Homestar Runner Reviews Week 17 (4/28/2014)
Apr 28, 2014 14:13:59 GMT -5
🐍 huss 🐍 and Pear like this
Post by Deleted on Apr 28, 2014 14:13:59 GMT -5
random dude: Hi everyone, back for another week of sbemails. This week is a little bit of a mixed bag, but there's some pretty good ones here, including the introduction of a new feature to the site. What did you think about this week's cartoons, Raige?
Cypher Raige: I am enjoying them. One thing I observed is that the toons are getting noticeably longer, but not in a bad way. The Brothers Chaps have become fully comfortable in the little world they have created, and they are allowing the characters to breathe a bit more. They are also beginnig to include a lot of callbacks to older sbemails and toons on the site, which makes the whole thing all that much more enjoyable to watch. The callbacks and in-jokes make the viewer feel like they are a part of something, which is perhaps one reason why so many loved this site in its heyday. On with the toonage already!
Strong Bad Email #51: website
random dude: When I went to the homestarrunner.com website and went to the part of the website with Strong Bad Emails and then when the the page of the website with the sbemail website, I watched Strong Bad get an email from a guy named James making a new website who wanted Strong Bad to give him tips on his new website. Strong Bad mocked him for using the word website more than most people would use the word website in a single email, but then gave the person who wanted website-making tips some tips on making his website. Strong Bad used his own website that he made as an example of a good website to use as a template for making your own website. Strong Bad's website had a lame cartoon intro like a lot of websites used to have back in the earlier days of the Internet when website formats were generally a bit shittier than modern website formats. I thought it was kind of funny that Strong Bad would think that a website intro like that was a good thing to put on his website. The next advice on making a website that Strong Bad gave was to say that GIFs are a good thing to put in a website. This is funny because putting low resolution animated GIFs on websites was a really hackneyed thing to put in a website even way back in 2002 when Strong Bad answered this email about websites and gave advice on making a website. I thought it was funny the way that Strong Bad said that "nobody ever gets tired of looking at [rotating animated GIFs]" on websites, which is funny because websites that have rotating animated GIFs have always been some of my least favorite websites. Then Strong Bad leaves to go work on his website, and when the paper comes down there's a link to Strong Bad's website on the Compy screen. If you click on the link to Strong Bad's website, it takes you to his website. When you go to Strong Bad's website, there's the same intro to Strong Bad's website earlier from when he was giving James advice on how to make a good website. Then if you click on the words "get on in!" you can enter Strong Bad's website. When you enter Strong Bad's website, you can see that his website is mostly about The Cheat. Strong Bad's website isn't a very good website, partly because he follows his own website advice and has a lot of animated GIFs on his website. Strong Bad's use of GIFs on his website is even worse because most of the GIFs have nothing to do with the website, and some of the GIFs on the website have their own captions that Strong Bad wrote explaining why he put them on his website. Some of the pictures that Strong Bad puts on his website are kind of funny, but it's still mostly funny because it's a bad website, because all there really is on the website are pictures of the Cheat and then explanatory captions. One of the photos of the Cheat on the website can't be viewed because Strong Bad messed up when putting it on his website It's a very lazily made website, like a lot of older bad websites, and an easy website to make fun of, the way that it's easy to make fun of bad websites like Buzzfeed today. Even the title to Strong Bad's website is messed up. It's hard to read, which isn't a good thing for the title of a website to be, and Strong Bad even put a random GIF of the letter A in the title to his website, which is a very unnecessary and distracting thing to put in the title to a website, so he probably shouldn't have put it in the title to his website. At the very bottom of the page of Strong Bad's website, there is a link to another website which reads "F10" and if you click on this link to another website, it takes you to Strong Sad's blog website. We reviewed Strong Sad's blog website a while ago; the blog website is linked to from an earlier cartoon on the homestarrunner.com website. Near the bottom of the page on Strong Bad's website is one of those counters that says how many people have been to the website, which was an annoying thing that people used to put on shitty websites back in the day, and it invariably says that you are the 16th person to visit Strong Bad's website, which makes it even more obvious that Strong Bad's website is a bad website, because the website has only been (fictionally visited) 16 times, which is a very low number of times for a website to have been visited. If you click on the GIF of a mouse shaking it's head right above the visitor counter on Strong Bad's website it takes you to a page on the main website where The Cheat and Strong Mad are assisting Strong Bad in answering his emails in an office setting, but Strong Bad just laughs and tears up the emails that Strong Mad sends to him via pneumatic tube. It's not a very funny part of the homestarrunner.com website, but it's just a simple easter egg, and it's nice that at this point in making their website, the Brothers Chaps were putting more easter eggs on their website. On this easter egg on the homestarrunner.com website, you can click on the generic motivational plaques above the entry to Strong Bad's room, but every time I clicked on one it sent me to a 404 website, but according to the Homestar Runner fan website hrwiki.org it used to link to a real website. But, back to Strong Bad's website, below the animated GIF of the mouse near the bottom of the page of the website, there is another GIF that says "ENTER" and if you click on the GIF it takes you to Strong Bad's website except there is another title for Strong Bad's website under the title for Strong Bad's website now and you can keep on clicking "ENTER" to go to Strong Bad's website and each time you enter Strong Bad's website there is another title for his website beneath all the other titles for Strong Bad's website. This makes Strong Bad's website even shittier, and shows that he is bad at making websites and that his advice to James on how to make a website was bad advice on making a website. What did you think about this cartoon about websites on the homestarrunner.com website, and about Strong Bad's website, Website, I mean Raige?
Cypher Raige: tl;dr.
I mean, how am I supposed to follow that mess? Let me just say that, since random is a young dude, he probably does not know that Strong Bad's website is pretty much what personal websites used to look like back in the mid to late 90's Geocities period. I took a business management class in around 1997, and one of our assignments was to create a personal website on the school's server. Mine looked a lot like Strong Bad's, and I even had a silly picture I made using MS Paint where I cut and pasted my head onto David Charvet's body so it looked like I was hanging out with the cast of Baywatch. I thought it was funny at the time. And I still kinda do. So there. Website.
Strong Bad Email #52: island
random dude: This one was a little bit disappointing. Strong Bad doesn't even mock the sender for spelling "were" as "where"! But, when asked what would happen if he was stuck on a desert island with Homestar, Strong Bad launches into a "best case scenario" explanation that is pretty much a description of every single old cartoon trope about being stranded on a desert island, complete with implausibly present salt for a sandwich-foot. It's nothing more than a blandly amusing deconstruction of the genre, but when Strong Bad imagines what would actually happen, the cartoon gets a little better. Homestar's incessant questioning and Strong Bad's awkward attempts to answer them all the same exact way are kind of meh, but Strong Bad's reaction to being called "Stinkoman" is pretty good. Homestar also manages to break the fourth wall when he manages to mimic one of the old site (I don't think I'm going to be able to handle prefixing "web" to "site" again for quite some time) menus, invoking a boat, harpooned whale and plane-trailing-a-banner to appear just by saying "Toons", "Games", or "Email". The scenario ends with Strong Bad receiving a message in a bottle which, to Strong Bad's dismay, is just an advertisement for Super Bowl XIX. All in all, not nearly as good as our next sbemail, but more on that after we turn to Raige for his opinion on "island".
Cypher Raige: That's funny, random, because I did not notice the misspelling of "were", but I did notice that Strong Bad also did not call out the email sender for saying "an desert island. He's really falling off on his pedantry! I found this sbemail enjoyable, if a bit slight. I enjoyed Strong Bad's run through of the standard "hungry Looney Tunes character chomps his own appendage" bit. Also, Homestar sure is dumb, amirite? I like how he calls Strong Bad "Stinkoman", a call out to another future alternate universe, 20X6. There are also some easter eggs at the end. If you click on both Homestar and Strong Bad, they will temporarily turn into various food items and other stuff, including a callback to the Marshie commercial featuring a plate of marshmallows wearing a hat and eyepatch and smoking a stogie.
Strong Bad Email #53: comic
random dude: That was much better. After he mocks email sender Brittany for atrocious spelling, Strong Bad accedes to her request to make a cartoon about her and her friends. What follows is the first installment of "Teen Girl Squad", a weird cross between stick figure drawings, deliberately off-kilter satire of teenagers, and violent absurdity. The main characters of TGS are exaggeratedly poorly characterized tropes whose nearly plot-less escapades usually end in the deaths of most if not all of the squad's constituents. There's Cheerleader, the head of the group, So-and-So, the honor roll student, the resigned-to-being-a-loner What's Her Face, and The Ugly One, whose name says it all. While in the hands of people dedicated to actually mocking a group of teenage girls, this reducing characters to completely one-dimensional stereotypes could very easily be problematic, but as Strong Bad's fictional creation, this unflattering characterization can be seen more as a product of his skewed idea of his pathetically skewed views on girls. Plus, the cartoon is incredibly weird, from the helicopter shooting down birds in the background to way that The Ugly one exclaims "Ow, my skin!" as she's pierced by multiple arrows, to the plotting non sequitur of What's Her Face being punted into the distance by a dinosaur, and this outlandish eccentricity is what TGS is really about. My favorite moment from this inaugural episode is when So-and-So is killed by a robot's laser beam, and Cheerleader says to her "Kristin, you look burnt, or dead," (What's Her Face stumbling through her name and eventually settling on "Kristin...a" is a great call-back to Strong Bad's mumbling through the names of Brittany's friends while reading the email. At the end of the TGS cartoon if you click on What's Her Face's tombstone a black and white cartoon Strong Bad will appear and try to flirt with Cheerleader, which isn't a great easter egg, but, just so you know, it's there. The sbemail ends with Strong Bad enthusiastically talking about how great his cartoon ended up, and saying that he should sell it at a "snooty independent record store". If you click on this last bit, you'll uncover an easter egg where we see a copy of TGS on the shelf of an independent record store and hear Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" in the background while the Brothers Chaps voice a couple of hipsters talking generic hipster-speak about an unnamed album that they just couldn't get into.
Cypher Raige: This is a god damn classic! My favorite Teen Girl Squad death would have to be when The Ugly One is killed by a buttload of arrows, and some random bald guy with a tie pops up and yells "ARROW'D!", an exclamation that I still drop from time to time, even when it makes no sense. That's how I roll! There are a bunch of little easter eggs here. The first group occurs when Strong Bad is reading the names of the email sender's friends. If you click on their names, little states show up. The next easter egg occurs when Cheerleader is standing alone amongst the graves or her fallen comrades. If you click on What's Her Face's headstone, you get an extra little bit added on to the comic, in which a hand-drawn Strong Bad wanders into the frame and macks on Cheerleader. Tip for the fellas: if you are looking to score with the ladies, it's probably not a good idea to offer to take them to Sonic BUrger, unless you are twelve. The last easter egg was already mentioned by random dude above, but I'm gonna hit it again, because it is god damned perfect! I love how their generic music geek speak includes how they couldn't get into the record they are talking about because it was in 4/4 time (as is probably 99% of all rock music) and used B-modal tuning on the guitars, and how they both have no idea what they are talking about, and yet feel the need to one up each other with their stupid criticisms. It's an amazing skewering of asshole hipster music geeks like myself. But, yeah, y'know, whatever. I don't even own a Brothers Chaps!
Strong Bad Email #54: morning routine
random dude: After being asked about his morning routine, we learn that Strong Bad had just been sleeping on the couch before being woken up by Strong Sad who "want[ed] to watch that show on public broadcasting hosted by that British guy". Strong Bad then groggily stumbles over to the computer, hand still shoved into a bag of potato chips, and we learn that this sbemail began in media res, as Strong Bad's pre-email song/saying this week is repeating ("My mouth tastes like...email"), and now makes more sense in light of him just having woken up on the couch. Next, while trying to write an acrostic for "routine", Strong Bad is repeatedly interrupted by Strong Sad, who has found a multitude of eggs beneath the cushions of the couch. This is so weird, and Strong Bad's impatient responses to his little brother are so dismissive, that I found this whole bit pretty funny, particularly what might be Strong Bad's most creative insult of the week "Thank you, Interrupter Jones," after Strong Sad interrupts him for the second time.
Cypher Raige: Yes, the surreal weirdness of this email puts it over the top. What the hell all dem eggs for anyway? Why he got so many eggs? Is Strong Bad, like, making some sort of egg army? Is he incubating little Strong Badlings in the couch? Is he gonna make a really kick ass omelette? No one can know for sure. OR CAN WE? More on this later. And just when all o' dem couch eggs make it seem like things can't get any more strange, out pops the Cheat with a pair of tighty whities over his head. There's some odd doings afoot in Strong Badia, my friends. While it would've been sorta genius for the one sbemail that features a ton of multi-colored eggs to not feature an easter egg, there actually is one. If you click on the Compy 386 logo on Strong Bad's computer after the email ends, you will finally learn Strong Bad's nefarious scheme for all of those eggs: he's making a breakfast cereal. That's just eggs. In a box. If you look at the "Side words" and the box, you will see that the egg cereal is not very nutritious. So I guess Strong Bad's plan is to make kids eat eggs that have no nutritional value, a plan worthy of the greatest Bond villians. OR IS IT?
Strong Bad Email #55: cheat talk
random dude: When Cory in North Dakota asks why The Cheat's speech is unintelligible, Strong Bad calls him over and tries to get his little yellow friend/henchman/pet to say "Douglas". When The Cheat simply adorably replies with "Mehs", Strong Bad gives up. I liked this cartoon, especially the moment near the end where Strong Bad hears what sounds like a high pitched voice repeatedly saying "Douglas," and looks around in alarm until he realizes that it's just a tree branch brushing against a window all along, an amusingly self-aware utilization of that old trope. At the end of the cartoon if you click on the words "learn how to speak The Cheat", you can listen to a clip from a "Learn how to speak...The Cheat" record. Remember everyone "Language is what makes people talk."
Cypher Raige: No, random dude, this email is not from Cory in North Dakota. It is from the entire town of Cory, North Dakota. Get it straight! You can also see a postcard from Cory, North Dakota if you click on the words "you guys" at the end of the sbemail, featuring Monkey D! I don't know what Monkey D is, but I want it. He loves the cheese! I kind of think this was the weakest email of the week, but it still had some chuckles in it, especially when we learned that when Strong Sad is punched in the stomach, it forces the word "Douglas" out of his wussy little mouth. I would like to learn more things about Strong Sad getting punched in the stomach. And even if we ended on a weaker email today, next week will see us reviewing the number one most popular sbemail of all time, a stone cold classic that really marks the turning point of when this site finally came into its own. Can't wait to watch it again!
And that's it for this week, everyone. Next week, we have:
Strong Bad Email #56: current status
Strong Bad Email #57: japanese cartoon
Strong Bad Email #58: dragon
Strong Bad Email #59: marzipan
Strong Bad Email #60: huttah!
Cypher Raige: I am enjoying them. One thing I observed is that the toons are getting noticeably longer, but not in a bad way. The Brothers Chaps have become fully comfortable in the little world they have created, and they are allowing the characters to breathe a bit more. They are also beginnig to include a lot of callbacks to older sbemails and toons on the site, which makes the whole thing all that much more enjoyable to watch. The callbacks and in-jokes make the viewer feel like they are a part of something, which is perhaps one reason why so many loved this site in its heyday. On with the toonage already!
Strong Bad Email #51: website
random dude: When I went to the homestarrunner.com website and went to the part of the website with Strong Bad Emails and then when the the page of the website with the sbemail website, I watched Strong Bad get an email from a guy named James making a new website who wanted Strong Bad to give him tips on his new website. Strong Bad mocked him for using the word website more than most people would use the word website in a single email, but then gave the person who wanted website-making tips some tips on making his website. Strong Bad used his own website that he made as an example of a good website to use as a template for making your own website. Strong Bad's website had a lame cartoon intro like a lot of websites used to have back in the earlier days of the Internet when website formats were generally a bit shittier than modern website formats. I thought it was kind of funny that Strong Bad would think that a website intro like that was a good thing to put on his website. The next advice on making a website that Strong Bad gave was to say that GIFs are a good thing to put in a website. This is funny because putting low resolution animated GIFs on websites was a really hackneyed thing to put in a website even way back in 2002 when Strong Bad answered this email about websites and gave advice on making a website. I thought it was funny the way that Strong Bad said that "nobody ever gets tired of looking at [rotating animated GIFs]" on websites, which is funny because websites that have rotating animated GIFs have always been some of my least favorite websites. Then Strong Bad leaves to go work on his website, and when the paper comes down there's a link to Strong Bad's website on the Compy screen. If you click on the link to Strong Bad's website, it takes you to his website. When you go to Strong Bad's website, there's the same intro to Strong Bad's website earlier from when he was giving James advice on how to make a good website. Then if you click on the words "get on in!" you can enter Strong Bad's website. When you enter Strong Bad's website, you can see that his website is mostly about The Cheat. Strong Bad's website isn't a very good website, partly because he follows his own website advice and has a lot of animated GIFs on his website. Strong Bad's use of GIFs on his website is even worse because most of the GIFs have nothing to do with the website, and some of the GIFs on the website have their own captions that Strong Bad wrote explaining why he put them on his website. Some of the pictures that Strong Bad puts on his website are kind of funny, but it's still mostly funny because it's a bad website, because all there really is on the website are pictures of the Cheat and then explanatory captions. One of the photos of the Cheat on the website can't be viewed because Strong Bad messed up when putting it on his website It's a very lazily made website, like a lot of older bad websites, and an easy website to make fun of, the way that it's easy to make fun of bad websites like Buzzfeed today. Even the title to Strong Bad's website is messed up. It's hard to read, which isn't a good thing for the title of a website to be, and Strong Bad even put a random GIF of the letter A in the title to his website, which is a very unnecessary and distracting thing to put in the title to a website, so he probably shouldn't have put it in the title to his website. At the very bottom of the page of Strong Bad's website, there is a link to another website which reads "F10" and if you click on this link to another website, it takes you to Strong Sad's blog website. We reviewed Strong Sad's blog website a while ago; the blog website is linked to from an earlier cartoon on the homestarrunner.com website. Near the bottom of the page on Strong Bad's website is one of those counters that says how many people have been to the website, which was an annoying thing that people used to put on shitty websites back in the day, and it invariably says that you are the 16th person to visit Strong Bad's website, which makes it even more obvious that Strong Bad's website is a bad website, because the website has only been (fictionally visited) 16 times, which is a very low number of times for a website to have been visited. If you click on the GIF of a mouse shaking it's head right above the visitor counter on Strong Bad's website it takes you to a page on the main website where The Cheat and Strong Mad are assisting Strong Bad in answering his emails in an office setting, but Strong Bad just laughs and tears up the emails that Strong Mad sends to him via pneumatic tube. It's not a very funny part of the homestarrunner.com website, but it's just a simple easter egg, and it's nice that at this point in making their website, the Brothers Chaps were putting more easter eggs on their website. On this easter egg on the homestarrunner.com website, you can click on the generic motivational plaques above the entry to Strong Bad's room, but every time I clicked on one it sent me to a 404 website, but according to the Homestar Runner fan website hrwiki.org it used to link to a real website. But, back to Strong Bad's website, below the animated GIF of the mouse near the bottom of the page of the website, there is another GIF that says "ENTER" and if you click on the GIF it takes you to Strong Bad's website except there is another title for Strong Bad's website under the title for Strong Bad's website now and you can keep on clicking "ENTER" to go to Strong Bad's website and each time you enter Strong Bad's website there is another title for his website beneath all the other titles for Strong Bad's website. This makes Strong Bad's website even shittier, and shows that he is bad at making websites and that his advice to James on how to make a website was bad advice on making a website. What did you think about this cartoon about websites on the homestarrunner.com website, and about Strong Bad's website, Website, I mean Raige?
Cypher Raige: tl;dr.
I mean, how am I supposed to follow that mess? Let me just say that, since random is a young dude, he probably does not know that Strong Bad's website is pretty much what personal websites used to look like back in the mid to late 90's Geocities period. I took a business management class in around 1997, and one of our assignments was to create a personal website on the school's server. Mine looked a lot like Strong Bad's, and I even had a silly picture I made using MS Paint where I cut and pasted my head onto David Charvet's body so it looked like I was hanging out with the cast of Baywatch. I thought it was funny at the time. And I still kinda do. So there. Website.
Strong Bad Email #52: island
random dude: This one was a little bit disappointing. Strong Bad doesn't even mock the sender for spelling "were" as "where"! But, when asked what would happen if he was stuck on a desert island with Homestar, Strong Bad launches into a "best case scenario" explanation that is pretty much a description of every single old cartoon trope about being stranded on a desert island, complete with implausibly present salt for a sandwich-foot. It's nothing more than a blandly amusing deconstruction of the genre, but when Strong Bad imagines what would actually happen, the cartoon gets a little better. Homestar's incessant questioning and Strong Bad's awkward attempts to answer them all the same exact way are kind of meh, but Strong Bad's reaction to being called "Stinkoman" is pretty good. Homestar also manages to break the fourth wall when he manages to mimic one of the old site (I don't think I'm going to be able to handle prefixing "web" to "site" again for quite some time) menus, invoking a boat, harpooned whale and plane-trailing-a-banner to appear just by saying "Toons", "Games", or "Email". The scenario ends with Strong Bad receiving a message in a bottle which, to Strong Bad's dismay, is just an advertisement for Super Bowl XIX. All in all, not nearly as good as our next sbemail, but more on that after we turn to Raige for his opinion on "island".
Cypher Raige: That's funny, random, because I did not notice the misspelling of "were", but I did notice that Strong Bad also did not call out the email sender for saying "an desert island. He's really falling off on his pedantry! I found this sbemail enjoyable, if a bit slight. I enjoyed Strong Bad's run through of the standard "hungry Looney Tunes character chomps his own appendage" bit. Also, Homestar sure is dumb, amirite? I like how he calls Strong Bad "Stinkoman", a call out to another future alternate universe, 20X6. There are also some easter eggs at the end. If you click on both Homestar and Strong Bad, they will temporarily turn into various food items and other stuff, including a callback to the Marshie commercial featuring a plate of marshmallows wearing a hat and eyepatch and smoking a stogie.
Strong Bad Email #53: comic
random dude: That was much better. After he mocks email sender Brittany for atrocious spelling, Strong Bad accedes to her request to make a cartoon about her and her friends. What follows is the first installment of "Teen Girl Squad", a weird cross between stick figure drawings, deliberately off-kilter satire of teenagers, and violent absurdity. The main characters of TGS are exaggeratedly poorly characterized tropes whose nearly plot-less escapades usually end in the deaths of most if not all of the squad's constituents. There's Cheerleader, the head of the group, So-and-So, the honor roll student, the resigned-to-being-a-loner What's Her Face, and The Ugly One, whose name says it all. While in the hands of people dedicated to actually mocking a group of teenage girls, this reducing characters to completely one-dimensional stereotypes could very easily be problematic, but as Strong Bad's fictional creation, this unflattering characterization can be seen more as a product of his skewed idea of his pathetically skewed views on girls. Plus, the cartoon is incredibly weird, from the helicopter shooting down birds in the background to way that The Ugly one exclaims "Ow, my skin!" as she's pierced by multiple arrows, to the plotting non sequitur of What's Her Face being punted into the distance by a dinosaur, and this outlandish eccentricity is what TGS is really about. My favorite moment from this inaugural episode is when So-and-So is killed by a robot's laser beam, and Cheerleader says to her "Kristin, you look burnt, or dead," (What's Her Face stumbling through her name and eventually settling on "Kristin...a" is a great call-back to Strong Bad's mumbling through the names of Brittany's friends while reading the email. At the end of the TGS cartoon if you click on What's Her Face's tombstone a black and white cartoon Strong Bad will appear and try to flirt with Cheerleader, which isn't a great easter egg, but, just so you know, it's there. The sbemail ends with Strong Bad enthusiastically talking about how great his cartoon ended up, and saying that he should sell it at a "snooty independent record store". If you click on this last bit, you'll uncover an easter egg where we see a copy of TGS on the shelf of an independent record store and hear Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" in the background while the Brothers Chaps voice a couple of hipsters talking generic hipster-speak about an unnamed album that they just couldn't get into.
Cypher Raige: This is a god damn classic! My favorite Teen Girl Squad death would have to be when The Ugly One is killed by a buttload of arrows, and some random bald guy with a tie pops up and yells "ARROW'D!", an exclamation that I still drop from time to time, even when it makes no sense. That's how I roll! There are a bunch of little easter eggs here. The first group occurs when Strong Bad is reading the names of the email sender's friends. If you click on their names, little states show up. The next easter egg occurs when Cheerleader is standing alone amongst the graves or her fallen comrades. If you click on What's Her Face's headstone, you get an extra little bit added on to the comic, in which a hand-drawn Strong Bad wanders into the frame and macks on Cheerleader. Tip for the fellas: if you are looking to score with the ladies, it's probably not a good idea to offer to take them to Sonic BUrger, unless you are twelve. The last easter egg was already mentioned by random dude above, but I'm gonna hit it again, because it is god damned perfect! I love how their generic music geek speak includes how they couldn't get into the record they are talking about because it was in 4/4 time (as is probably 99% of all rock music) and used B-modal tuning on the guitars, and how they both have no idea what they are talking about, and yet feel the need to one up each other with their stupid criticisms. It's an amazing skewering of asshole hipster music geeks like myself. But, yeah, y'know, whatever. I don't even own a Brothers Chaps!
Strong Bad Email #54: morning routine
random dude: After being asked about his morning routine, we learn that Strong Bad had just been sleeping on the couch before being woken up by Strong Sad who "want[ed] to watch that show on public broadcasting hosted by that British guy". Strong Bad then groggily stumbles over to the computer, hand still shoved into a bag of potato chips, and we learn that this sbemail began in media res, as Strong Bad's pre-email song/saying this week is repeating ("My mouth tastes like...email"), and now makes more sense in light of him just having woken up on the couch. Next, while trying to write an acrostic for "routine", Strong Bad is repeatedly interrupted by Strong Sad, who has found a multitude of eggs beneath the cushions of the couch. This is so weird, and Strong Bad's impatient responses to his little brother are so dismissive, that I found this whole bit pretty funny, particularly what might be Strong Bad's most creative insult of the week "Thank you, Interrupter Jones," after Strong Sad interrupts him for the second time.
Cypher Raige: Yes, the surreal weirdness of this email puts it over the top. What the hell all dem eggs for anyway? Why he got so many eggs? Is Strong Bad, like, making some sort of egg army? Is he incubating little Strong Badlings in the couch? Is he gonna make a really kick ass omelette? No one can know for sure. OR CAN WE? More on this later. And just when all o' dem couch eggs make it seem like things can't get any more strange, out pops the Cheat with a pair of tighty whities over his head. There's some odd doings afoot in Strong Badia, my friends. While it would've been sorta genius for the one sbemail that features a ton of multi-colored eggs to not feature an easter egg, there actually is one. If you click on the Compy 386 logo on Strong Bad's computer after the email ends, you will finally learn Strong Bad's nefarious scheme for all of those eggs: he's making a breakfast cereal. That's just eggs. In a box. If you look at the "Side words" and the box, you will see that the egg cereal is not very nutritious. So I guess Strong Bad's plan is to make kids eat eggs that have no nutritional value, a plan worthy of the greatest Bond villians. OR IS IT?
Strong Bad Email #55: cheat talk
random dude: When Cory in North Dakota asks why The Cheat's speech is unintelligible, Strong Bad calls him over and tries to get his little yellow friend/henchman/pet to say "Douglas". When The Cheat simply adorably replies with "Mehs", Strong Bad gives up. I liked this cartoon, especially the moment near the end where Strong Bad hears what sounds like a high pitched voice repeatedly saying "Douglas," and looks around in alarm until he realizes that it's just a tree branch brushing against a window all along, an amusingly self-aware utilization of that old trope. At the end of the cartoon if you click on the words "learn how to speak The Cheat", you can listen to a clip from a "Learn how to speak...The Cheat" record. Remember everyone "Language is what makes people talk."
Cypher Raige: No, random dude, this email is not from Cory in North Dakota. It is from the entire town of Cory, North Dakota. Get it straight! You can also see a postcard from Cory, North Dakota if you click on the words "you guys" at the end of the sbemail, featuring Monkey D! I don't know what Monkey D is, but I want it. He loves the cheese! I kind of think this was the weakest email of the week, but it still had some chuckles in it, especially when we learned that when Strong Sad is punched in the stomach, it forces the word "Douglas" out of his wussy little mouth. I would like to learn more things about Strong Sad getting punched in the stomach. And even if we ended on a weaker email today, next week will see us reviewing the number one most popular sbemail of all time, a stone cold classic that really marks the turning point of when this site finally came into its own. Can't wait to watch it again!
And that's it for this week, everyone. Next week, we have:
Strong Bad Email #56: current status
Strong Bad Email #57: japanese cartoon
Strong Bad Email #58: dragon
Strong Bad Email #59: marzipan
Strong Bad Email #60: huttah!