Easter egg

From Homestar Runner Wiki

(Redirected from Easter Eggs)
Jump to: navigation, search
This article is about the hidden items in toons. For the Easter specials, see Holidays (Easter). For other uses of eggs, see Eggs (disambiguation).
Not those kinds of Easter eggs!

Easter eggs — a message, image, scene, or other feature that is hidden or obscured during normal viewing — are a mainstay of Homestar Runner. Primarily featured throughout the hundreds of Flash toons that make up the body of work, this tendency to include hidden bonus content extends to games, other media releases, and even toys.

The majority of toons feature Easter eggs, documented in their respective articles. Easter eggs are most often triggered by clicking on a hidden button in the Flash cartoon; other Easter eggs may be activated by pressing a certain key, or simply by waiting a while after the toon is seemingly over. For instance, Easter eggs are commonly found in Strong Bad Emails by clicking on a certain word or phrase that Strong Bad has typed onto his computer.

Occasionally, Easter eggs are hidden in a way that cannot be revealed directly: they can only be seen if the Flash file is opened in a decompiler. In a 2007 appearance, Matt Chapman explained that these were added because the normal Easter eggs were getting too easy to find. The Halloween Teasers are the most prominent example of this sort of Easter egg.

Maintaining Easter eggs in formats that do not have the same interactivity as Flash has been a constant topic of consideration for The Brothers Chaps. DVD releases used the "angle" feature to display visual Easter eggs and often retained post-toon Easter eggs as hidden menu options (often requiring a directional button to be pressed multiple times before selecting). As YouTube videos cannot be interacted with, many toons uploaded to YouTube make use of fake end screens to hide bonus scenes after the toon appears to have ended.

Contents

[edit] Finding Easter Eggs

"Next, as I'm typing, you can usually click on certain words and make little pictures of dumb stuff pop up."

The majority of Easter eggs are activated by clicking a certain area of the cartoon. The easiest way to find these is by following a few simple steps:

  • Click on the Flash animation so keypresses are accepted.
  • Press the "Tab" key on the keyboard to cycle through all click zones.
  • When a border surrounds a part of the animation, it is probably a hot spot for a Easter egg. Either press the "Enter" (or "Return") key or click on the spot to activate the Easter egg.

In addition to clickable Easter eggs, there are a small number of Easter eggs found by pressing a key or digging through a decompiled Flash file.

Note that some Easter eggs do not do anything immediately. For example, in almost all the Halloween cartoons, Homsar appears in a later scene if an Easter egg is clicked (usually near The Poopsmith).

[edit] Keypress Easter Eggs

Occasionally, Easter eggs are activated by a specific keypress.

In most cases, letters will only be recognized if they are "lowercase" — pressing a key while holding down shift or with caps lock turned on will not activate the Easter egg. Letters are only rendered as capitals in this article for clarity of reading.

[edit] Toons

Homestar likes Marshmallows... in Abe Lincoln's Head
  • Fluffy Puff Commercial — L frames the screen in a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln's profile.
  • Meet Marshie — At the end of the toon, two additional moments are triggered by keypresses. They can only be played once, and the second can only be triggered after the first plays.
    • R cues an additional line from Homestar:
HOMESTAR RUNNER: I hate that freakin' robot.
  • F plays a disclaimer from Fluffy Puff Marshmallows.
{The yellow screen from earlier is seen with the Fluffy Puff Marshmallows logo, a bag of marshmallows, and a jar of mayo.}
VOICEOVER: Fluffy Puff Marshmallows and Marshmallow Mayonnaise. Each sold separately. Comes with everything you see here. Batteries not included. Kids, don't eat nails. {pause} Is that it? Am I done? Can I go? Anybod—Anybody want to get something to eat?
  • personal favorites — At the end of the toon, Q plays Strong Bad's email intro tune again.
  • mile — At the end of the toon, O shows a clip of a silhouetted Strong Bad doing cartwheels over a bunch of hills with a song playing in the background (in reference to Old Intro 2).
  • Where My Hat Is At? — Spacebar toggles an overlay of the corresponding page from the original book.

[edit] Games

  • TROGDOR! —
    • On the hints screen (found by clicking the "G" on the TROGDOR title screen), inputting the key sequence up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, and then clicking to start (the Konami Code) will begin the game with 30 mans instead of the default 3.
    • During gameplay, K will "kick" the game: a kick sound effect plays, and the machine to repeats the word "TROGDOR!" (a reference to Arcade Game).
  • 50K Racewalker — Additional hidden customization options are in the "Choose it out" screen:
    • H toggles "big head mode".
    • F toggles "fat walker" mode, widening the walker sprite.
    • The up and down arrow keys adjust the vertical position of the arms on the walker.
  • HomestarRunner.com: PAY PLUS! — During the trial game, 7 deactivates the flashing "TRIAL VERSION" overlay so the game can be played for twenty seconds uninterrupted.
  • Kid Speedy — At the title screen, pressing certain keys 10 times allows the player to race as a different character:
    • S — Strong Sad
    • K — The King of Town
    • H — Homestar Runner

[edit] Decompiled Flash Easter Eggs

From a 2007 talk at the Georgia Tech library:

MATT CHAPMAN: People are poking around, they decompile our Flash files and look at stuff. So we've started adding a few things here and there for the nerds that do that stuff. There's one where these two Homestars appear — like, it appears that there's two Homestars, you can barely see the edge of his feet on that side of the frame, that's in the actual cartoon. But then, to make it consistent in the universe, one of them has a mustache. But you only see it if you decompile the Flash thing and be like, "Oh, that's Homestar with a mustache."

[edit] Appearances

Who actually made all those fence drawings...

[edit] Easter Egg Pages

"Easter Egg Toon" redirects here. For a list of Easter toons featuring decorated eggs, see Easter.

[edit] See Also

Retrieved from "http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Easter_egg"
Personal tools