Homestar Runner To Return Soon

An anonymous reader writes with good news for everyone who loves Strong Bad.Back in April, Homestar Runner got its first content update in over four years. It was the tiniest of updates and the site went quiet again shortly thereafter, but the Internet's collective 90s kid heart still jumped for joy...The site's co-creator, Matt Chapman, popped into an episode of The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show to chat about the history of Homestar — but in the last 15 minutes or so, they get to talking about its future. The too-long-didn't-listen version: both of the brothers behind the show really really want to bring it back. The traffic they saw from their itty-bitty April update suggests people want it — but they know that may very well be a fluke. So they're taking it slow.

Comments

Kickstarter

[The Larch]

From the interview:

Matt: I’d just love to be making cartoons with these characters again. If it looks like there’s a possibility of doing this full time again, that’s amazing I don’t want to set expectations too high, but needless to say, we’re jonesing to do this again.

If the Brothers Chaps really wanted to do web cartoons for a living, I bet a Homestar Runner Kickstarter would easily bring in a million or two to get them (re)started.

Re:Kickstarter

[antifoidulus]

Homestarrunner I think works better as a part time project. While the updates over the past few years have been sparse, they have also been very inspired and incredibly hilarious. I can't say the same about the cartoons they were making towards the end when they were doing it every week. They still may kickstart, but I would much rather see sporadic but absolutely hilarious updates to h*runner than lots of bland ones.

Needs updates really

[Hsien-Ko]

sbtweets.exe

No Flash, though, please.

[Bing Tsher E]

If it makes a comeback, please don't use Adobe Flash. I think I barely have it installed anymore in Seamonkey. I get very satisfying little windows on my browser page sometimes scolding me that my 'version is too old' that please me.

Re:No Flash, though, please.

[jensend]

Vector animations like Homestar Runner are the original purpose of Flash- the one thing it is actually quite good at, and has been quite good at since Macromedia released Flash 3 in 1998. That's part of how it became ubiquitous- it did one thing and did it well. Even now there isn't really a better alternative- there's nothing that has the capabilities, the cross-environment rendering consistency, the install base, and the tool support Flash vector animations have.

It's just really unfortunate that after the Adobe acquisition Flash became a way of shoehorning a subpar and insecure "rich content platform" into that ubiquitous install base. For quite a while now streaming raster video has been a dominant use of flash, where it's been inferior to other solutions and only used because of its large install base and its support for DRM.

Re:No Flash, though, please.

[jensend]

Oh, by the way, one of my pet peeves is seeing vector animations from Homestar Runner, AtomFilms, etc uploaded to raster streaming video sites. The original vector animations had bitrates low enough for dial-up, ran smoothly on a Pentium III, and scaled flawlessly to any resolution. The raster (usu. H264) versions frequently look much much worse despite 20x the bitrate and dedicated processing hardware.

This is why I stick with reliable sites

[Hydrated Wombat]

Ones that always are up to date and maintain the same functionality, like http://zombo.com/

Links and Explanation

[perlith]

OK, for those who have no idea what this is (the internets is a big place):
http://www.homestarrunner.com/

From Wikipedia:
"Homestar Runner is a Flash-animated Internet cartoon series. It mixes surreal humor with references to retro pop culture, video games, classic television, and popular music. [....] The site is one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the Internet and is notable for its refusal to sell advertising space (the creators pay for everything through merchandise sales, which includes a line of T-shirts)."

Try this cartoon to understand a bit of the site's humor:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/...

Re:I'm sorry but

[EuclideanSilence]

You can't sell creativity and a good sense of humor.

It has to be said:

[Guy From V]

TROGDOOOOOOR!!!!

Re:I'm sorry but

[boarder8925]

They did get paid. H*R was selling enough merchandise for The Brothers Chaps to quit their dayjobs and work on the site full-time. What it sounds like to me is they saw opportunity to do more (other) things they wanted to do and got sucked into doing those all the time.

Re:I'm sorry but...

[Dins]

Sorry, try this instead...

The big question nobody has asked...

[weeboo0104]

Dear Strong Bad,
How do you tweet with boxing gloves on?
I mean, you must hit that 160 character limit every time you touch your smartphone and smash all the keys at once with those things.
Seriously, your twitter feed must look like:
"#Strongbad -
Adflkjad-0u91Adflkjad-0u915kl134-0udfk;lgkm;ldf-qpoilmar,madfv[pairg;lkqmer,m/. adfv[0adlm ,adlav[fqegl,mqdeg,.madfv;oja;ldknfadf890uarjo1k109afomaqer, q34t[0er"
Sincerly,
Chicago, IL