#FirstClassFLASHBack

[radwolf76]

Reblogging this for the 20th anniversary. Rereading my post on this, it's saying September 2nd is the date but people have all been saying September 1st.

To be honest, I'm already embroiled in my crusade against Know Your Meme's incorrect date listed for They're Taking the Hobbits to Isengard, I'm not about to start fighting a war on a second front.

FLASHBack: Week 3 [First Class FLASHBack] - Badger Badger Badger

Another Thursday, so it’s time for me to post another classic of the Flash Animation era. Since I’m doing one of these a week until the end of 2020 when Adobe shoves Flash into the End-of-Life bin, I realized that I’m going to be posting a whole lot of these. I also knew that a small handful of creators are responsible for a whole hell of a lot of Flashes that easily fall under the classics label. So I’m setting aside the first Thursday of the month for a sub-series that I’m calling “First Class FLASHBack”, to help pace my posts of the most prolific creators, so they don’t overwhelm the one-offs.   And who better to kick off First Class FLASHBack with than one of Flash Animation’s true juggernauts, Jonti Picking, aka Mr. Weebl?

Keep reading

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 89 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Japanese Cartoon

Time for another First-Class FLASHBack, where we talk about the more prolific and influential Flash animators of the early web. This month, we're going to be looking at another offering from Homestar Runner. As mentioned previously, the Brothers Chaps drew on a wealth of 80s and 90s pop culture (and even a dash of the 70s, absorbed from pop-culture osmosis from their older siblings, as well as the influence of older decades from the fact that syndicated broadcast television reruns mined content all the way back to the Golden Age of Hollywood). One example where this 80s/90s pop culture overload really shines is in Strong Bad Email #57, Japanese Cartoon, posted on 6 January 2003. James F. asks Strong Bad what he would look like as a Japanese Cartoon, and what it'd be about. Strong Bad goes on to describe himself in a chibi big-eyes/small-mouth style (except when the mouth is open, when it goes ridiculously huge), reminiscent of a helmetless Mega Man. With blue hair. You gotta have blue hair. (WARNING: TV Tropes link.)   The show itself consists of him in space flying around in cool poses, an allusion to how many animes of the 60s-80s would rely heavily on a library of stock sequences for fight and transformation scenes, to pad out a show's run time (and sometimes that stock footage would get abused even further by US editors who needed to make up for runtime lost to localization censorship). The English is clearly dubbed, with mouth movements not even close to matching. Strong Bad's anime counterpart, Stinkoman, has a voice that sounds like voice actor Cam Clarke, who while best known for being the voice of Leonardo on the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, also voiced on several prominent 80s anime dubs, including the roles of Max Sterling and Lancer on Robotech, Dirk Daring on G-Force, and Kaneda in the original dub of Akira -- at one point Stinkoman even breaks out with a line, "You're just a kid!" that echoes Kaneda's dismissal of Tetsuo's interest in riding his bike at the beginning of the movie. (The name "Stinkoman" was a reference to a line from another Strong Bad Email, Island, which may have been a take on the old 90s Sierra-Online/Dynamix Screensaver, Johnny Castaway.)  

Now, it's important to note that television was not the only vector for introducing anime stylings and sensibilities to Western audiences. The shift of video game console market dominance to Japan after the video game market crash of 1983 meant that many titles would originally be developed for the Japanese market first and then have to be localized for the US. One such title is Rad Racer for the Nintendo Entertainment System, originally Highway Star for the Famicom. The Brothers Chaps lifted one of the songs from the Rad Racer soundtrack for their hypothetical Stinko Man K 20X6 anime. The anime's name is only revealed in an easter egg accessible by clicking the words "japanese cartoon" during the end credits -- using X to obscure a year was a gimmick that the Mega Man titles were particularly known for (but also occurred in Metroid as well as the Mother/Earthbound series). Inception-like, there are easter eggs within easter eggs here; clicking "japanese cartoon" a second time would bring up a clip of Homestar Runner watching Stinko Man K 20X6.   For the final layer of the easter egg, under Homestar's TV are a collection of VHS tapes, one of which is labled "NES Endings". Clicking that tape brings up a pop up window that shows the ending to Rad Racer. Subsequent clicks on the pop up cycle through the endings to a bunch of video games: Castlevania 2, Mega Man 2 (furthering the connection between Stinkoman and Mega Man), Super Mario Brothers 2 (The US version, which began life as the wholly unrelated title Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic), Hoops, Ghosts n' Goblins, Blaster Master (with a sketched on label and arrow calling out "Blue Hair"), The Legend of Zelda (whose credits provided the inspiration for some of the made-up names in the Stinkoman credits), Metroid (Samus is a girl?!?), Jackal, and Rygar. The world of 20X6 and Planet K would become recurring elements of the Homestar Runner site, and eventually the Brothers Chaps would even make a full Mega Man clone starring Stinkoman. Another subtle video game connection is the fact that the little mushroom clouds around Stinkoman's head when he laughs were inspired by Animal Crossing. Surprisingly, the indie video game I Wanna Be The Guy was NOT an intentional reference to this Flash, despite featuring a "Kid" who's motivation is "I Wanna Be The Guy"; the creator does acknowledge in his FAQ that he and his friend Eric who helped him name the game had probably seen this animation, but claims any influence it had was a subconscious one. (Fun Fact: I cosplayed as The Kid from I Want to Be The Guy at DragonCon one year, and almost got into hot water with con security over my gun prop.)   That's all I really have for this week. Next week, we'll go from badly dubbed anime, that staple of after-school weekday cartoons, to something a little more Saturday Morning.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 67 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Weebl & Bob: FF7 / Scampi

Easter is this month, so the obvious choice for this installment of First-Class Flashback is going to be Jonti "Weebl" Picking. However, I did all of his Easter themed content last year. So my next thought was to cover some Weebl & Bob episode to get some egg related content, and then talk about Weebl's animation trilogy titled "The Lord", a series of animations in the style of old Black & White Edwardian films, narrated by Lord Peter Feathering-Walthamstones. His attempts to show you his drawing room are thwarted by the fact that he's high off his mind on various illicit substances. However, it appears that "The Lord" trilogy is now only available for viewing via Weebl's Patreon. So I'm just going to be flying by the seat of my pants for this, with some Weebl content that I haven't covered yet, at random.   Perhaps not entirely at random, as I am going to stick with my plan of including a Weebl & Bob episode, after all this is the season for eggs. And while I've covered these eggy boys before, the ones that I have have all been Weebl-centric. However for a small handful of the Weebl & Bob shorts, the art style changes, with the premise that Bob made those episodes. Bob's shorts are characterized by a red-orange background instead of the usual purple, and a hand-drawn line-art look with an excess of "line boil". Line boil is that look that you get in hand-drawn animation where it's clear that the artist was not able to accurately and smoothly draw the same outlines from frame to frame; Originally considered to be an animation defect, it became a style choice for professional animators in the 90s when a method was developed to automate its addition to digital 2D animation.   And if I'm going to talk about one of the Bob-animated toons, the obvious choice would be one known for making its players think about resurrection -- originally because of the fact that Phoenix Downs don't work in cutscenes, but more recently because its publisher is finally getting around to the high definition remake that fans have been begging for for the last few console generations. Posted on 10 December 2002, FF7 is the 25th Weebl & Bob Short. In this animation, the role of Cloud is played by Weebl, and Bob is Sephiroth (or possibly Aeris -- when you get down to sketches the two have similar hairstyles). The main points of satire are the aggressive random encounter system (a topic also touched upon by Legendary Frog), and excessively long in-battle cutscenes.

  So next, we're going to look at Scampi (I've Seen Things), released on 14 September 2003 ... *Listens to Voice From Offstage* ... What do you mean I already mentioned Scampi? ... *Listens Again* ... In the Savlonic post? Argh. But I didn't drop a link to a 10 Hour Version, as is customary for covering Weebl's Flash loops here on FLASHBack. And I know I didn't mention the Scampi Remix posted on 15 July 2009 where Weebl asked ZekeySpaceyLizard to re-animate it in his own style, nor the Christmas version of Scampi from Weebl's 2015 Advent Calendar. So this isn't entirely a re-hash.   Next week on FLASHBack, more eggs.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 55 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Kenya

First of, apologies to everyone for missing last week, I was waylaid by a migraine. So while we try to open every month here on FLASHBack with something from one of our First-Class artists, this time First-Class FLASHBack got delayed until the second Thursday of the month. We're again going to look at the work of Jonti "Mr. Weebl" Picking.   One of Weebl's most popular song loop Flashes was released on 28 January 2004, Kenya. Normally on FLASHBack, I like to link to the creator's own video conversion of their work if available, but as I've said before, the looping nature of Weebl's songs warrants linking to 10 hour versions to get the full effect. That, and Weebl's YouTube Channel's own version has been sanitized for all-ages audiences.

In the original, the narrative tension between Kenya and its rival Norway was emphasized by a sequence that was captioned with "If Kenya was to physically urinate all over Norway* as well as metaphorically then the orange dotted line on the right would indicate the most probable trajectory to ensure a good coverage. *This is a fairly rare occurance though." -- Weebl's YouTube version omits the caption and the orange dotted line, leaving just Kenya bouncing on the map.

Along these same lines, the safari tour bus at the end was labeled "Holy crap. Lions! Tours" originally, and is unlabled in the YouTube edition. (While similar in form to the "Jesus Christ! It's a Lion! Get in the Car!" meme, "Holy crap. Lions! Tours" predates the earliest documented instance of it by a year and a half.)

This was not the first time the label on the tour bus would be omitted. On 8 May 2005, Weebl posted a Live Action version made by enthusiastic fans. On Weebl's site, the cast was credited only by first name and/or initial: Laura was the Lion, the Tiger was Brandy, Zan was Norway, and M pulled down the dual roles of Kenya and Zebra.   Also in 2005, on 31 October, Weebl announced that he would be taking pre-orders for plush toys of the Lion and Tiger (along with Weebl, Bob, Chris the Ninja Pirate, Badger, and Magical Trevor), becoming one of the first Flash artists to begin to sell non-clothing merchandise for his animations. When the plushes actually went on sale, he had an animated banner ad specifically for Lion and Tiger that claimed they were "100% Yiffable!" before changing its caption to read "You sick freaks." (If you don't understand what that means, BE GLAD.)   The year before, Weebl would close out 2004 with an Advent Calendar of animations, Day 19 of which was a Flash titled Lapland: Where can you find Santa?. This time the focus of the song is Finland's northern most region (which is still posited to be better than Norway). Lions and Tigers have been replaced by Santa and Snowflakes. Curiously, Weebl did not sanitize this animation when he placed it on YouTube, keeping references to strip clubs and the "Holy crap. Santa! Tours" label on the tour bus.   On 20 November 2008, in response to the the piracy crisis off the coast of Somalia prompting a declaration from the UN Security Council earlier that year, Weebl and fellow animator Wonchop released a Flash based on an idea by Weebl's creative partner Skoo. Somalia focuses on an African nation bordering on Kenya, and replaces the Lions and Tigers with Pirates. As always, they have to get in a dig at Norway (it's where Long John is being deported to).   On 24 July 2009, Weebl posted an animation by his Flash collaborator, Peab0. Kenya Remix was part of a series where Weebl had his fellow animators post versions of classic Weebl Flashes in their own distinct styles. Peab0 took the opportunity to incorporate the aforementioned "Get in the car!" meme, and to also incorporate a frequent criticism of the Kenya flash, that being the fact that tigers are not actually native to Kenya, or anywhere on the African continent. Lion-O and Tigra from the original 80s version of Thundercats get a cameo. The safari has traded in the tour bus and horns for a more appropriate vehicle for driving the savannah, but it's not sturdy enough to withstand a pride of curious big cats.   That's it for Kenya, next week we'll resume the usual schedule by going back to Somewhere in Nevada.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 47 [First-Class FLASHBack] - The Matrix Has You

First Thursday of the month, so that means going First Class. This time around on First-Class FLASHBack, we're checking back in with LegendaryFrog AKA Joseph Blanchette. Like all our First-Class Flash Artists, he was a prolific creator who had an influence on the overall genre. In particular, he organized several early large collaboration projects, bringing together teams of Flash Animators for compilations that dwarfed the typical uploads of the day. Two such collaboration projects that LegendaryFrog spearheaded demonstrate something that I've mentioned in the past: Flash Animators on the early web LOVED the Matrix movies. It is fitting that this would be the topic this week, as sixteen years and two days ago, the final installment of the Matrix Trilogy was released in theaters. On 28 March 2004, Blanchette would upload The Matrix Has You to Newgrounds, and a half year later on 20 September 2004, he would release The Matrix Still Has You. Both times, he and his team would be awarded Newgrounds Daily Feature.

The Matrix Has You consisted of the following short segments:

There Is No Spoon -- animated by Metal Maverick: A parody of Neo's visit to the Oracle, with Legendary Frog providing the voice for SpoonBoy

Château -- animated by the Super Flash Brothers: A recreation of the iconic scene where Neo faces down the Merovingian's goons in Matrix: Reloaded, this short features cameos by Astaroth from Soul Calibur, Ewan MacGregor Obi-Wan from the Star Wars Prequels, Legendary Frog's OC Kerrigan (in statue bust form), the swords Soul Edge from Soul Calibur, Ultima Weapon from Final Fantasy VII, and the Master Sword from Legend of Zelda, the toppling of a statue of Sadam Hussein, and Legolas from Lord of the Rings.

Zion Rave -- animated by Luke de Ayora: An excuse to bust out with any and every gif of people dancing, including the Peanut Butter Jelly Time Banana and the game sprite of Michael Jackson from the Moonwalker video game. It then veers off into left field when Luke decides to insert himself into the story instead of animating Neo and Trinity getting it on. It ends with a visit from Strawberry Clock from Newgrounds' Clock Crew, the self proclaimed "King of the Portal" (who is a topic for another day).

Burly Brawl -- animated by Richie Zirbes: A humorous take on the famous scene from Matrix Reloaded where Neo Takes on an Army of Agents Smith. This probably would have become the defining Flash Animation parody of the scene, but for the fact that just four days earlier on 24 March 2004, paultervoorde uploaded Super Mario Reloaded, a masterpiece of custom sprite work.

The Architect -- animated by Chris Boe: For some strange reason, Blanchett gives The Architect the exact same voice he would later use for Tom Bombadil in his One Ring: The Hobbit Flash 3 years later.

Final Fight -- animated by Joseph Blanchette: Legendary Frog's scathing critique of the ending to Matrix Revolutions.

 The Matrix Still Has You featured a whole new crop of collaborators:

Agent Training -- animated by Cycon: A spoof of the "Woman in the Red Dress" scene from the first Matrix, this features shoutouts to other movies such as The Godfather, and A Few Good Men, a cameo by Jesus Christ, and an AOL advert.

Subway -- animated by Serge: A comedic take on the subway platform showdown between Neo and Agent Smith in the first movie. Watch for the blink-and-you'll-miss-it call back to the Bill & Ted franchise right at the beginning of the clip, stay for the well deserved dig at the reliability of Windows Millennium Edition.

Twins -- animated by Joseph Blanchette: The scene from Matrix Reloaded where Morpheus and Trinity face off in a parking garage against the ghostly albino twins working for the Merovingian is turned into a Public Service Announcement for seatbelt use. Includes gratuitous product placement (but no worse than the original source material), and a practical demonstration of Godwin's Law.

Mobil Ave -- animated by Joanime: a very anime-esque take on the part from Matrix Revolutions where Neo is stranded on a subway station that represents an interface between the machine world and the Matrix, because the Merovingian's Trainman refused him passage.

The Seige -- animated by Gerkinman: a downright silly parody of Zion's final stand. Features some heroic moments by Kid. Now if you'd only ever watched the movies, you might have been confused about who this Kid character was, because Reloaded and Revolutions set him up as a pretty significant secondary character but never elaborated on his backstory. That was because his backstory was actually revealed in one of the Animatrix shorts.

 Legendary Frog had toyed with the idea of doing a third Matrix collaboration, to be titled The Matrix Has You Again, but did not get much past the preliminary animations of his own contribution. He did however do collaborations on other subjects, which we will cover in future installments of First-Class FLASHBack. As for next week's regular FLASHBack, we'll be looking at a work inspired by a different story of multiple iterations of the same hero having to save the world again and again.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 33 [First Class FLASHBack] - Weird Al’s Official Flash Animated Music Videos

Thomas Lee, who had made the video for the Star Wars Gangsta Rap, discussed in last week's FLASHBack, was asked to make a video for I'll Sue You, Al's "Style Parody" of Rage Against The Machine.

David Lovelace, the mind behind the Newgrounds series, Retarded Animal Babies, was tapped by Al to make Virus Alert, which was another style parody, this one of the band The Sparks (who regular FLASHBack readers may recall had a keyboardist, Ron Mael, who was the direct inspiration for the look of Roscoe Thunderpants from the Flash-only band Savlonic).

Ren & Stimpy creator and general garbage human being John Kricfalusi was brought in to animate Close But No Cigar, his first time animating in Flash. As with the others this one doesn't parody any specific song, but is instead Al's style parody of the band Cake.

Digital Entertainment company JibJab was hired to apply their animated photocollage style of Flash to Al's Do I Creep You Out?, which finally is an actual direct song parody, in this case of Taylor Hicks' "Do I Make You Proud?".

Doug Bressler, from Doogtoons, made the video for Al's 11 minute epic Trapped in the Drive-Thru. This too, is a song parody, of the even more epic 33 Chapter Rap Opera "Trapped in the Closet" by R. Kelly. There are diagrams. Al's version is simpler at only 3 chapters long but he did get to have his own fun with it. Years earlier he had approached Led Zeppelin about doing a polka medley of their songs for his movie UHF. Jimmy Page declined at the time, but when Al asked him if he could use a sample a few seconds of their song Black Dog to use in this song, Page again said no to the sampling, but did give them the green light for Al's own band to re-record a few seconds of the song's instrumentals. Al's band did such a good job, that many just assume that it was a sample.

  Yankovic kept up the practice for his 2011 release Alpocalypse, but this time around the Flash artists he engaged were the kind who were drawing regular paychecks from their work in the medium.

The video for Skipper Dan, a style parody of the band Weezer, and based on DisneyLand & Disneyworld's Magic Kingdom's Jungle Cruise Ride was by Divya Srinivasan who had previously done music videos in Flash for They Might Be Giants, as well as Flash trailers childrens' books she's self authored and illustrated.

The video for CNR, a style parody of The White Stripes, and celebrating comedian and Hollywood Squares fixture Charles Nelson Reilly, was another JibJab collaboration.

The video for Ringtone, Al's style parody of Queen was animated by the Flash artists responsible for SuperNews! on Current TV.

The video for Whatever You Like, a song parody of the T.I. song of the same name, was done for Al in Flash by Cris Shapan, Lead Artist on Cartoon Network Adult Swim's Tom Goes to the Mayor, Art Director on Season 1 of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and motion graphics designer from seasons 2 & 3 of Yo Gabba Gabba!

The video for Party in the CIA, a parody of Miley Cyrus's "Party in the U.S.A.", was animated by Ghostbot Inc. the same company that had also used Adobe Flash to create the Erin Esurance ad campaign, a campaign which ultimately had to be pulled when Rule 34 of Erin outstripped search hits for the actual company being advertised by a wide margin.

The video for Another Tattoo, Al's spoof of B.o.B.'s "Nothin' on You", was by Augenblick Studios, who had previously worked on Shorties Watchin' Shorties, Wonder Showzen, Superjail!, Ugly Americans, and the occasional short animation for Yo Gabba Gabba!

The video for If That Isn't Love, a style parody of Hanson, was from Flash animator Brian Frisk of FrownHouse, who had also done segments for Comedy Central's Triptank.

The video for Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me is kinetic typography from Dutch graphic artist Koos Dekker, who unlike the others on this list I can't actually find anything that confirms that this one was actually done in Flash. But I'm throwing it in, just in case (I did read somewhere where someone had guessed that it had been done in Adobe After Effects, so that's gotta count for something.) This song is Yankovic's love letter to producer & songwriter Jim Steinman. Steinman, a long time collaborator with Meat Loaf (and who Meat Loaf describes as "one weird dude") has an immediately recognizable sound even if he's not a household name. He primarily is the songwriter for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell and Bat Of Hell II, but he also wrote Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All", Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" & "Holding Out For A Hero" and Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now". His musical stylings are ripe for parody, and Al hits it out of the park with this one.

  That's it for this week. Next week, something simple. Maybe some stick figures that aren't from Madness Combat.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 29 [First Class FLASHBack] - Happy Fireworks!

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 12 [First Class FLASHBack] - Trogdor

First Thursday of the month so it's time not just for FLASHBack, but for First Class FLASHBack, the week that I highlight the titans of the genre. Today's post is well overdue. I'm sure some of you have been wondering how I could go for almost a dozen posts talking about flash animation on the early web, and not once mention Homestar Runner?

There's a reason for that. I never really got into Homestar back in the day. Aside from a handful of standout animations from that website, most of my exposure to Homestar Runner was via pop culture osmosis at least one layer removed from the source material. So unlike most of my posts, where I augment personal memories with a touch of research, this one flips it the other way around.

  Homestar Runner was the brainchild of Mike and Matt Chapman, collectively known as The Brothers Chaps. The youngest of five brothers, the whole family of whom had a propensity for heavy snark and deep pop culture knowledge, the pair grew up riffing on not just popular media of the 80s, but also the earlier eras their older siblings came to age in. The name "Homestar Runner" comes from one of their friends, James Huggins, who for fun would impersonate an old-timey radio sportscaster, despite not knowing much actual sports terminology. (James would later become a musician in the band Of Montreal, working under the stage name James Husband.)

  While at college in 1996, Mike Chapman and his friend Craig Zobel (who would later go on to write and direct the true crime thriller film Compliance) were goofing around in a bookstore and made note of how low quality children's' books could be. They decided that they could try and make their own book, for fun. The result was The Homestar Runner Enters the Strongest Man in the World Contest. This book marked the first appearance of many of the characters who would later become the main cast of the cartoons on the Homestar Runner website, such as Homestar himself, Strong Bad, Pom Pom, and The Cheat.

  Later, in 1999, Mike and Matt were seeing how the internet was going to be the next big thing, and decided to get on board by teaching themselves flash animation. Their goal was to make a website that would recreate the feeling of sitting down in front of the TV in the 60s, 70s, or 80s to watch Saturday Morning Cartoons. Mike remembered the earlier children's' book and suggested that they could expand on that story. After all, shortly after they had made the original book, they had made a short Homestar Runner cartoon in Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo. In January of 2000, they had enough content to go live with their website, including the first full length flash animation to feature Homestar, Marshmallow's Last Stand.

  Ultimately though, it would not be the title character of the website that would become the most popular. Instead, it was the villain character, Strong Bad, a boxing-glove wearing luchador inspired by characters from the NES port of Tag Team Wrestling, who would become the franchise's breakout star. He was given a weekly series where he would respond to actual fan emails (while typing with his boxing gloves on). The SBemails were a hit with fans, and ultimately the Brothers Chaps would produce 207 of them. The SBemails would also often result in the introduction of concepts, characters, or songs that would become reoccurring elements of the site themselves, such as Teen Girl Squad, Homsar, Li'l Brudder, Cheat Commandos, 20X6, Everybody to the Limit, and The System Is Down.

  Probably the biggest thing to come out of Strong Bad's Emails, however, comes from #58 - Dragon, posted on 13 January 2003, sent in by Kaizer from California, which was a request for Strong Bad to show off his skills as an artist by drawing a dragon. Strong Bad took up a pencil in his boxing glove and drew a dragon he called Trogdor the Burnninator. He then proceeded to sing an epic song about how Trogdor was the bane of any peasant who lived in a thatched roof cottage.

  Words can not even begin to describe the sheer awesome that is Trogdor, so instead, I'll link to what that initial appearance inspired

On 17 Mar 2003, a flash game was released where you could play as Trogdor. It was later ported to HTML5.

The final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, first aired on 20 May 2003, Trogdor shows up as the big bad of a session of Dungeons and Dragons. (Given the lead time in producing live action TV, this was most certainly a last minute addition.)

Another flash game, one that lets you play as one of the Peasants seeking revenge for his burnt thached roof, Peasant's Quest was released on 2 August 2004.

Three years after the original SBemail HomestarRunner.com begain celebrating Trogday as a holiday.

8 Bit is Enough, the fifth and final instalment of Telltale Games' multi-platform release, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, features Trogdor escaping from an arcade game cabinet to start burnninating the real world.

Trogdor's Theme is an unlockable bonus track on Guitar Hero 2. (It is impossible to hit every note on this song, as the notes per second in the strumming during the solo exceeds the game engine's strum limit.)

The song has been performed live in concert by the band Limozeen on 27 March 2008.

It was also performed by the University of Maryland Gamer Symphony Orchestra on 3 May 2014.

Mathew Beckham, a YouTuber who does metal covers of everything, absolutely shredded his rendition of the song (which was already pretty fuckin' metal to start with).

Previously on First Class FLASHBack, parody artist Weird Al was featured (Despite Al not making any Flashes himself). The video for Weird Al's song Word Crimes, Animated in Adobe AferEffects instead of Flash by Jarrett Heather, at one point features a cover of a school notebook that has been scribbled on with a doodle of Trogdor.

If jazz is more your thing, the soundtrack from the video game Poker Night at the Inventory features a Trogdor Jazz Cover.

In July of 2018, there was a Kickstarter for a Trogdor Board Game. It raised 1.42 million dollars against its original goal of $75,000. The Cheat would later put out a video "from the 70s" of a commercial for the board game. (There were a lot of inaccuracies present.)

While it has never been officially confirmed that the popular mobile game Merge Dragons is a shameless rip off of Trogdor, Strong Bad was merging together an "S" with a "more different S" to create Trogdor and other dragons almost a decade and a half before Merge Dragons was ever released.

  So, that's the Dragon-man (Or maybe he was just a Dragon). Next week, Kikkoman (or maybe he was just a Kikko.).

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 93 [First-Class FLASHBack] - The System is Down

There was supposed to be an installment of First-Class FLASHBack here today, but The System is down. The System is down. The System is down.   Ok, I won't actually do that to you. The Flash Animation linked to above, Strong Bad Email #45: Techno, was posted to HomestarRunner.com on 7 October 2002. In it, "Silent J" (Artist's Depiction) asks if Strong Bad likes Techno, and if so, what kind. Our favorite luchador then proceeds to vocally recreate a techno song he heard once. Fans have speculated that he's trying to do a version of Daft Punk's Rollin' and Scratchin'; though while similar, that song lacks the "obligatory old movie quote from some sci-fi movie". ("The System is down.")  

Strong Bad's musical stylings are interrupted when he has to scold The Cheat for starting a Lightswitch Rave to his song. As is per the norm for Homestar Runner Flashes, there's an easter egg here. After the Flash ends, clicking on The Cheat's lightswitch brings up an ad for The Cheat's Lightswitch Rave, featuring DJ The Stick, and DJ from Full House. There were also links for a downloadable expanded version of Strong Bad's Techno Song, minus the commentary. However, even with the downloads being served up in compressed archives, they limited the song length to 45 seconds as the majority of the fans were still on dial-up. The song would get extended again by another minute as a track on the Strong Bad Sings album.   A few months later, the sentence "The System is down" would appear in a Homestar Runner Flash in a different context. In January of 2003, Yahoo!, who had been hosting the Flash files for HomestarRunner.com, could no longer turn a blind eye to the fact that while most Flashes that they hosted only consumed a few megabytes of bandwidth per month, Homestar Runner's content was sucking down terabytes on a monthly basis. Yahoo! stopped serving the files, which broke the website entirely, as even their front page menu was entirely in Flash. The Brothers Chaps scrambled to find an alternate hosting solution, and as a stopgap, they started work on an animation titled The System is Down, planning to find some place to upload it to and email a link to their followers. However, the site outage only lasted for two days, before they could finish the Flash, and so they amended the ending and uploaded it straight to HomestarRunner.com on 22 January 2003. In the animation, Strong Bad apologizes to Homestar for the site being down due to high traffic; Homestar is confused at this because it's not Strong Bad's website. When Strong Bad points out that people don't really come to the site to see Homestar, Homestar takes a jab at a particularly weak Strong Bad Email, Tape Leg.   That wraps it up for this week. Last week we had 2001 and it's stargate sequence, this week it was The Cheat's Rave, next week, even more psychadelia.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 59 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Fan-made Weird Al Music Videos

First Thursday of February here on FLASHBack, so that means two things. One, we're going First-Class, looking at an artist whose repeated contributions helped shaped the Flash Animation Genre, and two, Valentine's Day is just a little over a week away, and unlike last year, I'm not going to let it sneak up on me to where I'm all the way through a post about a Flash series mocking Metallica's stance against file sharing before I realize I need to throw in a love themed animation. So naturally, when it comes to matters of love, the obvious choice in this case is Weird Al, who often sings about love especially in his original songs, and was a hugely popular choice for Flash soundtracks.   The first entry we're going to look at today isn't an animation, but instead an interactive valentines day card maker by Shafer Animations that was uploaded to Albino Blacksheep for Valentines Day 2006. This is the exact type of content that doesn't translate well to being video archived and is going to be hard to access after the death of Flash at the end of this year, but I can at least give a screenshot of the kind of output you could make with this thing. The soundtrack chosen to back this widget is Weird Al's accordion-backed polka medley Hooked On Polkas from his 1985 album Dare to Be Stupid. This medley features clips from such love themed songs such as "What's Love Got to Do With It?" originally by Tina Turner, "Method of Modern Love" by Hall & Oates (Fun fact: Daryl Hall and I share the same junior high school chorus teacher), and "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes. (It also has a clip from the song I lost my virginity to, which I will not specify as to keep some air of mystery about myself.)

  But ultimately, FLASHBack isn't about interactive Flash widgets, it's about Animations, and long before Weird Al was officially commissioning Flash Artists to make music videos for him, fans were doing it out of their love for his music. Such as the 2006 video that R. Wappin made for Al's 11+ minute ballad about a man's love for his mother, his love for his snorkel, his love of a woman bold enough to tell him "You've got weasels on your face," his love for the city of Albuquerque, and most importantly [spoilers] his anti-love for sauerkraut. Released on Weird Al's 1999 album Running With Scissors, there was no way that Yankovic's Sony Records imprint, Volcano Records, ever would have footed the bill for a music video for Albuquerque, as there was 0% chance it ever would have seen any airplay on Total Request Live -era MTV. Wappin's Flash steps in to fill this void.   Now not everyone is so lucky as to meet the girl of their dreams outside of a donut shop that's out of everything (and I seriously mean everything -- if you ever get the chance to see His Weirdness perform Albuquerque live, be prepared for him to rattle off about another twenty varieties that didn't make the studio cut -- I'm fairly sure he improvises them on the spot just to mess with the superfans who actually have the song memorized and try to sing along). For some people, it can be a long and involved process to find out if you're meant to be with someone romantically. One common starting point is comparing astrological signs for compatibility. Fortunately Al's Running With Scissors album also contains the definitive word on astrology, in the form of a song titled "That's Your Horoscope For Today". In May of 2006, this song was given a fan music video by long-time Mr. Weebl collaborator ZekeySpaceyLizard (Content Warning: Rapidly Flashing Text). (The same song was also used in a Homestuck AMV by KatRaccoon of "Behind the GIFs" fame, and while I have no idea if Flash was used for making this AMV or not, Homestuck counts as Flash-adjacent content at the very least, so I'm including it.)   Of course, not everything has to be about romantic love, sometimes love can be the joy brought by a shop full of tools. In February of 2007, Lennox put together a fan music video for the song Hardware Store from Yankovic's 2003 album Poodle Hat. In an impressive level of attention to detail (but not nearly as impressive as the fact that Al sings this all in one breath), at the climax of the song Lennox makes sure to include: allen wrenches, gerbil feeders, toilet seats, electric heaters, trash compactors, juice extractor, shower rods and water meters, walkie-talkies, copper wires, safety goggles, radial tires, BB pellets, rubber mallets, fans and dehumidifiers, picture hangers, paper cutters, waffle irons, window shutters, paint removers, window louvres, masking tape and plastic gutters, kitchen faucets, folding tables, weather stripping, jumper cables, hooks and tackle, grout and spackle, power foggers, spoons and ladles, pesticides for fumigation, high-performance lubrication, metal roofing, water proofing, multi-purpose insulation, air compressors, brass connectors, wrecking chisels, smoke detectors, tire gauges, hamster cages, thermostats and bug deflectors, trailer hitch demagnetizers, automatic circumcisers, tennis rackets, angle brackets, Duracells and Energizers, soffit panels, circuit breakers, vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, calculators, generators, matching salt and pepper shakers.   So you may ask yourself, why were they selling hamster cages at the hardware store, and why would Al be excited about that? This brings us to the final type of love that I want to cover today, the love between a man and a small rodent. Wait, that makes it sound like I'm talking about Richard Gere. Let me rephrase: the pure innocent love between a man and his pet. At one point His Weirdness had a pet hamster named Harvey that he made a short song about, and Albino Blacksheep user UncleTom made an animation for. (Link goes to the original Flash, as I can't find a video conversion of this and am too behind schedule on this post to convert one myself.)   Next Week on FLASHBack, more on the theme of love.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 8 [First Class FLASHBack] - LOST Rhapsody

As is tradition, Thursday brings another post of FLASHBack, where I share a Flash video from days gone by. On top of that, it's the first Thursday of the month, which means it's time for First Class FLASHBack, where I highlight prolific creators who shaped the genre.   This time around, I'm going to do something a little bit different. One might even go as far as to say something a little, dare I say, weird. This First Class creator has actually never made a Flash himself. He has however had a shit-ton of his songs show up as sound tracks to some of the more popular Flash animations. Not too surprising, considering his career as a singer/songwriter spans four decades. I'm talking of course, of the pride of Lynwood, California himself, Alfred Matthew Yankovic, "Weird Al" to his fans (though those in the music industry itself often refer to him by his royal title "His Weirdness").   While mostly known for his song parodies, a significant portion of his discography consists of original songs. Many of these originals are pastiches of another artist's general sound, what Weird Al calls a "Style Parody", such as his song Dare to Be Stupid, which is in the style of DEVO. Other Al originals are wholly his own, such as his Dr. Demento -era song Mr. Frump in the Iron Lung, or 2003's Hardware Store.   Also, as a once-an-album tradition, Weird Al pulls out all the stops on his accordion for a medley of snippets of song covers, nearly entirely faithful to the lyrics of the originals, with the only change being that they're done in dance hall polka style. These polka medleys always contain a broad cross section of the pop music zeitgeist of the time, with the lone exception of the polka track on 1993's Alapalooza.   Alapalooza's polka was one of a handful of times that Al has recorded a full, lyrics-unaltered cover of another artist's song, his accordion version of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, titled obviously enough, Bohemian Polka.   It was this track that Robert Montjoy, under the username CapnBob, used to back his flash animation LOST Rhapsody, which was released on 18 Oct 2005, shortly after the beginning of LOST's second season. The idea came from a text post by Captainaeon on the LOST General board of ABC's forums. The showrunners loved it so much that they actually brought Montjoy in to include him in the Mysteries, Theories and Conspiracies featurette of the LOST Season 2 DVD.   CapnBob would again turn to Weird Al for the sound track to LOST Rhapsody 2: Electric Boogaloo, released on 6 Dec 2006. This time, he used the medley The Alternative Polka from Al's 1996 release, Bad Hair Day. While the previous installment consisted of simple photo cutouts with crude, nutcracker-like mouth movements, this outing made extensive use of rotoscoping, an animation technique where live-action video is traced over, frame by frame. Be sure to keep an eye out for an homage to Terry Gilliam's animations from Monty Python's Flying Circus. (Gilliam's extensive use of image cutouts in his own animations would have been right at home in the Flash era, and he even expressed a wish to release his library of Victorian art for use as license-free Flash animation assets, however, the project fell through on several occasions.)   These are but two of the many times Weird Al's songs have been used in Flash, several of which were commissioned by Al himself. The ones that weren't, there's a chance that his tracks were obtained by peer-to-peer filesharing, which was popular at the same time Flash animation was getting big. (Fun Fact: it was traditional that any comedy audio uploaded to filesharing would get tagged with Weird Al as the artist, even when he had nothing to do with the piece.) Weird Al even poked fun at the file-sharing phenomenon in his song Don't Download this Song (with a video animated not in Flash,*gasp* *shock*, but instead with traditional techniques by animation great, Bill Plympton). But more on that topic next time.   [Originally posted 07 February 2019]

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 102 [First-Class FLASHBack] - Weebl & Bob

Way back at the start of the FLASHBack project, on my third post, I set aside the first Thursday of every month as First-Class FLASHBack, reserved for the most prolific creators, the ones that I knew I would be talking about again and again. And out of the nearly two dozen of those once-a-month posts, so far I've talked about Jonti "Mr. Weebl" Picking nine times, the most of any of the First-Class creators. So today, we're going for an even ten, bookending the First-Class sub-series the same way we opened it, talking about Weebl.   We've talked about many different facets of Mr. Picking's work, everything from Savlonic to Mr. Stabby. I also have made a passing mention here and there to an episode or five of his long running series, “The everyday happenings of Weebl and sometimes Weebl’s Friend, Bob.” However, those one-off mentions here and there, sometimes tucked away in a post where I was talking about a different animation of Jonti's altogether, didn't really give a sense of scope for just how big the Weebl and Bob series was. It was one of the first flash series to get its own DVD release, and also aired in between music videos on MTV2 Europe.   Earlier this year, Weebl uploaded a compilation of almost all his Weebl and Bob animations, nearly 150 in total. Split across four YouTube uploads, the entire collection clocks in at around four and a half hours in its entirety. And that's what we're linking to this week. I'm not going to even try to summarize each episode of these mumbly not-too-bright eggs, you'll just have to set aside some time to watch their funny antics for yourself. This was what I meant by "prolific".   Nearly Complete Weebl and Bob pt1 Nearly Complete Weebl and Bob pt2 Nearly Complete Weebl and Bob pt3 Nearly Complete Weebl and Bob pt4   That wraps up the First-Class posts. Next week a new window of opportunity.

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 3 [First Class FLASHBack] - Badger Badger Badger

Another Thursday, so it's time for me to post another classic of the Flash Animation era. Since I'm doing one of these a week until the end of 2020 when Adobe shoves Flash into the End-of-Life bin, I realized that I'm going to be posting a whole lot of these. I also knew that a small handful of creators are responsible for a whole hell of a lot of Flashes that easily fall under the classics label. So I'm setting aside the first Thursday of the month for a sub-series that I'm calling "First Class FLASHBack", to help pace my posts of the most prolific creators, so they don't overwhelm the one-offs.   And who better to kick off First Class FLASHBack with than one of Flash Animation's true juggernauts, Jonti Picking, aka Mr. Weebl? Hailing from Bristol, England, Weebl is a sound engineer and artist by trade. He also worked uncredited on some 3D visual effects for the first Resident Evil film (specifically, I understand he was responsible for the 3D animated map of Umbrella Corp's underground facility, "The Hive"). The name "Weebl" comes from one of his longest running series of animations "The everyday happenings of Weebl and sometimes Weebl’s Friend, Bob." The first episode of Weebl & Bob, Pie, establishes most of what you need to know about the series: Weebl and his smaller friend are both wobbly egg shapes with the same split head mouths that South Park uses for Canadians, they talk in an incomprehensible muttering that would be almost impossible to understand without the speech bubbles, and they're obsessed with pie. But, you're not here for Weebl, Bob, or pie. They're not the title of this post. I can hear you right now, you're saying:   "radwolf76, when come back, bring Badgers."         "Wanker."   So, lets talk about Badger Badger Badger, sometimes called "Badger^3", "Badger, Mushroom, Snake", or just "Badgers"... no, wait. That clip I linked is too short. Last week I mentioned how many Flash animations were designed to play on continuous loop until it melted your brain? Weebl is one of the main reasons why. So many of his ultra-popular Flash hits were designed to be musical loops, that many other creators copied this technique to try to achieve the same success. I won't say for certain that he invented the idea of a musical loop Flash, but he's the one who codified it into the institution that it became. So, don't watch that first video I linked, watch this official one hour version instead. Yes, the whole thing. Or if you don't care about official uploads, here's a ten hour version.   Badgers was released on 2 September 2003, and quickly became one of the most successful early internet memes. Unlike modern times, where memes can peak and then drift down into deadmeme territory in the space of days or weeks, the meme economy of the early internet was much slower paced. Flash music loops were particularly potent, as the repetition needed to reinforce the meme was built right in, and Badger Badger Badger may have been the most potent of all, with its hypnotic double layering of repetition.   Weebl would revisit the Badgers concept many times. In October of the same year, he released Badgers 2, a special Halloween edition where the Badgers were zombified (sadly, this one seems to be lost to the mists of time, if anyone knows where it's been mirrored, let me know so I can edit in the link). A Christmas version would follow in 2005. He would also parody movies, such as Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Snakes on a Plane, and Transformers.   Weebl is also a fan of football (soccer, for those who think of hand-egg when they hear the word football), originally uploading Footy Footy Footy in 2004, updating it for the FIFA World Cup in 2010 by overlaying vuvuzelas overtop the original audio (like the zombie badgers, this one's gone missing too), and then a 2014 version called Realistic Football Badgers in response to England's performance in that year's FIFA World Cup.   He did a parody of the dubstep song Swagga by Excision & Datsik, called Guess I Got My Badger Back, which would also see a release as a 3D version.   In 2013, he would partner with Brian May of Queen and Brian Blessed from the film Flash Gordon (among many other works), in support of the RSPCA's protests against badger culling in the UK. Together as "Team Badger" they would produce Save the Badger Badger Badger, which on 1 September 2013, charted at #79 on the UK Singles Chart, #39 on the UK iTunes chart and #1 on the iTunes Rock chart.   And of course, Weebl would inspire other creators, such as Devin Townsend with his cover song Deconstructing Badgers, and the Fifth District, with their Harry Potter version of the concept.   So next week, check back for good guys, bad guys, and explosions, as far as the eye can see.   [Originally posted 03 January 2019]