lets all the green out. Not sure why you would want to waste all that green, though. Next to them, you see that weird logo – the rainbow star with a bite taken out that kind of reminds one of the Apple Computer logo.

Weird, yeah?

Keep an eye out for this thing. You’ll see it in a few other places.

Next up on the future-goof future-proofing list, did you notice Strong Bad sang a little email-checking song right up at the top of the email? Well, that’s going to keep happening. In fact, the email songs become an iconic portion of the Strong Bad Email landscape. This one’s pretty banal, but the fact that it exists is going to be really important.

There’s one more important piece of groundwork that gets set in this email: If you email Strong Bad, he will make fun of you. Strong Bad’s fan, Abdi LaRue (a certified real person that the Brothers Chaps actually had to ask to email Strong Bad to get the ball rolling,) asks a perfectly reasonable question and gets thoroughly dunked upon harder than The Deke slam dunked the ball after that pass Reg sent him from the top of the key. (If that’s incomprehensible to you, well, stick around for another 66 SBEmails and we’ll get there.)

Beyond these notable setups for future spikes, this email is pretty light on content, owing to the fact that it’s 45 seconds long. It doesn’t introduce many new concepts, take us to new locations, or bring in any other characters. It’s just Strong Bad and his email. I suppose Strong Bad does imply here that his wrestling mask and boxing gloves are his actual face and hands, or at least, they’re so much a part of him that they might as well be. The desire to see Strong Bad without his mask and/or boxing gloves endures for a long time, though, so Abdi, I gotta say, you wrote a good one.

In terms of quotability, Abdi’s actual email, often bastardized as some form of “how do you type with boxing gloves on,” is an enduring text, though I favor the phrase “for good or for awesome” personally. That one slips into my vocabulary from time to time, though I can’t say it’s one of my more prominent Strongbadisms. We’ll get to those a little later.

Overall, evaluating this email on its own rather than as the foundation of the canon, I’d have to say this is a solid B-Tier email. It’s got that one quotable line and it possesses the quintessential sassy energy of Strong Bad, but it doesn’t really do much in and of itself. I’m glad things kept evolving from here.

That’s it! Tune in next time for some more words, which will be about the second Strong Bad email. Maybe. Nah, just kidding. Definitely.

Thanks as always to HRWiki.org, where I do all my research to make sure I have the history and connective tissue of these emails correct.

Eric Levinesbemail1 Comment