Is Homestar Runner Coming Back?!

Elizabeth Peterson ’17 / Emertainment Monthly Contributor 

You’ve heard it before and you’ve been let down time and time again. But this time, Homestar Runner’s return very well could be real.

Homestar Runner hadn’t released any new cartoons in over four years when they came out with an April Fools’ short in 2014. People believed then that the cartoon was going to come back again, but those hopes didn’t manifest into any major reality. They released two Halloween cartoons, but the most popular “show” that the website had to offer, Strong Bad Emails, remained unseen. There didn’t seem to be much hope for the website ever being as strong as it was before in the 2000s.

Co-creator Matt Chapman has gone on the record to say that they plan on making more Homestar Runner in the future. When they left the site in 2010, they were working in the professional world of animation with a reasonable amount of success. Both of the “Bothers Chaps” (Matt and Mike Chapman) have been writers for Wander Over Yonder and Yo Gabba Gabba. Matt became a writer/director for the show Gravity Falls as well, and even serves as a voice actor on another show (for which he also writes), The Aquabats! Super Show! The brothers serve as a major success story for the Internet, creating the idea of weekly Internet content but becoming successful in mainstream media as well. Why would they ever actually leave their well-paid writing jobs to go back to the sketchy world of online video?

But, this year’s April Fools’ was different. It held something that no one expected we would ever see again—a “Strong Bad Email” segment, and a very unusual one at that. (Strong Bad doesn’t even sit down to actually check an email on his computer until the end.) But it marks a change. It springs hope. There might actually be “Strong Bad Emails” again.

What makes this different than last year? A new addition to the website. Instead of emailing Strong Bad, a feature encouraged at the end of each “Strong Bad Email,” they now have an official Twitter page for Strong Bad. When Homestar Runner first came around, Twitter didn’t even exist. In the show’s main years of popularity, Twitter was rarely used by anyone. Obviously, times have changed and Twitter is an integral part of the social world. But creating an actual Twitter for Strong Bad, the character, is a huge step. It shows that their process is changing and that there is a new way to get the attention of the fabulous Brothers Chaps.

Giving a Twitter to Strong Bad (and possibly the other Homestar Runner characters) could lead to a huge change in the website. Instead of going through thousands of emails, the questions are made short and sweet for the creators to get right to the root very quickly. This could also mean that viewers could get witty short responses from the characters over social media. Maybe they could use Twitter to make a whole new show. The possibilities are endless.

Here, you can watch the newest April Fools cartoon: