#firstclassflashback

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.)  

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.

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.")  

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.

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.)