Homestar Runner is an American animated comedy web series created by Mike and Matt Chapman, known collectively as The Brothers Chaps. The series centers on the adventures of a large and diverse cast of characters, headed by the titular character, Homestar Runner. It uses a blend of surreal humor, self-parody, satire, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music.
Homestar Runner originated in 1996 as a book written by Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel, intended as a parody of children's literature. While learning Macromedia Flash, Mike and his brother Matt expanded the concept into a website, which was launched on New Year's Day 2000. While the site originally centered on the title character, Strong Bad emerged as a breakout character, and the Strong Bad Email skits became the site's most prominent feature.
At the peak of its popularity, the site was one of the most-visited sites with collections of Flash cartoons on the web. The site went on hiatus in 2010 and new cartoons have been released only occasionally on the website and its YouTube channel since that time.
History
1996–2000: Development Homestar Runner was created in Atlanta in 1996 by University of Georgia students Mike Chapman and friend Craig Zobel, who wrote the original picture book, The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest, while working summer jobs surrounding the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Matt described the origin of the name "Homestar Runner" as an in-joke between themselves and James Huggins, a childhood friend of the Chapman brothers while growing up in Dunwoody, Georgia.
Mike Chapman and Craig Zobel originally designed Homestar Runner as a children's book including the characters Homestar Runner, Pom Pom, Strong Bad, and The Cheat. They did not seek publication and distributed copies to friends. Chapman's father sent copies to several publishers, which were rejected. They later used the Super NES video game Mario Paint to create the first cartoon featuring the characters.
2000–2009: Launch and initial popularity Mike Chapman and his younger brother Matt began learning Flash animation around 1999. They developed cartoons based on the original Homestar Runner children's book created with Zobel. These initial cartoons were launched on homestarrunner.com in early 2000. Mike animated the cartoons, Matt provided the voices of the male characters, and Missy Palmer provided the voice of Marzipan.
Initial shorts featured competitions between Homestar Runner as a heroic character and Strong Bad as the villain; over the course of its first year, these expanded to include scenes taking place between competitions, which the creators believed were more humorous. The site debuted a new design, including character designs, in February 2001. These have remained largely consistent to the present.
The site grew slowly at first and primarily through word-of-mouth. They were able to sell a "few dozen" T-shirts by 2001. Mike moved back to New York in mid-2001 and he and Matt started crafting the first Strong Bad Email some kinda robot, intending this to be a weekly feature. The Strong Bad Email series proved very popular, generating significant interest in the site; when the brothers were late in publishing a new Strong Bad Email, they received angry emails asking where the new short was, which Matt said was "a cool feeling to know you're as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks". Their father suggested Matt quit his full-time job to devote time to creating more Homestar Runner shorts. With the number of visitors to the site growing, by January 2003 the site had outgrown its original web host, Yahoo. Merchandise sales paid for all of the costs of running the website as well as living costs of the creators, whose retired parents managed many of the business aspects.
In a 2017 interview Gizmodo, the brothers spoke of the period between 2002 and 2005 as their most creative and successful, exploring various media for the shorts and having a large quantity of merchandise. Matt reflected on a day in February 2004 as the highlight of the series, when received a demo tape from They Might Be Giants for a song to use in a Strong Bad Email short and a life-sized replica of Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000 producer Jim Mallon on the same day. Joss Whedon incorporated references to Homestar Runner into his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
2009–2014: Hiatus Through 2010 Homestar Runner remained financially viable for the brothers through sales of related merchandise. Both brothers were married by 2010 and had their children to care for, and they recognized that they would need to find other jobs to support their respective families. When Matt had a second daughter, the two agreed to put the series on hiatus, knowing they would want to come back to it but could not guarantee a time frame. Mike also noted that they had spent nearly ten years delivering a weekly cartoon, and believed that, creatively, they needed a break. The success of Homestar Runner led to Matt and Mike getting writing jobs for television animated series Yo Gabba Gabba!, Gravity Falls, The Aquabats! Super Show!, and Wander Over Yonder.
During this hiatus the brothers released a small number of Homestar Runner cartoons, including ones for 2010's April Fools' Day, Christmas (which they renamed Decemberween), Halloween, and other holidays. They also made a special video featuring Homestar and Strong Bad for the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con to introduce a panel regarding the history of W00tstock.
2014–present: return Matt, after completing work on Gravity Falls, moved back to Atlanta in 2014 where Mike was living, and the two agreed that they now had the opportunity to return to Homestar Runner on a semi-regular basis. Their first short in nearly four years, posted on April 1, 2014, poked fun at how they had not updated the site in years. Matt confirmed their commitment to continue the series in July 2014. Since then, the site has featured occasional updates, usually for holidays. Until 2017, this was mostly due to the brothers' involvement in developing the Disney XD animated show Two More Eggs.
With the impending discontinuation of Adobe Flash in December 2020, most new Homestar Runner animations were released directly as videos to YouTube; the brothers also worked to transfer the older Flash content into video format for archival purposes. Prior to Flash's discontinuation, the Internet Archive included Homestar Runner content in its collection of Flash animations and games. The content is directly viewable in modern browsers through the Ruffle Flash emulator. The Homestar Runner website itself was also updated to use Ruffle, restoring much of its original functionality.
Characters Homestar Runner cartoons typically center on Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, and the other ten main characters: The Cheat, Marzipan, Coach Z, Bubs, Strong Sad, Strong Mad, Pom Pom, the King of Town, the Poopsmith, and Homsar. The Brothers Chaps have described them as “dumb animal characters”. These characters all live in the fictional town of Free Country, USA. Each character has multiple alternate versions of themselves, such as "Old-Timey" and "20X6" versions.
Cartoons
Homestar Runner features several spin-off series from the main "shorts" and "big 'toons", including the most well-known, Strong Bad Email.
Strong Bad Email
Strong Bad Emails is a series featuring Strong Bad answering emails from fans. Since starting in August 2001, the initially brief episodes have grown in length and scope, introducing numerous spin-offs, characters, and inside jokes, such as Homsar, Trogdor, Senor Cardgage, 20X6, the Teen Girl Squad shorts, and Homestar Runner Emails (also known as "hremails"). The format, however, has remained largely unchanged. Each episode typically begins with Strong Bad singing a short song to himself while booting up his computer to check fan emails. Starting a reply, he typically mocks the sender's name, spelling, and grammar, and rarely answers questions directly. While early episodes focused mostly on Strong Bad sitting at the computer with occasional cutaways, the cutaways would become more elaborate over time, allowing for more complex story lines to develop, growing tangentially from the initial email. As of November 24, 2025, 210 Strong Bad Emails have been released on the website (with another six exclusive to DVD releases).
Holiday specials Prior to the 2010 hiatus, holiday specials were a regular feature of the site, released to coincide with popular holidays, specifically Halloween and Decemberween (a fictional holiday similar to Christmas also celebrated on December 25). Halloween shorts typically feature the main characters celebrating a traditional aspect of the holiday (such as ghost stories, trick-or-treating or pumpkin carving) in costume, often making pop culture references relating to their costumes. The site also usually releases a separate Halloween video where Strong Bad views a slideshow and mocks and/or appraises photos sent in by real life fans of their Halloween costumes and props modeled after Homestar Runner characters and other elements. Similarly, Decemberween cartoons typically satirize Christmas traditions such as gift-giving and carol-singing. The fact that it takes place on the same day as Christmas has been presented as just a coincidence, having been stated that Decemberween takes place "55 days after Halloween". April Fools' Day features various gags, such as turning the site into a paid subscription service, or turning it upside down.
Teen Girl Squad Teen Girl Squad is a crudely drawn comic strip narrated by Strong Bad, using a falsetto voice. The series was a spin off of Strong Bad Email No. 53, comic, in which Strong Bad is asked to make a comic strip of a girl and her friends. The comic features four archetypal teenage girls, "Cheerleader", "So and So", "What's Her Face" and "The Ugly One", and satirizes high school life, teen movies, and television. Each episode follows the girls in typical high school situations, often leading to their gruesome deaths. A spinoff of this series is "4 Gregs", which follows four of the squad's nerdy classmates, all named Greg.
Marzipan's Answering Machine Marzipan's Answering Machine is a series of cartoons with almost no animation. It features messages from the other characters, being played on the answering machine belonging to the character Marzipan. In early episodes, the episode number ended in .0 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 5.0), but since Marzipan changed to a new answering machine, the number ends in .2 (for example, Marzipan's Answering Machine Version 15.2). In every episode, Strong Bad prank calls Marzipan, badly pretending to be someone else, such as "Detective Everybody", "Safety Dan", and sometimes other characters. Although the animation is usually just a picture of the answering machine, sometimes there are short animated segments featuring the characters. As of April 1, 2016, there are 17 Marzipan's Answering Machines.
Puppet Stuff These are live action shorts in which the regular characters are depicted by puppets. These may be skits, or musical performances with They Might Be Giants. Many Puppet Stuff videos feature the characters interacting with children, often related to The Brothers Chaps. One spin-off series, "Biz Cas Fri", depicts Homestar and Strong Bad's interactions from his office cubicle at work. The first Biz Cas Fri video arguably first coined the term Doge.
Powered by The Cheat In-universe, "Powered by The Cheat" videos are short cartoons made by the character of The Cheat, and are often music videos done for other characters. During these segments, Matt Chapman does the animation and Mike Chapman provides the voices, a switching of their usual roles. As a result, the cartoons' animations are deliberately poor.