Homestar Runner is an American comedy animated web series created by Mike and Matt Chapman, known collectively as The Brothers Chaps. The series centers on the adventures of a large and diverse cast of characters, headed by the titular character, Homestar Runner. It uses a blend of surreal humor, self-parody, satire, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music.
Homestar Runner originated in 1996 as a book written by Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel, intended as a parody of children's literature. While learning Macromedia Flash, Mike and his brother Matt expanded the concept into a website, which was launched on New Year's Day 2000. While the site originally centered on the title character, the Strong Bad Email cartoon skits quickly became the site's most popular and prominent feature, with Strong Bad, initially the series' main antagonist, becoming a breakout character. Since 2000, the site has grown to encompass a variety of cartoons and web games featuring Homestar, Strong Bad, and numerous other characters.
At the peak of its popularity, the site was one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the web, spreading via word of mouth. The site sustains itself through merchandise sales and has never featured advertisements. The Brothers Chaps have turned down offers to make a television series.
After a four-year hiatus beginning in 2010, Homestar Runner returned with a new Holiday Toon on April 1, 2014, for April Fools' Day. Afterwards, co-creator Matt Chapman announced plans to give the site semi-regular updates. Since global support for Flash ended on December 31, 2020, homestarrunner.com has maintained a fully functional website through the Flash emulator Ruffle. More cartoons have since been released on the website and its YouTube channel on an occasional basis, usually to celebrate holidays.
History
1996–2000: Development
Homestar Runner was created in Atlanta in 1996 by University of Georgia students Mike Chapman and friend Craig Zobel, who wrote the original picture book, The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest, while working summer jobs surrounding the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Matt described the origin of the name "Homestar Runner" as an in-joke between themselves and James Huggins, a childhood friend of the Chapman brothers while growing up in Dunwoody, Georgia. They spent around two hours designing the look of Homestar Runner, Pom Pom, Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and completed the book within a day. They only printed about five to ten copies to share with friends, and had no intention to publish it. However, they had no idea that their father had sent out the book as a manuscript for submission to about 80 different publishers, but they only got rejection letters back, if anything. The pair began to work on a sequel, Homestar Runner Goes for the Gold, which would have introduced Strong Bad's brothers, Strong Mad and Strong Sad, but was eventually abandoned.
2000–2009: Launch and initial popularity
Around 1999 Mike recognized how popular Flash animation was taking off, and he and his younger brother Matt Chapman started to learn Flash on their own. Their initial cartoons were launched on their dedicated website, homestarrunner.com, by 2000. Mike animated the cartoons, Matt provided the voices of the male characters, and Mike's girlfriend (now wife) Missy Palmer provided the voice of Marzipan. the website and cartoons started out with different art styles. In February 2001 it gained a new look, which has largely remained consistent to the present with minor changes.
The site grew slowly at first and primarily through word-of-mouth. They were able to sell a "few dozen" T-shirts by 2001.
In a 2017 interview Gizmodo, the brothers spoke of the period between 2002 and 2005 as their most creative and successful, exploring various media for the shorts and having a large quantity of merchandise. Matt reflected on a day in February 2004 as the highlight of the series, when received a demo tape from They Might Be Giants for a song to use in a Strong Bad Email short and a life-sized replica of Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000 producer Jim Mallon on the same day. Since then, the site has featured occasional updates, usually for holidays. Until 2017, this was mostly due to the brothers' involvement in developing the Disney XD animated show Two More Eggs.
Characters
Homestar Runner cartoons typically center on Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, and the other ten main characters: The Cheat, Marzipan, Coach Z, Bubs, Strong Sad, Strong Mad, Pom Pom, the King of Town, the Poopsmith, and Homsar. The Brothers Chaps have described them as “dumb animal characters”. These characters all live in the fictional town of Free Country, USA. Each character has multiple alternate versions of themselves, such as "Old-Timey" and "20X6" versions.
Cartoons
Homestar Runner features several spin-off series from the main "shorts" and "big 'toons", including the most well-known, Strong Bad Email.
Strong Bad Email
Strong Bad Emails is a series featuring Strong Bad answering emails from fans. Since starting in August 2001, the initially brief episodes have grown in length and scope, introducing numerous spin-offs, characters, and inside jokes, such as Homsar, Trogdor, Senor Cardgage, 20X6, the Teen Girl Squad shorts, and Homestar Runner Emails (also known as "hremails"). The format, however, has remained largely unchanged. Each episode typically begins with Strong Bad singing a short song to himself while booting up his computer to check fan emails. Starting a reply, he typically mocks the sender's name, spelling, and grammar, and rarely answers questions directly. While early episodes focused mostly on Strong Bad sitting at the computer with occasional cutaways, the cutaways would become more elaborate over time, allowing for more complex story lines to develop, growing tangentially from the initial email. As of November 24, 2025, 210 Strong Bad Emails have been released on the website (with another six exclusive to DVD releases).
Holiday specials
Prior to the 2010 hiatus, holiday specials were a regular feature of the site, released to coincide with popular holidays, specifically Halloween and Decemberween (a fictional holiday similar to Christmas also celebrated on December 25). Halloween shorts typically feature the main characters celebrating a traditional aspect of the holiday (such as ghost stories, trick-or-treating or pumpkin carving) in costume, often making pop culture references relating to their costumes. The site also usually releases a separate Halloween video where Strong Bad views a slideshow and mocks and/or appraises photos sent in by real life fans of their Halloween costumes and props modeled after Homestar Runner characters and other elements. Similarly, Decemberween cartoons typically satirize Christmas traditions such as gift-giving and carol-singing. The fact that it takes place on the same day as Christmas has been presented as just a coincidence, having been stated that Decemberween takes place "55 days after Halloween". April Fools' Day features various gags, such as turning the site into a paid subscription service, or turning it upside down.
Teen Girl Squad
Teen Girl Squad is a crudely drawn comic strip narrated by Strong Bad, using a falsetto voice. The series was a spin off of Strong Bad Email No. 53, comic, in which Strong Bad is asked to make a comic strip of a girl and her friends. The comic features four archetypal teenage girls, "Cheerleader", "So and So", "What's Her Face" and "The Ugly One", and satirizes high school life, teen movies, and television. Each episode follows the girls in typical high school situations, often leading to their gruesome deaths. A spinoff of this series is "4 Gregs", which follows four of the squad's nerdy classmates, all named Greg.
Marzipan's Answering Machine
Marzipan's Answering Machine is a series of cartoons with almost no animation. It features messages from the other characters, being played on the answering machine belonging to the character Marzipan. In early episodes, the episode number ended in .0 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 5.0), but since Marzipan changed to a new answering machine, the number ends in .2 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 15.2). In every episode, Strong Bad prank calls Marzipan, badly pretending to be someone else, such as "Detective Everybody", "Safety Dan", and sometimes other characters. Although the animation is usually just a picture of the answering machine, sometimes there are short animated segments featuring the characters. As of April 1, 2016, there are 17 Marzipan's Answering Machines.
Puppet Stuff
These are live action shorts in which the regular characters are depicted by puppets. These may be skits, or musical performances with They Might Be Giants. Many Puppet Stuff videos feature the characters interacting with children, often related to The Brothers Chaps. One spin-off series, "Biz Cas Fri", depicts Homestar and Strong Bad's interactions from his office cubicle at work. The first Biz Cas Fri video arguably first coined the term Doge.
Powered by The Cheat
In-universe, "Powered by The Cheat" videos are short cartoons made by the character of The Cheat, and are often music videos done for other characters. During these segments, Matt Chapman does the animation and Mike Chapman provides the voices, a switching of their usual roles. As a result, the cartoons' animations are deliberately poor.
Alternate Universes
Over time, many alternate versions of the Homestar Runner world and characters appeared, parodying other cartoons and animation styles. Many of these feature in their own cartoons. The many alternate universes crossed over with each other in some cartoons, such as the 150th Strong Bad Email, alternate universe.
Old-Timey cartoons take place in an old-time setting, with most of the characters being Old-Timey counterparts of the Homestar Runner characters. These cartoons are in black and white with a film grain effect and scratchy audio quality. They parody the distinctive style of animated cartoons during the 1920s and 1930s (à la Steamboat Willie), and can be seen as perhaps deliberately unfunny, to make a slanted joke about such old-style cartoons.
20X6 (pronounced "twenty exty-six"), a parody of the Mega Man and EarthBound games' "year 200X", originated from Strong Bad Email No. 57, japanese cartoon, an email asking Strong Bad what he would look like if he were in a Japanese anime. The main character, Stinkoman, is an anime version of Strong Bad with blue hair, a shiny body and robot boots. He is always looking for a fight, asking various characters he interacts with to engage him in a "challenge" ("Are you asking for a challenge?"). There is also a game, Stinkoman 20X6, which is heavily based on the Mega Man series.
Cheat Commandos is a parody of G.I. Joe that features a cast of characters that are the same species as The Cheat. and again on November 8, 2008, opening for indie pop band of Montreal. A college rock band called Sloshy was introduced in 2007. Sloshy features songs in the musical vein of Pavement such as "We Don't Really Even Care About You" and "The B-est of B-Sides". Other fictitious artists include Scandinavian death metal parody Taranchula (although performing more in a thrash metal/sludge metal style); rapper Peacey P, with a rapping style resembling that of Snoop Dogg; and the self-absorbed R&B artist Tenerence Love, a parody of Barry White and such artists.
Browser games
Beyond cartoons, Homestar Runner offers a variety of online games. Early games such as the Homestar Soundboard, "Homestar Talker", and Lite-Brite emulator "Astro-Lite 2600" are basic web toys featuring the characters, and can now be found on the "Old Games" section of the site. Over time, more recent games have diversified and become more complex, with many being released as products of "Videlectrix", a game company within the world of Homestar Runner and a side project of The Brothers Chaps, spoofing games of the 1980s. Often the games would originate as video games played by the characters in the cartoon, such as Secret Collect, StrongBadZone, and Strong Bad's RhinoFeeder, all parodies of early Atari and arcade games, originating in the Strong Bad Email video games.
TROGDOR! which previously appeared in the Arcade Game short, features the titular dragon Trogdor the Burninator attempting to burn all the cottages on each stage without being slain by knights. A spin-off of TROGDOR!, called Peasant's Quest, is an adventure game featuring Rather Dashing, a young peasant in short pants. After he finds his cottage burned to the ground, he vows to kill the destroyer of his cottage, Trogdor. The game uses a system that is a near-replica of Sierra Entertainment's Adventure Game Interpreter, used in King's Quest, Space Quest and several other early Sierra titles. This system is something like text adventure games yet it has simple visuals. Stinkoman 20X6 is a Mega Man-style platform game featuring the characters and world of anime parody 20X6. Nine levels were added to the game over the course of 2005, while the tenth and final level was not released until December 2020, days before Flash would no longer be supported by browsers.
The Thy Dungeonman series are parodies of text adventure games originating from Strong Bad Email No. 94, video games. In each game, your goal is to "get ye flask". Though the game purports to be set in the medieval era, the text is actually rendered in mock Early Modern English, in the style of William Shakespeare. Thy Dungeonman has two sequels: Thy Dungeonman II, which expands on the features of the original game and can only be found on the Videlectrix site, and Thy Dungeonman III which adds basic graphics and can be found on the Homestar Runner site. "Ye Flask" and "You can't get ye flask" have become catch-phrases in the Homestar Runner universe, eventually spawning a T-shirt in the Homestar Runner store.
In 2007 the website produced Wii versions of some of the games on the site, for the Wii internet browser. When played on a computer, they use the mouse only.
Two point-and-click adventure game titles by the Brothers Chaps made in Unity have been released to Steam and Itch.io, Halloween Hide & Seek and Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate, an expanded remake of the original Dangeresque: Roomisode 1 web game that adds two new episodes.
Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People
On April 10, 2008, an episodic licensed game based on the series centering around Strong Bad titled Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People (abbreviated as SBCG4AP) was announced for the Wii's WiiWare service and Microsoft Windows, developed by Telltale Games in partnership with Videlectrix. The first episode, Homestar Ruiner, premiered on August 11, 2008, on Telltale Games' website and in North America on Nintendo's WiiWare service on August 11, 2008. It was also released in Europe and Australia the following Friday (August 15, 2008). The second episode, Strong Badia the Free, was released on September 15 on the WiiWare service in North America and on the Telltale Games' website, and in the PAL region on October 3. The third episode, Baddest of the Bands, was released on Telltale Games' website and the WiiWare service in North America on October 27, and to the PAL region on November 21. The fourth episode, Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective, was released on Telltale Games' website and WiiWare in North America on November 17, and in the PAL region on December 5. The fifth and final episode, 8-Bit is Enough, was released to North America on December 15 and in the PAL region on January 2, 2009. In 2010, it was decided that Telltale games would release SBCG4AP for the Mac operating system after a vote on the Telltale Games website.
Poker Night at the Inventory
Strong Bad appears as one of the computer-controlled opponents in Telltale's Poker Night at the Inventory, using the same model from SBCG4AP. Players can unlock in-game card sets and table designs based on Homestar Runner. Additionally, Strong Bad will occasionally bet Dangeresque Too's sunglasses in place of in-game cash; defeating him after doing so will unlock the glasses as an equippable cosmetic item for the Demoman in Team Fortress 2. The game was released for PC and Mac on November 22, 2010. A remastered version released on March 5, 2026 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PC.
Trogdor!! The Board Game
Trogdor!! The Board Game is a board game made by The Brothers Chaps in collaboration with James Ernest. The campaign was put on Kickstarter on Tuesday, July 17, 2018, with a goal of $75,000, which was surpassed in the first few hours. On July 23, the total had reached over $700,000. It affected 32-bit Windows computers on the 10th of each month, emailing copies of itself to contacts in the computer's address book, and also adding various .exe files to the hard drive.
Impact
Collaborations with other artists
The Brothers Chaps have partnered up with rock band They Might Be Giants and supplied animation for a music video of their song "Experimental Film". The creators of Homestar Runner spent time with the band and wrote songs that have been released on the website as "Puppet Jam", a spin-off of "Puppet Stuff", where Puppet Homestar sings with TMBG. TMBG also wrote the music for Strong Bad Email No. 99, different town, and the band wrote and vocalized the intro song of the 200th Strong Bad Email. Another group, The Skate Party, helped The Brothers Chaps create "The Cheat Theme Song". The band Y-O-U helped with the Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits CD, as well as songs on the strongbad_email.exe<!-- INTENTIONAL UNDERSCORE! Please don't change that. --> DVDs. The Brothers Chaps also employed the services of Paul and Storm of the a cappella band Da Vinci's Notebook to create a theme song for the Old-Timey version of The Cheat, called "Ballad of The Sneak"; the duo later wrote the theme tune for the Stinkoman 20X6 game. Matt Chapman provided guest vocals as Strong Bad on The Aquabats' "Pink Pants!" from their 2011 album, Hi-Five Soup!. Strong Bad's voice also appears on Shellac's "Genuine Lulabelle" off the album "Excellent Italian Greyhound" from 2007.
Discussing how he and his sibling decide which projects to work on, Mike Chapman said, "We learned how to politely say no to things that were going to affect our lives negatively. If it's going to be fun, if we're going to enjoy doing it, and if the end project is going to be something we want to have happen, we say yes."
Reception
In 2003, the site received several million hits a month and almost a thousand emails a day. According to Matt Chapman, the site did no advertising, but grew on word of mouth and endorsements. "Certain bands, like fairly popular bands and stuff would link us on their site and, you know we were Shockwave site of the day a couple of times over the years."
A review published in National Review characterized the site's humor as having "the innocence of slapstick with sharp satire of American popular culture"—humor that "tends to be cultural, not political."
The site-generated music has enjoyed popularity, such that two songs, "Trogdor" by the character Strong Bad and "Because, It's Midnite" by Limozeen, have been included in the successful Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s video games, respectively.
References
External links
- Homestar Runner Wiki
- Official YouTube account