Random Toon

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'Round and 'round it goes...where it stops nobody knows...

Contents

Random Toon Button

The Random Toon Button was added to the main pages alongside Quote of the Week, Weekly Fanstuff, and Sketchbook on September 12, 2005 and can be accessed by clicking the button labeled R. It loads a random Toon, Strong Bad Email, Marzipan's Answering Machine, or Teen Girl Squad. If you don't like the selection it comes up with, you can press the "again" button on the left side of the box before you are redirected, which will restart the selection process. You can also press the "close" button on the right of the box to abort the selection.

random.bat

A similar button was also added to the top right of the Strong Bad Email menu on September 12, 2005, along with a Scroll Button Song referencing it. It is labeled "random.bat" and appears in the top-right corner of the computer screen. Pressing it causes the menu to select several random emails in sequence. When it is done, it loads the last random email it picked. Strong Bad says one of several things when it's activated:

  • STRONG BAD: Brrrrrrakatakatakataka...ta..ka...tick...tick... Brring!
  • STRONG BAD: {higher pitched and louder} Lakalakalakalaka... tuck... tuck... tuck... tuck... {low pitched} Bong.
  • STRONG BAD: How 'bout this one? Donk. {a random email is then picked without a roulette of emails}
  • STRONG BAD: Broooodagadagadaga..da..ga..da...ga... Doosh.

Navigation Bar

The random toon button was also added to the navigation bar at the bottom of every page. It reads "rando". It doesn't show the roulette box, simply jumping straight to another toon. Thus far, this has not been added to the special navbars of Main Page 22 or virus, since the navbar is part of the .swf. On most of the toons, they use main_nav.swf.

Fun Facts

Trivia

  • Some of the names of toons were too long for the Main Page random box, leaving the last few letters cut off. They were soon renamed to fit.
Old Title (Letters Left Out) Solution
Homestar Presents: Present(s) H*R Presents: Presents
HomestarRunner.com: PAY PL(US!) HomestarRunner.com: PAY+
In Search of the Yello Dell(o) Yello Dello
Peasant's Quest Movie Trail(er) Peasant's Quest Trailer
Puppet Jam: Bad Jokes (none) Bad Jokes (renamed for consistency)
Puppet Jam: Mission Control (none) Mission Control (renamed for consistency)
Puppet Jam: Tropical Lazor (Beams) Tropical Lazor Beams
Puppet Jam: Vitamins/Celebr(ities) Vitamins/Celebrities
Strong Bad is in Jail Cartoo(n) Strong Bad is in Jail
Sweet Cuppin Cakes December(ween) Sweet Cuppin Cakes Dween
Teen Girl Squad Decemberwe(en) Teen Girl Squad Dween
The House That Gave Sucky T(reats) House ... Sucky Treats
  • The Random toon button also resulted in The Brothers Chaps formatting all the puppet stuff to html format.

Remarks

  • When the rando link in the navigation bar loads a Puppet Stuff, it is placed on a light blue background. This is because a Puppet Stuff is layered over another page, but the rando link doesn't work with this. The Random Toon button on the Main Pages does allow an external Flash link to be layered over them, so a Puppet Stuff is layered over them.
  • ".bat" is the filename extension for batch files, which are text files with a series of commands intended to be executed by the MS-DOS or Windows command interpreters.
  • While "random.bat" is running, you can still click on the names of the various Strong Bad Emails as they flash on the screen.
  • Shortly after being released, a number of minor changes were made to the randomizer. The following issues were resolved:
    • Decemberween Puppet Style and Homestar vs. Little Girl (the two Decemberween In July puppet toons) were not originally included in the random list. There was just a comment in the XML file reading "<!--note to add puppet dween!-->", reminding The Brothers Chaps to add them.
    • Labor Dabor didn't originally work, as the urls for the html and swf files were reversed in the XML.
    • If you clicked the R button on the main page more than once (either after closing the randomizer box or while it was up), and it picked a Strong Bad Email, the email number in the URL would be larger than the correct number by the number of Strong Bad Emails (it would redirect you to something like sbemail405.html). This was because it kept a counter of the emails as it read the email names from the XML file, and when you clicked the R again it re-read the list without resetting the counter.
      • flashback was immune to this problem, as it has a different URL from the others (to distinguish it from Not the 100th Email!!!, which itself is not in the XML list)
    • The Random Toon machine didn't have the "&" or "_" symbols embedded, so lures & jigs was shown as "SBEMAIL: LURES  JIGS" and sb_email 22 was displayed as "SBEMAIL: SBEMAIL 22".
  • Often the new toons are delayed being added to the XML list, and therefore will not yet be selected randomly. Currently, these are:
  • In the XML code, the newest email has the code: new="yup" after it.

Goofs

Fixed Goofs

  • On Monday, January 9, 2006, when the Scroll Button Rap was updated, a new bug was introduced to random.bat: the screen would not automatically scroll to the e-mails as they are selected by the roulette. This was later fixed.
  • Strongest Man in the World used to appear as "Strongest Man in the Worldk" in the randomizer. This has since been fixed.
  • The Next Epi-Snowed was originally listed in the XML file as ccd06.html instead of ccdo6.html. This was later fixed.

Inside References

Real-World References

External Links

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