How Homestar Runner Mastered the Flash Art Form

There wasn’t much time to get good at Flash when it was alive. But no one did it better than Homestar Runner.

Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube.

Flash may have died an extremely timely death at the end of 2020, but it deserves more credit than it gets at times. It enabled a generation of artists, animators, and game designers to create online in ways that wouldn’t be possible without Flash for years to come.

And no one made better use of Flash than Mike and Matt Chapman — a.k.a The Brothers Chaps — when they created Homestar Runner.

This site featured cartoons, minigames, eventually full-sized games, and even video at a time when the internet wasn’t good at doing much. Strong Bad Emails gave people a recurring show with dozens of episodes to rewatch before The Office ended up on every streaming site. Peasant’s Quest was an adventure game you could play in your browser before Stadia ever launched.

And the trailer for the live-action movie adaptation of Peasant’s Quest crashed Homestarrunner.com before YouTube…