Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits

One of the rare examples of an Internet humor site that's smart and juvenile at the same time (and manages to keep its comedy PG-rated without a hint of strain), www.homestarrunner.com features the flash-animated adventures of dunderheaded athlete Homestar Runner, his Lucha Libre-masked nemesis Strong Bad, Strong Bad's unidentified sidekick the Cheat, Homestar's hippie-esque girlfriend Marzipan, and other characters living in their strange but unthreatening neighborhood. Brothers Matt and Mike Chapman, who write and direct the website's cartoons as well as providing nearly all the voices, have an obvious fondness for letting their characters wander off onto musical tangents, and they've collected some of the more memorable tunes that have emerged from their work on this disc. Much as the Fonz grew from a minor supporting player to the leading character on Happy Days, the obnoxious but endlessly quotable Strong Bad soon became most fans' fave character on www.homestarrunner.com (more so than Homestar himself), and predictably he gets most of the lead vocals on Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits as he takes on heavy metal ("Trogdor"), hip-hop ("The Cheat Is Not Dead"), country ("Somebody Told Me [Now I Believe Them]"), electronica ("The System Is Down"), dance-pop ("Everybody to the Limit"), college-guy balladeering ("Circles"), and a handful of other musical avenues with his trademark mixture of arrogance and cluelessness. While most of the music on the www.homestarrunner.com site is put together by Matt and Mike Chapman using a variety of outdated Casio keyboards, for this album they collaborated with the band Y-O-U, who give the new recordings a bit more punch and polish without missing the comedic point (they also impersonate the fictive hair metal band Limozeen on two cuts, which are superbly accurate parodies of the form). And while some fans might have liked to hear more from Marzipan (who offers up a tribute to bees on this disc), Coach Z (who keeps it real by rapping "Coach Z's got money/But not much!/I could use a dollar/I could use a couple bucks!") or Homestar himself, as a first album from the www.homestarrunner.com crew, Strong Bad Sings captures the goofy charm and off-kilter humor that's the page's stock in trade. But you gotta wonder -- what happened to the Cheat's DJ set?