About

Trogdor, also known as Trogdor the Burninator, is a character from the popular web cartoon Homestar Runner. He is described as being a dragon with a very muscular arm and the ability to "burninate" peasants. Fans of the show often photoshop him into memes or remix his theme song.

Origin

Trogdor first appeared in episode 58 of the "Strong Bad e-mail" show on the Homestar Runner website.^[1] Originally airing on January 13th, 2003, the episode^[2] showed Strong Bad demonstrating how to draw a dragon. After an initial failed attempt, Strong Bad managed to create a dragon he was very pleased with, which became Trogdor (shown below).

At the end of the episode (starting at 2:32 in the video below), a heavy metal-style music video about Trogdor plays. The episode was later posted on YouTube on March 31st, 2009, and has since received over 3.2 million views and 39,000 likes in 12 years. Following the premiere of the episode^[3], Trogdor became an inside joke among fans.

Spread

Trogdor has been photoshopped into numerous images, with initial examples often themed around destruction and "burnination" caused by Trogdor. An early example of this can be found on the Geekologie website^[4] on February 11th, 2009, with many different variations of the Obama Hope Poster being uploaded, including the Trogdor variant (shown below).

However, one type of meme about Trogdor is to create a more stylized and high-quality representation of him and use that, as seen in the example below from Elite MRP (original author unknown).

Also popular among fans was the Trogdor theme song, with the below video "TROGDOR TRIBUTE" being uploaded to YouTube^[5] on April 15th, 2007, accumulating over 563,000 views and 2,600 likes in 14 years (seen below).

The song continued to grow in meme usage to the point where it was included in the 2006 video game Guitar Hero 2 (example shown below).

The creators of Homestar Runner and Strong Bad recognized Trogdor's popularity and created two Trogdor-themed games^[6], with Trogdor!! The Boardgame being released on October 1st, 2019 (seen below).

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References