Homestar Runner is now on YouTube, so you need to rewatch the absurdity of Teen Girl Squad

In an age before algorithms or social media, Mike and Matt Chapman went viral the old-fashioned way: Uploading good stuff at a reliable pace so quotable that it rewired the brains of an entire generation. All of Homestar Runner’s bits, gags and inside jokes drew heavily on 1990s media – cartoons, video games, action films – but while the website’s flagship series was the Strong Bad Emails, I have a dark candidate for the best of HomestarRunner.com.

With Teen Girl Squad, the Chapmans set their sights on the wide world of Shows With Stuff Executives Think Girls Like, and it’s just about the tightest piece they’ve ever uploaded.

The conceit: the continuing adventures of the ambitious Cheerleader, the overachieving So and So, the boring What’s Her Face and the unpredictable The Ugly One – with each episode offering some sort of challenge (usually to get one or more boys). But the framing device of Teenage girl team was a comic strip created and narrated by Strong Bad, first as a challenge and then, it is implied, because he just enjoys making it.

This creates a “show” for teenage girls, as interpreted (or honestly perpetrated) by Strong Bad’s teenage boy-inspired capacity for violent doodles and a lack of artistic talent, a show in which several or all of the stars meet some kind of gruesome Looney Tunes death in every episode. You wouldn’t think this formula would address absolutely penetrating observations of the teenage years, and yet I still remember the age when I too cool for Nick at Nite but also considered WB shows the pinnacle of sophistication.

I also remember being a clumsy girl with pants and a shapeless top, which I dreamed about dating science fiction Gregor the equivalent D&D rule-quoting and only mildly misogynistic kid from the 2000s. Sure, sure, America Ferreras Barbie speech is good, but have you seen the episode where the Girl Squad tries to form a band and So and So suggests that they call themselves “Smart beautiful”?

Modern children may have had that Riverdalebut I had my own absurdist teen media pastiche, which is still available to this day in bite-sized YouTube segments. It also gave us the sentence: “Removing the vowels from words doesn’t always make them cool.” If that isn’t the best internet insider information, I don’t know what is.