2004 / Video / Flash music-video absurdism
Experimental Film
Strong Sad and The Cheat made an artsy music video, then treated its collapsing film grammar like a very serious production problem.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
Strong Sad supplies moody black-and-white “experimental” footage while The Cheat adds frantic doodles, faces, and visual interruptions. Their incompatible visions increasingly overlap until the whole video becomes the ridiculous art film Strong Sad had been trying to explain.
Where it came from
They Might Be Giants and Homestar Runner’s Brothers Chaps released the Flash music video for “Experimental Film” on HomestarRunner.com on July 13, 2004, the release date of TMBG’s album The Spine.
Why it mattered
Experimental Film is a compact early-web comedy crossover: the Brothers Chaps turned a song about self-important art into a visual joke about competing creative impulses, while retaining the handmade, character-first logic that made Homestar Runner travel by link and recommendation.
How it spread
The collaboration put a web-native cartoon cast inside a band’s official release, giving Homestar Runner fans a new shared short to quote and revisit while demonstrating that an independent Flash site could host a polished music-video premiere.
Keep going
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