12/18/2022 0 Comments Homestar runner![]() ![]() But much of its muscle comes from the pop-culture fluency which it exhibits and evokes, and this is the first of Homestar’s diversionary tactics. This cartoon is the very Apotheosis of the Random, and anybody who loves nonsense humor (I plead guilty) can find their fill here. I suppose Homestar could be enjoyed just for its absurdist pyrotechnics and playfulness. The first Decemberween show is faux-copyrighted 1965 and has a theme song that’s sure to hit your nostalgia button. Lest you think I’m fabricating the comparison to Peanuts, note that it is invited by the cartoon itself: the episode called The Best Decemberween Ever is of course “sponsored by Dolly Madison” with Strongsad and Homestar conversing over a half-wall like Charlie Brown and Linus. If you want to see the postmodern coccoon that we weave around ourselves to keep things under control, here ’tis, made visible, entertaining, and even beguilingly cheerful. In that regard, Homestar is a perfect reflection of the youth culture it’s simultaneously spoofing and feeding. The world of Homestar, Free Country USA, is designed not so much to keep God out as to keep us from noticing he’s gone. The fugues and loops and ironies are not about something they are the point. Where there ought to be an openness to the beyond, the world of Homestar is turned inward in a series of increasingly complex interior dialectics: self-referentiality, pop-culture allusiveness, a fugue of sub-creator loops, and spiraling ironies. How old are these kids, anyway? Are they kids at all? It’s a strange place where anything can happen, but one thing that can’t happen is any kind of inbreaking from beyond: there is no transcendence here, no open heaven. Like the Peanuts gang, Homestar characters wander around a minimalist landscape in a perpetual after-school zone, but in this case it’s a kind of Twilight of the Fhqwgads. The contrast with Peanuts is so telling that I take it to be the best point of entry: Homestar Runner is some kind of digital Charlie Brown in the Secular Suburb. I do hereby announce that there is no theology of Homestar Runner. But finding the theology of Homestar Runner is another matter altogether. Short had a lot to work with in a strip like Peanuts, whose creator Charles Schulz was documentably preoccupied with spiritual matters. ![]() Short had a surprise bestseller with a book on The Gospel According to Peanuts. Essay / Art The Theology of Homestar Runnerīack in the ’60s, Robert L. ![]()
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