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Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting.

by TillE 3y ago

Those were fun gimmicks and all, but Homestar Runner worked because of the cute character designs, funny writing, and Matt's genuinely outstanding voice acting. It holds up just fine on YouTube. It was more about Flash being a really powerful tool for amateur animators, and coming at a time when you didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet.

derefr 3y ago
Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.) This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it. Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures. Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  I think you nailed it on the head with the demoscene mention. not only was this one of the only ways to get this kind of content in those days, but any ol hobbyist could and did pick it up. netflix is the farthest you can get from ever seeing anything like homestar runner's characters, plot, etc
- bsimpson 3y ago
  Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from logistical considerations. Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Related: drawing mouths on the side of the face to save on the animation budget: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.
  - xp84 3y ago
    I was remembering the same thing. What an awkward few years. I feel like Flash spent its retirement in the most ridiculous way, mainly in rendering players that streamed those crappy FLVs, because people were still insisting on using MSIE in enough numbers that we couldn’t afford to use HTML5 video without at minimum falling back to Flash. Oh, that, and that little SWF everybody needed to use in order to implement a click-to-copy button, back when there wasn’t an API in browsers for that function.
echelon 3y ago
Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things. Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND... It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.
- HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  "It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck." Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't mean you should.

by TillE 3y ago

derefr 3y ago

Yeah, but there was a reason that we "didn't have much else in the way of video on the internet" at the time — bitmapped videos were far too bandwidth-intensive for most people to download in realtime. (You could still download them, and people sometimes did; but a 3-minute, 240p MPEG1/RealPlayer clip was something you'd need to dedicate a half-hour to fetching, either using a download manager or Limewire. It was not a "click to play" experience.) This was also the reason that YouTube didn't get started until 2005 — that was about when at least some people were starting to be "ready" to receive streaming bitmapped video over their Internet connections, without needing to make a big production of it. Flash as a distribution format for video was distinctive and successful because it was essentially a standardized abstract machine for demoscene demos — a Flash animation wasn't a video, it was an ActionScript program that rendered a video when executed. So a Flash animation could be arbitrarily lightweight on the wire — as long as the author was clever about composing things out of vector bits and small reusable textures. Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. Flash as a distribution format for games stuck around a few more years, because HTML5 wasn't fully there to replace it yet. And the authoring tool (now Adobe Animate) is around to this day, because it's still an excellent tool for creating vector-based cartoons... that you render out to bitmapped video.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
I think you nailed it on the head with the demoscene mention. not only was this one of the only ways to get this kind of content in those days, but any ol hobbyist could and did pick it up. netflix is the farthest you can get from ever seeing anything like homestar runner's characters, plot, etc
bsimpson 3y ago
Hanna Barbera is another famous aethetic driven from logistical considerations. Every HB character wears a tie or a necklace because it provides a seam to separate the head from the body. You can have a bunch of Wilma or Yogi heads that reuse a single body. Lets you animate dialog without having to redraw literally everything.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Related: drawing mouths on the side of the face to save on the animation budget: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CheekyMouth
mschuster91 3y ago
> Flash as a distribution format for video was obsolete basically as soon as people's Internet connections improved enough that they could just stream the pre-rendered output of someone else rendering out the Flash animation program instead. (Which was around... 2010, I'd say?) Which also meant that, at that same moment, the "Flash aesthetic" of vectors and reusable resources basically instantaneously ceased to exist, because it had all been in the name of conserving bandwidth, and there was no longer a reason to do that if you were rendering the result out to MPEG anyway. You still needed Flash as a player platform for many years afterward. IIRC, Apple were the ones to finally push people to use native HTML elements for that.
- xp84 3y ago
  I was remembering the same thing. What an awkward few years. I feel like Flash spent its retirement in the most ridiculous way, mainly in rendering players that streamed those crappy FLVs, because people were still insisting on using MSIE in enough numbers that we couldn’t afford to use HTML5 video without at minimum falling back to Flash. Oh, that, and that little SWF everybody needed to use in order to implement a click-to-copy button, back when there wasn’t an API in browsers for that function.

echelon 3y ago

Flash made it easy for any kid or creative to do amazing things. Homestar, Weebl, Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, Ultimate Showdown, Xiao Xiao, Albino Black Sheep, Newgrounds, YTMND... It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago
"It was businesses with splash intros (the kind that Zombo.com parodied) that made Flash suck." Just because you can make everything fly around doesn't mean you should.