April Fools' 2006

Which way is up again?

On April Fools' Day 2006, homestarrunner.com was flipped upside down.

Fun Facts

Remarks

• The following pages/sites were exempt from the flipping because they are hosted separately from the main Homestar Runner content or are not Flash files:
  • Strong Bad's Website
  • Store and Store Thank You Messages
  • Legal
  • Strong Sad's Lament
  • Stinkoman 20X6
    • Note that if one tries to flip Stinkoman 20X6, the "no Flash 7" warning appears.
  • Podstar Runner
  • All the stuff in Museum
• Seek bars did not work with the flipped toons.
• Amusingly, this made Homsar's character video right-side up, as well as Main Page 8.
• This was the first April Fools' Day prank that is not available directly through the site, as the two before it (Under Construction and HomestarRunner.com: PAY PLUS!) were archived in the Holiday section of the TV Time Toons Menu, and the King of Town-themed pranks became an Easter egg in The King of Town DVD.
• Unlike the pranks before it, this affected the entire Homestar Runner website. In previous pranks, the Index Page was replaced, but most content was unaffected.

Glitches

• Several toons that are not the usual 550x400 resolution were not centered properly:
  • virus
    • This email also suffered from the fact that its custom navbar was missing, so Homestar pulled his words from nowhere.
  • Sbemail 100 Fakeout
  • Handheld Games Menu
  • flashback and Main Page 22 were both correct, as they used their own flipper .swf files, which handled the different size.
• Some pages had invisible or missing text:
  • Under Construction
  • Main Page 18 (No HTML text in the "Store" effect.)
• In high school, the "m." on Young Strong Mad's shirt was missing.
• TROGDOR! didn't load up properly - the game itself took up only the bottom right quarter of the usual frame, and the rest was filled in with gray.
• Many buttons and other scripts on some of the site did not work, as they use the _root property in ActionScript to access the main scene of the Flash file. However, with the flipper file loading the main scene, _root actually referred to the flipper, not the scene itself. The Brothers Chaps could have gotten around this by using the _lockroot property in the flipper, but it seems they didn't know about it (probably because they used Flash 5 at the time, in which the _lockroot property doesn't exist).
  • The Eject button on the Characters page (which normally makes Homsar's video come out of the VCR) did nothing.
  • Some Easter eggs did not appear, such as the Old-Timey Easter egg in little animal, and Edgar's Baby's Daddy in candy product.
  • In interview, you could not change the pictures on the sticky notes or play with The Cheat's lightswitch.
  • In Duck Pond, the hand never moved when it threw bread, and the ducks never ate what was thrown.
  • The video clips in HomestarRunner.com: PAY PLUS! repeated themselves automatically.
  • The rando link on the navbar did not work.
  • The King of Town DVD, King of Town Main Page and anything linked from there looped at the end instead of stopping.
    • Additionally, Revenge of the King seems to have had a similar fate to TROGDOR! (with the broken screen), except you could not hurt The King of Town, nor did he shoot at you. The timer also didn't work.
  • On the Decemberween Email Menu, none of the Easter eggs worked.
  • The buttons on Downloads didn't work.
  • The Telebision Toons Menu didn't work.
  • On any Strong Bad Emails featuring the Tandy 400 or the Compy 386, the contrast buttons didn't work. This includes the Easter eggs in gimmicks. The ripples on the Lappy 486 appeared and disappeared much faster than normal, and did not stay if the mouse button was held down.
  • In any of the Strong Bad's Message Bored games, none of them worked right. There was no possible way to score on any of them.
  • In First Time Here?, the number of takes never changed; the clapperboard always read "Roll 1, Scene 1, Take 1".
  • The Peasant's Quest Movie Trailers never loaded.
  • The number of messages on Marzipan's Answering Machine never changed.
• In Peasant's Quest, Trogdor's voice didn't work.
  • When the Kerrek is encountered, his tune did not play.
  • Trying to kill Poor Gary proved unsuccessful.
• It seems that the text in the Quote of the Week wasn't bold, like before the 'flip'.
• Nothing in the Handheld Games Menu (except for Homestar Quiz), including itself, was fully playable.
  • None of the buttons in the actual menu worked (except for "new games").
  • None of the buttons in Dancin' Bubs worked.
  • Homestar Talker did not lay out stars for each correct word, and never progressed to the Strong Bad Talker.
  • Nothing but the bongos in Audition with Marzipan were playable.
  • Bronco Trolleys was broken; you could click the "Play" button, but the timer didn't work and the ingredients were missing.
  • Neither the text boxes nor the finished libs worked in Strong Libs.
  • Hairstyle Runner was playable, but many things were not visible because the top frame was off-center.
  • The fortune cookies in Fortune Cookies did not work.
• Awexome Cross 98: When the player lost all their lives, the game froze and The Cheat was seen spinning in the tire, but the background stayed still.
• The Storyboards and Deleted Scenes in In Search of the Yello Dello did not work.
• When the pages were fixed early on the morning of April 2nd, the Main Page Navigation Bar fix was not initially repaired, leaving the main page right-side up, but the News button and Main Page numbers flipped.
• The musical t-shirts from the Store were put in a upside down box at the bottom of the page with its light blue background as a border.
• In A Jorb Well Done, the sky is darker than usual.

Fixed Glitches

Main Page 16: Looking into the past?

• Originally, the "What's new" button on the main pages did not appear in the correct location and was right-side up. This was fixed shortly after the "feature's" release.
• The Strong Bad Email menu originally did not list any emails. This was also fixed.
• The Weeklies popups originally appeared right-side up, but were later fixed so that they would appear flipped like the rest of the site.
• Many of the rollover button effects on the Main Pages didn't work. In most cases, the speaker simply said the name of the button that is hovered over (without moving his lips) and no visual effects or other sounds would occur. This was later fixed.
• On Main Page 22, the word "games" was not there. This was fixed later in the day.
• After the orientation reset on April 2, Main Page 16 had a copyright date of 2001 overlaying the regular copyright notice. Homestar's scarf was missing, as were some trees in the background, suggesting that certain elements of the main page were from an older version. Homestar would still speak as normal, but no triggered animations would happen other than mouth movements and a visible wisp of Homestar's breath.

Real-World References

• The Flash file that causes the pages to be flipped contains the phrase "They call him Flipper", a lyric from the Flipper theme song.

External Links

• view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped opening page
  • This is an example... everything other than the exceptions below used this style of URL. You used to be able to replace the part after contentURL= with the Flash file of the toon you want to flip. However, after an unspecified date, this feature was taken off the website.
• Several toons with different sizes had their own Flash file to compensate:
  • view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped Toons Menu
  • view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped Games Menu
  • view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped HomestarRunner.com: PAY PLUS!
  • view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped Main Page 22
  • view an archive of the Flash file for the flipped flashback
• forum thread re: April Fools' 2006