I like cartoons. My appreciation for them started young. I watched Sunday morning cartoons back when that was a thing; Transformers, He-Man and the other animated toy advertisements of the 80’s. In the 90’s my family had a weekly ritual of gathering around the TV to watch the Simpsons. Later on I was at just the right age for Beavis and Butthead to speak to my teenage mind, and then to be entertained by children spouting obscenities on South Park. Still later there was Adult Swim to provide all kinds of absurdist animated entertainment.
The internet brought its own unique form of animation in the Macromedia—later Adobe—Flash platform, the once ubiquitous browser plugin that made “rich content” possible on the pre-HTML5 web. Although it had its limitations as a proprietary animation engine, it gave the world a glimpse of the potential of the web as a delivery platform for more than static words and images, demonstrating that it could deliver animated, interactive information, entertainment, and of course, ads, ads, and more ads.
The low barrier to entry of the internet made “user generated content” possible; just about anything you could come up with, you could put out into the world for its approval, disapproval or indifference. Content that would never have been considered appropriate for general audiences could find its way to whatever niche may be receptive. Sites like newgrounds.com allowed anyone with some time on their hands and access to a Flash authoring tool to share with the online world whatever their imaginations and animation skills could come up with.
And so we got cartoons like David Firth’s demented Salad Fingers, a series of surreal, disturbing Flash-based animations centered on the eponymous character, who inhabits a lonely, desolate landscape and who enjoys the feeling of rusty spoons on his leafy fingers in an entirely unwholesome manner. These started out as short, crude animations, but were peculiar and unsettling enough, with their grimy aesthetic and sense of the uncanny, to make enough people take enough notice to attain viral status.
While he is best known for Salad Fingers, Firth has produced many other animations, and although none of them have attained the same viral notoriety as the man with the vegetable digits, I can recommend all of Firth’s work for the unique blend of surrealism, humor, social satire, and an adolescent need to push the boundaries of taste and squeamishness that they all exhibit in various combinations. He is still producing animations (as well as doing a podcast, playing in an indie-rock band and producing electronic music—the guy is prolific) and while Firth, along with the rest of the world, has moved on from Flash as publishing platform, his work has an instantly recognizable stylistic signature that started with those early newgrounds.com animations.
Of all the content put out in the Flash era, certainly the homestarrunner.com website was the most widely enjoyed. Homestarrunner.com hosted a bunch of cartoons, but together these cartoons created a world, where each new addition to the site added to the lore. A character introduced for the sake of a one-off joke would thereafter become a native inhabitant of Free Country, USA. It was also something of a multiverse, where the characters existed in multiple incarnations, including an old timey black-and-white version and a felt-puppet version.
In some ways the world of Homestar Runner and friends is like that of Firth’s creations, with an absurdist sense of humor and colorful, unique characters. But where Firth delights in pushing boundaries, the Brothers Chaps, as the homestarrunner.com creators are known, always made their comedy light and playful, avoiding the shocking and controversial just as Firth plowed into it. The Homestar Runner world was completely PG, and yet it managed to be wildly imaginative and entertaining while remaining within the boundaries of family-friendly content.
I always enjoyed the Homestar Runner cartoons. I remember the first time I became aware of them, when a friend showed me the Trogdor episode of Strong Bad Emails. I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard since. It was absurd and completely unexpected. The characters were nothing like I had ever seen in a cartoon, online or otherwise, doing things that i’d never seen cartoon characters do. It contained all kinds of cultural references, to anime and movies and music and video games, as well as to surprisingly familiar obscurities like the demo song played by Strong Bad’s head in his Crazy Cartoon, which belongs to a toy synthesizer that we had in my home growing up.
The Flash era is now over, having been deprecated in favor of web-native technologies that do not require a proprietary plugin to access. This is all well and good, and much of the homestarrunner.com content has found its way to Youtube, but there was something special about the original site, which was a unique place on the web, completely developed in Flash and known for being ad-free and packed with easter eggs to discover. Fortunately, some enterprising individuals have come up with a Flash emulator named Ruffle, so although the site is no longer updated with any regularity, it retains something of its original character in the post-Flash world.
I’ve just taken you on a little trip down internet-memory lane; was there a point to this? Just that I recently became aware that the Brothers Chaps, whose lives have moved on from being full-time internet content creators, have created a series of short animations for Disney, that behemoth of animation, under the name Two More Eggs.
These are ostensibly cartoons for children, and while there is nothing in them that I would consider inappropriate for that age group, I don’t know how many kids can relate to the experience of dealing with a phone support system. In any case, despite their “made for kids” status, I think they have all of what was fun and unique about the original site, but with a new cast of characters and content updated for a new decade, although missing some of the nods towards adulthood, such as the fact that Strong Bad enjoys the occasional cold one. There are song parodies, there are characters whose dialog is an endless stream of non-sequiturs, and a character with a childlike naiveté who speaks with a pronounced rhotacism. Definitely worth checking out if you want to experience some of that Homestar Runner joy-in-absurdity again in a new guise.
Addendum
After writing this post, it occurred to me that there is another point of contact between the worlds of Salad Fingers and Homestar. Reading the wikipedia pages for both characters, you will find that they share a similar origin story, in that the characters that we know and love today started out with a random phrase thrown out by a friend in conversation.
I think this says something about how creativity works, when an unexpected phrase captures your attention and makes you think: what would someone named “Salad Fingers” look like? What would he sound like, and what kind of world would he live in?
I think many creative works have a similar origin. They don’t all start with a name necessarily, but it may be a little snippet of half-heard music, a dream, or a brief glimpse of a scene passed by in a moving vehicle, that becomes the grain of sand that gets into your subconscious and works its magic to produce something new.