Painting The Medium / Web Animation

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• On Homestar Runner, the Strong Bad Email "virus" involves computer viruses not only infecting Strong Bad's computer, but apparently the Flash file for the cartoon itself, as reality starts falling apart in strange, interesting, and funny ways. This also created a Main Page on the site based on the sbemail, though the "virus'd" components were just animations from scrolling over the buttons; the page is just as functional as the other Main Pages.
  Bubs: My mouth was a broken jpeg!
  • While clicking on the "main" navbar link at the bottom of most other pages will bring you to a random main page (all named "main[number].html"), trying to do the same from "virus" will bring you to "mainNaN.html", which doesn't exist and will load the 404 error page.
  • In January of 2003, the site went down for a day or two thanks to high server traffic, and they returned with an auto-loading animation featuring the same standard 404 page, and the characters walking on-screen to comment.
    Homestar: Ummmm... what's going on here? What happened to my website?
    Strong Bad: The system is down, yo.
  • A few weeks after Email number 99 was released, typing in the URL http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail100.html (which follows the same format as the previous 99 emails) brought you (and still does) to a similar "page could not be displayed" page where Strong Bad berates the user for being impatient. Supposedly, this page was created to trip up users trying to view the 100th Strong Bad Email before it was officially released.
    Strong Bad: Teach you to poke around in my HTML...
  • Then the actual 100th Email itself plays with the fourth wall. Strong Bad says that this story must be shown "IN WIDESCREEN!" and the Flash window expands to do just that. And Homestar himself appears behind the right side, where he admits "I'm pretty much here every week. It's just that usually I'm Behind the Black."
  • In a similar example to the gag they did for the 100th email, http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail200.html brought you (and still does) to a fake Firefox "address not found" page where the "Deleteheads" are camping out waiting for the 200th Strong Bad Email.
  • Typing in an invalid URL on the site will bring up a "404'd" page in the style of Strong Bad's "Teen Girl Squad" comics. The title is a play on a Running Gag in Teen Girl Squad: injuries named with the object used to cause it, plus a "-'d" on the end (examples: MSG'd, team manager'd... Strong Bad even LampshadeHanging'd it once: "Those Teen Girl Squad girls are sure gonna get something'd now!") While this works with any URL that is not a valid file in the homestarrunner.com domain albeit not in a different directory (due to relative linking, pages such as this one will not load), the official URL is http://www.homestarrunner.com/404error.html.
  • In the 150th e-mail, "Alternate Universe", the style of talking changes depending on which universe Strong Bad is in at the moment. For example, in the Strong Badman comic, speech bubbles show up during speech, and in the storybook universe, everything anyone says is subtitled like a children's book.
    • Also in the Strong Badman comic, Strong Bad tells Strong Badman that his comic is getting boring, then jumped out of the panel and landed in a later one, thus basically gaining the power of time travel.
  • In Strong Sad's character introduction video, he is actually running his fingers through the side of the screen.
• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, the Emperor's subtitles are always rendered like this.

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