Trogdor the Burninator

Origin: Strong Bad Email #58¶

Trogdor was invented on camera. In “dragon,” the 58th Strong Bad Email on the Homestar Runner website, posted on January 13, 2003, Strong Bad answers a request to draw a dragon and narrates his own process. His first attempt is a failure. His second becomes canon.

He starts with an S, adds a “beefy arm” on the assumption that all dragons need one, tops the body with a row of “consummate V’s” for spines, and finishes with majesty. The result is a lopsided, badly proportioned dragon with a single muscular human arm sticking out of its side — a drawing that is funny precisely because it is exactly what a confident amateur produces. Strong Bad then performs a heavy-metal ballad about the creature burninating the countryside, the peasants and the thatched-roof cottages.

Why he escaped the site¶

Most web-cartoon gags stay inside their cartoon. Trogdor did not, for three reasons: the drawing is trivially reproducible (anyone can draw an S and a beefy arm), the song is genuinely catchy, and “burninating” is a coinage that fills a gap the language did not know it had. Within months the dragon was appearing in margins of school notebooks, on whiteboards, and in forum signatures with no reference to Homestar Runner attached.

An extended version of the song was released on the site’s music CD, and a TROGDOR! arcade-style minigame — the dragon burninating cottages while dodging knights and archers — became one of the most-played features on homestarrunner.com.

Meaning and usage¶

Trogdor is quoted whenever something rampages with gleeful abandon. “Burninating the countryside” is the standard tag for indiscriminate destruction, applied to sports blowouts, patch notes, code deployments that take down production, and anything else that scorches everything in reach. The character functions less as a punchline than as a mascot — a shared reference that identifies the user as having been online during a particular era.

Milestones¶

• 2006 — the Trogdor song appears as a track in Guitar Hero II, putting the dragon in front of a mainstream console audience.
• 2007 — Limozeen’s “Because, It’s Midnite,” another Homestar Runner original, turns up in Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
• April 15, 2007 — a fan “TROGDOR TRIBUTE” video reportedly passes 563,000 views.
• July 17 to August 15, 2018 — a Kickstarter for Trogdor!! The Board Game, co-designed with James Ernest, blows past its $75,000 goal within hours and closes at $1,421,903 from 23,338 backers.
• October 1, 2019 — the board game ships.
• 2022 — the “Majicks & ‘Mergencies Expando Deck” expansion follows.

Legacy¶

A fifteen-year gap between a Flash cartoon and a $1.4 million crowdfunding campaign for a board game about the same joke is an unusual measure of staying power. Trogdor outlived the plugin he was animated in, the site’s own hiatus, and most of his contemporaries, surviving through fan art, tattoos, cover versions and a merchandise line that helped fund Homestar Runner itself. He belongs to the same early-2000s cohort as All Your Base and Badger Badger Badger, and he is the one that turned into a product line.