#3: butt IQ
Welcome one and all to my third SBEmail review! Today we’re talking about SBEmail #3: “butt IQ”. With a name like that, how can we possibly go wrong? Well, we pretty much can’t; it’s a Strong Bad Email, after all. Let’s begin the beginnination!
Of course, if you want to watch the email before the review starts in earnest, check it out on the main site here or on Youtube here.
The menu describes this email as follows: “Strong Bad makes up his first bogus mathematical theorem to explain stupid butts.” With a runtime of 59 seconds, you might think there’s not much to talk about. I assure you, this is not the case.
As is now customary, we open with an email checking song. “Check-a my email, check-a my email, check-a check-a check-a check-a my email.” Once again, this doesn’t make reference to anything as far as I know, but it’s a fun and catchy little song that I often sing when checking my own email. Strong Bad is deeply embedded in my brain.
Before we go past the song, I should mention something I forgot in SBEmail Review #1. The email song in that email, “some kinda robot”, actually is a reference - in this case, to another Homestar Runner toon that’s no longer on the site, “A Jumping Jack Contest”. In that toon, Strong Bad sings a song to himself that goes like this: “Who is the guy that wins all the contests? That’s me, Strong Bad!” I found this out while doing research for something later in this review and I felt I could no longer compromise my journalistic integritrons by leaving it out. So, there you go.
Then we get to the actual email:
"Mr Bad"? So his first name is Strong... but they're the Brothers Strong... yeah, this is confusing.
Tyler’s got a pretty good question for Strong Bad to riff on, even without major punctuation or spelling issues. That said, he did sign the email “Crapfully Yours”. We haven’t seen that before, but I guarantee you we’ll see it again. But why?
Well, in his early days, Strong Bad was known to use the catch phrase “Holy Crap!” in his more exaggerated voice. Since what we’re talking about definitely qualifies as early days, it makes sense that people would be tuned into this tendency. How often did Strong Bad use “Holy Crap”? Well, there’s a whole page on the Homestar Runner Wiki just about the word Crap, so you do the math. Well, Strong Bad will actually be doing some math soon, but you know what I mean.
To pick a couple examples, though, The Reddest Radish is an adorable short which features a rare sighting of Homestar’s house, a really fun art style, and one perfect instance of Strong Bad shouting “Holy Crap!” It also has Strong Bad saying the word “competition” in a hilarious way that you might want to bookmark in your brain for later (or for last week where it showed up in the Strong Bad Talker.)
Look at these adorable paper-cut-outs!
If you’re looking for something a little goofier, try out A Holiday Greeting, where Strong Bad turns “O Holy Night” into the somewhat blasphemous “O Holy Crap”. This sweet holiday short also features a completely adorable and surprisingly heartwarming holiday version of the website’s original theme song, “Everybody! Everybody!” that creeps in at the end. While writing this I’ve just left it playing, since it loops, and I’ll probably throw it on when it snows in earnest here for the first time.
Ah, there was this guy, and he was probably born!
Feel free to watch more videos from the ol’ crap page if you want, but I think at this point we’ve established that Tyler has a reason to write “Crapfully Yours”. Nice job starting a trend, Tyler. Hope it doesn’t spiral completely out of control and get totally meta. (foreshadowing)
Now, let’s get back to the content of the actual email. Tyler is asking Strong Bad how you know if someone’s butt is stupid. He’s probably not just asking that out of thin air, right? Well, good news, we haven’t even left the original email and we’re already off on our second tangent, because there’s an extremely good reason for asking that! Watch that reason! Right here! With your face orbs! … Your eyes. I’m talking about your eyes.
Somebody told me, that you were so stupid, but I didn’t believe them, but now I believe them.
Now, I could talk about Strong Bad Sings for a while. And I will. This short is, I think, the first ever instance of Strong Bad doing a fake advertisement for something. It has all the characteristics of those weird commercials for CD compilations from the before times - weird wilderness backgrounds, multiple heads of the same person singing, a scrolling list of song titles, a bizarre value proposition involving way too many 8-tracks and a free throw-in, and of course, a call to action in the form of an ugly screen with a blue background and a 1-800 number. The only thing it’s missing is some totally out of place TV show themes, or at least, that’s what I think because I saw that one Pure Moods commercial too many times. The theme from Twin Peaks? Seriously? Don’t get me wrong, it’s great, but how does it even fit the … anyway.
Strong Bad Sings is also important because it became a real CD, and many of the songs listed in this fake commercial became fully realized pieces of music. The actual CD was called “Strong Bad Sings And Other Type Hits”, and here it is.
Yep, right there next to my Dream Theater CD. Guess which one I still care about?
A surprising number of songs listed in the scroll in the original Strong Bad Sings toon show up on the real CD. That number is this list of songs:
● Let’s Get Started on Doing All Those Awesome Things I Suggested
● The Ladies In My Town All Know My Name
● Somebody Told Me (Now I Believe Them)
… and of course, You’ve Got an Ugly and Stupid Butt. (“and” is replaced with “&” for the album version.)
That last song is the most important one, because it shows us that Strong Bad is, or at least believes himself to be, able to discern whose butt is (and non-transitively, therefore, is not) stupid. Now that we’ve established the bonafides of our expert witness, let’s get back to expert business.
Strong Bad, of course, has the answer to Tyler’s question in the form of, as you remember from the intro, a bogus mathematical theorem, which will be the first in a series of many.
Of all the bogus mathematical theorems… theora? Theoroctopi? This sure is one of them.
Now, the more mathematically-inclined among you might notice a small issue here - this is in no way a transitive property. The transitive property we learned as tiny childlets in math class was a little different - I took to my whiteboard in my best impression of every e-learning e-rithmetic e-ducator to show you.
No, the Homestar Runner magnets are not a real product. My wife made them for me. She’s the best.
Wait, what is all that garglemesh up there? Well, anyway, y’all know it’s gotta be the classic:
If A=B and B=C, then A=C.
This isn’t a transitive property that Strong Bad is showing us - it’s an inequality! This is just the beginning of a long-running Strong Bad goof where he pretends to be an expert in all kinds of fields. And believe me, it only gets goofier.
For now, though, Strong Bad shows off the graphical power of the Tandy 400 as well as his inhuman ability to quickly program something in - or maybe he already had this presentation prepared? Regardless, it’s the first time we ever see anything besides words on the Tandy, so that’s a technological marvel. Here’s his diagram of Homestar that explains the “Transitive Butt Property.” You can even hear the keypress when Strong Bad changes the but from simply “stupid” to “stupid/stupider” - love that attention to detail.
Look at all that shading!
It’s pretty amusing to note how much more sophisticated the computer seems to be when drawing the text boxes than when it draws Homestar, but that’s just a fun detail. What is important is that Strong Bad takes it for granted that Homestar’s head is stupid - he just says “Look at his stupid head! Look at how stupid it is!” as though it’s obvious. We could say, from a Bayesian perspective, that Strong Bad has a prior regarding the stupidity of Homestar’s head and is using that to calculate the posterior probability of his butt being at least as stupid. Yes, I did all that not-math just to say “posterior probability of his butt”. You’re welcome.
We close out with a quick bromide (bookmark this word) from Strong Bad: “On a scale from one to awesome, I’m super great.” This is later referenced outside of the Homestariverse by pop-punk band The Reunion Show, who apparently toured and shared space on compilations with Taking Back Sunday before releasing their one and only album, Kill Your Television, on Victory Records in 2002. The ninth track on that album is called “On A Scale From One To Awesome (You’re Pretty Great)”, and while it doesn’t appear to contain any other Strong Bad-related content, it’s a fun little factoid, isn’t it?
Finally, the Paper comes down, and that’s the end of the line. (More on the Paper someday.) Even though this one is short, it has some solid references, a catchy email song, the first of many bogus mathematical theorems, and the first use of Tandy Graphics. The attention to detail is solid, the “math” is funny, and we have the first Crapfully Yours. If I disregard the historical value of this SBEmail as well as the ones before it, I have to say it brings me more joy and laughter than the first two. By golly, I think that qualifies as our first A-Tier Email! Impressive. See you next time for an even shorter email: “homestar hair”!
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.