Homestar Runner Returns for First New Video in Over a Year

The Brothers Chaps’ wildly popular flash animation Homestar Runner has debuted a new episode for the first time in over a year. The series, which started way back in 1996, is one of the internet’s longest-running and most iconic comedy features. The characters and silly, surreal concepts of Homestar Runner kicked off in 1996, but it was 2000 when the brothers introduced an animated version online, using the then-new Macromedia Flash animation format. Following Flash’s discontinuation, the site has remained functional viw Ruffle, a third-party Flash emulator.

Over the years, Homestar Runner has evolved quite a bit. At first, it was updated regularly and the intent was to center it primarily on the title character. Antagonist Strong Bad more or less took over as the site’s mascot, though, with the massive popularity of “Strong Bad email” segments where he responded to, and mocked, emails. That made for a pretty easy story template as well as something fairly routine to animate.

The newest episode centers on Homestar Runner and Strongbad, and features a tease at the start that revealing the title up top would ruin it, so we won’t. You can see it here.

Over the course of its life, Homestar Runner has become an increasingly infrequent, sometimes random thing. At one point, there was a four-year hiatus, and since returning from that in 2014, releases have been few and far between, with the general sense being that the creators are waiting for inspiration to strike, rather than sitting in a room coming up with ideas that might work.