2002 / Video / Flash music-video parody
The Cheat Theme Song
A yellow blob got a theme song, learned Flash, and accidentally launched Homestar Runner’s fakely homemade-animation wing.
The original is off-site. HAHrchives preserves the story and a route back to it.
What happened
The Cheat directs a tiny music video explaining who he is, who he is not, and why a character with no visible legs apparently has yellow feet. Its one-line drawings, strange cutaways, and Strong Bad’s immediate review make the low-fi format part of the joke.
Where it came from
The Brothers Chaps released The Cheat Theme Song on HomestarRunner.com on February 25, 2002. Set to a song by The Skate Party, the 1:20 short became the debut of the site’s deliberately crude “Powered by The Cheat” Flash style.
Why it mattered
The Cheat Theme Song is an early-web comedy artifact about making something cheaply and weirdly on purpose. Rather than hiding Flash’s limits, Homestar Runner turned jagged drawings and tiny-file energy into a recurring joke—and gave its site another reason to revisit.
How it spread
It lived inside the creator-run Homestar Runner site, where visitors encountered it alongside cartoons, games, and Strong Bad Emails. The short established a reusable in-universe format that the site returned to for later deliberately bad Flash cartoons.
Keep going
The same corner of the internet
An armless athlete, a masked bully, and a pile of non sequiturs turned one Flash site into an early-web comedy universe.
A masked wrestler checked email on a fake computer and accidentally built one of the web’s great comedy universes.
A drawing lesson went wrong, grew one beefy arm, and somehow turned “thatched-roof cottages” into a battle cry.
Strong Sad and The Cheat made an artsy music video, then treated its collapsing film grammar like a very serious production problem.