#4: homestar hair
Hey folks, we got a short one today, which is good because I’m pretty darn busy. On this pre-Thanksgiving episode of Strong Bad Email reviews, we have SBEmail #4: “homestar hair”. Watch it on YouTube or the main HomestarRunner site beforehand if you want. If you watch it on YouTube, you’ll hear an old Windows “hardware disconnect” sound before the email starts, but that’s just some kind of weird error.
The SBEmail menu description for the email is as follows: “When he gets an email meant for Homestar, Strong Bad becomes “all cheesed off” as the kids say… in the 50’s maybe.” It clocks in at a solid 55 seconds.
We start off with another quick but solid email song - “I check the email once, I check the email twice! A-doo-doo-doot, doo-doo-doot.”
Then we get to the meat of the email. Well, it’s not quite the traditional email you might expect. The email just says “Homestair Hair” and “downloading…” before showing us whatever the heck this is.
Look at that majestic beard. Look how it just … hangs off his chin there. Lookin’ real nice.
It’s a Hairstyle Runner? What is that? Well, it’s an old “game” you can still play on the Homestar Runner website - try it out right here. Note that we’re displaying a full-color image on what is supposed to be a monochrome monitor, so that’s a little bit of Tandy 400 magic, I guess.
I made this one myself. I was going for kind of a Bowie in Labyrinth thing, but I ran out of iron filings. And talent.
You can “play” Hairstyle Runner by picking up and moving these little scribbles, which are intended to represent iron filings, around this drawing of Homestar Runner’s head to give him hair, a thing he quite clearly does not have. I like the Hairstyle Runner packaging - “DO YOUR BEST!” in the little excitement corner and “Made in Prance” are pretty solid goofs. Prance is a canonical foreign country, or “far off land” as Homestar Runner likes to call them, referenced along with “Dortugal” and “Potamia” in the toon In Search of the Yello Dello. The “Reset” button drops the iron filings back to the bottom, and the Gallery button… no longer works. It used to show you a gallery of a bunch of different hairstyles for Homestar done within this tool. If you’re really determined, the images are still available via some brute-force URL manipulation. They’re numbered from 001 to 092 and use this link structure:
https://old.homestarrunner.com/gallery2/hair001.GIF
Warning: they’re very small and probably not worth the effort of changing that link a bunch, but you do what you want.
But is Hairstyle Runner based on something? Of course it is - how else would I (and Strong Bad) know these things were iron filings? Hairstyle Runner is a goof on an old toy called Wooly Willy, where you move iron filings sealed in plastic over a drawing of a face using a magnetic stylus. According to Wikipedia, the toy first appeared in 1955 and had knockoffs like Funny Face, Betty Brunette, and Dapper Dan. Strong Bad actually references Dapper Dan as well, suggesting that the Brothers Chaps may be familiar with multiple versions of this toy.
Strong Bad then deletes the Hairstyle Runner, using the command “delete that crap.” The Hairstyle Runner disappears into the void, leaving behind the words “crap deleted.” This is clearly an early version of Strong Bad’s deletion protocols, as even the Tandy 400 will develop a more iconic style of deletion in the future. HRWiki notes that this is the first SBEmail to use the word “crap”, although based on the use of “crap” in the last SBEmail by the original sender, Tyler, this is debatable. Strong Bad then complains that no one ever plays his game, Strong Libs, which means we’re going on another journey.
“Strong Libs” sounds a lot like something we need in the United States.
Strong Libs are, unsurprisingly, a version of Mad Libs featuring some Brothers Strong flavor. You can actually play three different Libs from each of the brothers - from left to right, we have the classic Strong Bad, followed by his athletic but stupid brother Strong Mad, who can always be seen in that wrestling singlet, and finally, Strong Sad, the depressed brother with a kind of elephant body, including elephant feet. For today’s purposes, let’s check out Strong Badlib #1.
“Strong Lib” loses the pun in “Mad Lib”, but once you add in the name of each specific brother, the pun on “Ad Lib” returns. Interesting? Maybe.
This follows the classic Mad Lib structure - fill in some prompts, and then add what you filled in to a pre-written block of text to get something goofy. Let’s try it out.
So… yeah. It’s a Mad Lib. Somebody alert Travis McElroy, I guess.
Here’s how I filled out the prompts:
guy’s name: Homestar
food item: Bronco Trolley
verb: run
verb (ends in s): jumps
noun: wagon fulla pancakes
Of course, these are all in-universe references - Homestar is an athlete who runs and jumps. He eats Bronco Trolleys, a terribly confusing food item made from Triscuits, peanut butter, and orange slices, and later he has an encounter with a wagon full of pancakes. If you want to know more about Bronco Trolleys, I guess you can play the game where you assemble them to learn more, but it’s not great. I suppose in the context of flash games from the year 2000, it’s excusable. I played it while writing this and scored 19 points. How high can you try?
30 seconds of your life is too much to give to the Bronco Trolley game in 2021.
So that was quite a journey through multiple old Flash games. Back to the email! At this point, Strong Bad gives up on this email show and goes off to play some Temple of Apshai, a dungeon crawler inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. This is our first in-email hint at Strong Bad’s love of retro gaming! Confusingly, according to HRWiki, the game we see on the screen is not Temple of Apshai. Instead, it’s based on Chaos: Battle of the Wizards for the ZX Spectrum and made to kind of look like Temple of Apshai. If you’re interested, a remastered version is available on Steam, and I might throw up a video of myself playing it one day soon.
This kind of game is still fun, if you’re me.
This is another example of Tandy 400 magic, as the monitor displays colors that are simply impossible based on what we know about it.
Okay, down comes the Paper in all its dot matrix glory, signaling the end of yet another email. Despite the first deletion of an email, the many references to weird flash games, and the introduction of retro gaming into Strong Bad’s life, there’s not all that much going on here. It’s mostly an ad for the flash games on the site, or maybe for Temple of Apshai. Either way, I’m dropping this email solidly in the C-Tier. I’m surprised I had so much to say about it. See you next week for another one of these!
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.