#2: homsar

With my review of SBEMail #1 squarely in the rear view, it’s time to move on – to SBEmail #2! Also, apparently the SBEmail menu on HomestarRunner.com got updated while I wasn’t looking. It’s really nice – it links out to YouTube for emails that are on there, which gives me some faith that they hope to upload the full collection there for easy binge viewing. You can even click on the email names for a quick description of that email!

Whoa! Check out all these… SBEmails.

I’m not here to talk about menus and scroll buttons, though. (Scroll buttons will be discussed later!) I’m here to talk about Strong Bad Email #2: “homsar”. Watch it yourself on the HomestarRunner site or on YouTube! The description in the menu is as follows:

“Homsar is born, and way less funny than he will eventually become, in this very short email.” Well, that’s simultaneously auspicious and inauspicious. Maybe a little suspicious.

We start off with, of course, an email song! It’s just an idle little ditty – nothing special, nothing referential as far as I can tell, but still, a continuation of the trope. Then we get to the meat of the email: the actual email.

Homsar, you say?

Vinnie has fallen victim to one of the classic blunders here. Of course, the question is supposed to be about Strong Bad’s hate of Homestar! Strong Bad is, of course, the antagonist, and he has no discernable reason to hate Homestar other than finding him annoying and losing to him in various contests and conflicts. While some of the relevant ‘toons have been removed from the site, you can still hear Strong Bad proclaim his hate for Homestar (and hear an even older version of his voice) in the Strong Bad Main Page.

Let’s take a little detour and discuss that. See, if you go to HomestarRunner.com now, you’ll get to what could certainly be considered a website from the year 2021. Click that “come on in” button and you’ll be directed to one of 27 different Main Pages (aka Home Pages) featuring different characters and themes.

I can’t wait to talk about Nebulon.

Each of the buttons on the main page takes you to a different part of the site, of course, but there’s plenty of fun to be had. Mouse over a button and Homestar will say its name – “Toons!” “Games!” and so on. Each one also plays a fun animation along with, potentially, additional sound effects. Check out each one for a little dose of 2000s fun or wave your mouse frantically over all six buttons on the left side for a cacophonous nightmare.

So why are we here on the main page? Well, see that “first time here?” button on the right? Go ahead and click that, or just click this link to watch this very relevant introductory video to the Homestar Runner site, which I should have made you watch last week. So it goes.

This is the second appearance of director Cherry Greg, but we’ll talk about him later.

Quick note about this video: the weird costume Homestar wears partway through is one of four randomly chosen costumes! Your options are clown, sailor, witch, and censored nudity. Enjoy?

At least in the current canon for the Homestariverse, Strong Bad’s dislike of Homestar seems mostly to be based on Homestar being kind of an idiot. Strong Bad asserts in this video that he’s the reason you’re here, which seems about right.

But if you want to really understand why we watched this and why we talked about main pages, go ahead and click on the link to Homestar Talker. Now it’s time to get deep into some easter egg nonsense. The instructions for Homestar Talker straight up tell you that there’s hidden content if you put in the right phrase. You can do some trial and error if you want, or you can just go ahead and plug in “STRONG BAD AND POM-POM ARE TOTALLY GOING OUT”, which is only a “7-word phrase” if you really stretch your imagination to believe that “Strong Bad” is one word. (It used to be a different phrase, which may be part of the reason for the confusion.

That gets you to the surprise: Strong Bad Talker! Wait, that’s not a main page. Well, we’re getting there. Note that the Strong Bad Talker doesn’t sound great after the transition away from Flash. I don’t remember how it sounded back in the day, but I don’t think the words were this clipped. This does feature a very old Strong Bad voice, so enjoy that – once you’re done fooling around, put in “BUT HOMESTAR CAN WIN THE STUPID COMPETITION” to get to the real secret I’m here to talk about.

No, I can’t just link you to it. It’s baked into the Homestar Talker “game”.

That’s right, the Stro-Bro has his very own Main Page! Mouse over “’toons” and you’ll get to hear Strong Bad say what we’ve all been waiting for:

“Aw, man, I hate this guy!” as a dart flies at a crude drawing of Homestar. (You can get up to five darts into the picture.)

At this point you are likely wondering if we just came here to hear Strong Bad say that he hates Homestar. Yes. Yes, we did. We kinda knew that, sure, but we had fun confirming it, right? Go ahead and mouse over the rest of these buttons for some goodies – you can see Strong Bad playing what appears to be Night Driver for the Atari, hear him listen to and talk about Peter Frampton (“this guy’s guitar is totally talking!”), hear part of a song called “Poot Slap” that would be much too confusing to get too deep into right now, and see a poster of Farrah Fawcett. Now, let’s get back to the sweet, sweet SBEmail.

Here’s the email again. You know, in case you forgot.

So Vinnie asks a relevant question that we often ask of our cartoon villains when we get a little older – why do they not just kill their cartoon nemeses, our heroes? Well, Vinnie also made a grave mistake by misspelling Homestar as “Homsar”, and as Strong Bad promised in the last email, “keep sending me your questions, and I will make fun of you.” So how does Strong Bad make fun of Vinnie? Why, he creates a new character out of whole cloth just to mock the bad spelling in this email. He even goes to a second location during this email for the first time ever! That’s right, we get the “second character” and “second location” milestones in the same email… which I guess makes a lot of sense, actually.

Say what you want about Homsar, but he is undeniably outstanding in his field.

Yes, this is the first appearance of Homsar. But what the heck is Homsar? Well, he’s clearly some sort of Great Value Brand Homestar Runner, with a shirt that says “homsar” just to help you understand what kind of nonsense Strong Bad has “yes-anded” himself into this time around. (Thanks to Kevin for pointing out Strong Bad’s tendency to self-yes-and back in the comments of the last review – it’s an important part of Strong Bad’s character and something I take so deeply for granted that I just forgot to mention it!) We briefly hear Homsar’s wacky voice before he is crushed by a “Heavy Lourde”. Strong Bad then heads back to his computer to thank Vinnie and let us know that if we keep emailing him he will “keep making fun of your punctuation and spelling.” Now that’s a promise he keeps!

Despite appearing to be a throwaway character, Homsar sticks around and becomes a full-fledged secondary or maybe tertiary character! As indicated by the email description, he gets a lot funnier later, but for now, this is all he is.

The Heavy Lourde, of course, is just a reference to various 16-ton (or otherwise heavy) weights that fall on cartoon characters in various classic cartoons. The Heavy Lourde actually sticks around and is re-used to fulfill this same trope of cartoon crushination again and again. “Lourde”, as it turns out, is a French adjective meaning “heavy” – between that and its sonic similarity to the word “load”, we’ve got a winner of a joke here, at least for me. When I get crushed by falling objects in old platformers, I often think of the Heavy Lourde.

We’ve now gotten through the whole email as well as a little Homestar History lesson, so let’s get on with the ratings! This email, overall, has two jokes: Heavy Lourde, and of course, the creation of Homsar. I think because this email isn’t terribly long, it doesn’t have the space it would need to become a serious classic, and there’s not much that’s hilarious about Homsar yet. Funny, sure, but not hilarious. That means we’re once again looking at a B-Tier email. I’m glad Homsar sticks around – saying we eventually learn more about him is probably inaccurate, but we see more of him and get to know him better as a comedic character.

All right! I’ll keep doing this on Mondays, so check back next week for another one. If I find myself writing a short review of a short email, we might get a combo pack of multiple short emails, but I expect to be doing some more Homestar History lessons with a lot of these, so it might be one at a time for a while.

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.