"How Homestar Runner changed web series for the better"

"So much of this understanding of web video was already present in the works of Homestarrunner.com, the first online provider of TV-like content to see significant crossover success. At the height of the site’s cultural cachet—roughly 2002 to 2005—the programs it offered, particularly its popular Strong Bad Emails series, made appearances in mainstream press publications like Entertainment Weekly. They were referenced on Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s series finale. News of them spread far and wide on the Internet, mentions of Trogdor The Burninator and The Cheat turning into a kind of lingua franca of Internet cool for those in the know. They turned up in video games both on the series’ site and produced by other companies. And this was accomplished almost entirely without social media. There wasn’t a Facebook or Twitter when Homestarrunner.com started putting up videos, and those videos were encoded in Flash (a platform that paled in comparison as a delivery system to essentially any video player out right now). The success of the site was a minor miracle, but it also seemed self-evident to anyone who spent more than a few minutes clicking around through its content. The stuff on Homestarrunner.com was really funny, and even if the site hasn’t been updated in years, its surprisingly elaborate mythology and characters still pop up in online discussions from time to time. It also provided a blueprint for web TV going forward: Start small, then keep going...

Homestar Runner ended up feeling very like the purest possible expression of one corner of the Internet, the one that wanted to just like stuff, instead of always feeling at a remove from it. It codified the pureness of being a little kid and falling in love with your first TV show or movie or book, and it turned that into a series of web shorts that pointed the way forward not just for the legions of web series to follow but also a host of TV shows, from Adventure Time to Bob’s Burgers, from Community to Parks And Recreation."

http://www.avclub.com/article/how-ihomestar-runneri-changed-web-series-for-the-b-104146

My friends and I dressed up as Teen Girl Squad one year for Halloween and it was fabulous. I have so much adolescent affection for that site; at the end of our high school graduation ceremony, one of my friends turned to the rest of us and channeled Strong Bad to declare "It's Over!!!!"

I miss that internet.

(Posting this today to celebrate my friend Alice's birthday)

Related: The immortal life of "my immortal"