Homestar Runner

Homestar Runner is one of the most brilliant flash animation sites to be spawned in the wild, overgrown creativity fields of the internet. It was originally a children's story idea by two very creative brothers from Atlanta, Mike and Matt Chapman, but it has grown far beyond its original scope to become its own little full-fledged universe with animated updates of some kind nearly every week.

The brilliance is truly centered on the characters. Each one is fully fleshed out and well-developed enough to host their own series on another site, but that doesn't stop the creators from using no less than a dozen of them regularly. You have your straight-man and resident idiot/athlete, Homestar Runner; your arch-rival and doer of no good, Strong Bad; your intelligent hippie and girlfriend of Homestar, Marzipan; your evil sidekick and small furry thing, the Cheat; and the list goes on and on. My personal favorite is a man in an orange shirt named Bubs who is a con-man capitalist to the core. He runs a local convenience store and is always trying to sell the locals' stuff back to them at inflated prices.

A big part of the site is a regular segment called Strong Bad Emails, where Strong Bad answers an email from the week in a humorous fashion. They almost always involve some clever animation and music to illustrate some side adventure that is spawned from the text the email. The most famous example is a music video about a dragon, Trogdor, that terrorizes a medieval town which was spawned from a request to Strong Bad to show how good of an artist he is.

I'm sure most of have run across this gem of a site at one point or another, but if you haven't ever been there, you should. These guys were good enough to turn down deals with both Cartoon Network and Comedy Central to keep complete control of their animation for their site.