TechStuff Interview - 16 Feb 2018

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"An Interview with the Creators of Homestar Runner" is an episode of the TechStuff podcast. Host Jonathan Strickland interviewed the Brothers Chaps to discuss the history of Homestar Runner, Flash, Two More Eggs, and more.

Date: February 16, 2018

Running Time: 1:02:12

[edit] Description

The creators of Homestar Runner hop on TechStuff to talk about their pioneering work in web series production and how StrongBad is going to catch up on that huge email backlog.

[edit] Transcript

Warning: Language that may be considered offensive by some readers follows. To view a censored version of this page, see TechStuff Interview - 16 Feb 2018 (censored).

[edit] Introduction

JONATHAN STRICKLAND: Hey there and welcome to TechStuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, executive producer. I love all things tech, and today I've got a real special treat for you guys. Or at least it was a special treat for me. I got to talk with the creators of Homestar Runner. It's a Flash-based web cartoon... uh, network, really, when you think about it — it's not just a series, er, lots of different little offshoots that came out of it — that premiered in the late 90s, early 2000s, and anyone who was around on the internet in those days probably has at least encountered some sort of reference to the Homestar Runner universe. And Mike and Matt Chapman, the Brothers Chaps came into the studio and we got to talk a lot about how they got into this, and how it evolved over time, and where it's going in the future. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this interview with the Brothers Chaps.

{pause as program switches}

[edit] History of Homestar Runner

JONATHAN: I am overjoyed to be joined in the studio by Matt and Mike Chapman — also known as the Brothers Chaps — the creators of Homestar Runner, as well as many other projects. And it's a bit of a fanning out, geek out moment for me. I've been a fan of Homestar Runner since before I was working at HowStuffWorks. And, really, it's great to have two people here who... their work preceded the age of YouTube web series, because YouTube didn't exist when you guys launched Homestar Runner, and anyone who has been on the internet for any length of time has at least encountered Homestar Runner references, if they're not deeply familiar with the incredible lore and mythology... the deep legends of Homestar Runner that have found their way into all sorts of other mythos. I mean, you're part of the Buffyverse, guys.

MATT CHAPMAN: Yeah, that was a cool one. Now, somehow we're responsible for the doge meme, even though we didn't really have anything to do with that.

{Mike laughs}

JONATHAN: Yeah. Well, and you have an incredible couple of bonus tracks on Guitar Hero II, which have confounded me on numerous occasions. So, I mean, your— the influence just keeps on going. But for people who have never seen a Homestar Runner cartoon, they're not familiar with it... I can't wait to hear your—

MIKE CHAPMAN: Don't bother at this point.

JONATHAN: You missed the boat! Sorry, guys, just go.... Go to knowyourmeme.com and you'll find stuff. No, I want to hear from you guys because I'm really curious to hear your elevator pitch for what is Homestar Runner?

MATT: Homestar Runner...

MIKE: I like the... Matt's furrowed brow right now, as he struggles with this.

MATT: {haltingly} ...is a series of animated shorts following the exploits of non-humanoid, ageless... uh, organisms {all laugh} that have, that interact with one another in meaningful and humorous ways to the delight of... several.

{All laugh}

JONATHAN: Of literally dozens of people.

MIKE: That's the elevator pitch, and that's why we just did this ourselves. And never had any... success.

JONATHAN: I mean, I'm starting to get a glean of the marketing brilliance that has been part of Homestar Runner since the very beginning. So, I know you guys have talked about this in other interviews, but I would love it if you could kind of walk people through the origin of where this all came from. Because it all— I mean, I know it's kind of a mishmash story, because Homestar Runner itself ends up being a reference to... a weird joke that kind of came up of a local Atlanta ad spot, right?

MIKE: Yeah. So our friend Jamey Huggins was mimicking a Kroger or Winn-Dixie ad that Mark Lemke was on, in probably 1994 or something. Jamey doesn't know a lot about sports, so instead of saying "All-Star second baseman for the Braves, Mark Lemke!", he was trying to parody this commercial and said "and now, Home Star Runner for the Braves, Mark Lemke!" And I was like, "Jamey, what is a 'Homestar Runner'?" And so then a couple of years later, we kept using that phrase and decided to use it as the, you know, the name of a character. When we were bored one day and made a story involving Homestar Runner.

JONATHAN: This is great because, you know, it's the sort of thing— I think it's an inspirational story, honestly. Because, I know... I've got lots of friends, and we goof off and we make, you know, you make a joke, and every now and then a joke is just... it's sticky. And it's something that, for some reason, resonates beyond just the moment of making an offhand, absurd reference. And then it kind of snowballs from there and it can grow. And to me, that's sort of what Homestar Runner sounds like. It was something that began as just sort of this one-off little goof, but it ended up inspiring a huge number of shorts! So after the little joking about a local ad spot— and by the way, if you ever really need to mine for comedy gold, you just have to find some great local Atlanta commercials. {Chaps laugh} I've seen so many amazing ones, including people I know have showed up in them, like Chris Blair of Dad's Garage...! A character. But you guys then went on and started looking at things like children's books, and seeing how terrible children's books can be, and thought, "we can do a terrible children's book!" And Homestar Runner had a spot in that. But beyond that, we get into the late 90s, early 2000s... and the World Wide Web was really just starting to get some really serious traction at that point, right? We're seeing kind of the end phase of what people later on would call the "Web 1.0" era, where everything was very static. Nothing was interactive. You would probably have a web page and it wouldn't change from one month to the next, so there's no reason to ever go back. You go once, and that's it.

MATT: You made a new web page! You didn't update your web page, it was: here's my new web page.

JONATHAN: Right.

MATT: Just got a new URL and you started something else.

April Fools' gag Under Construction parodied many clichés of early web design.

JONATHAN: And you would have to have the little "under construction" picture here at the very top, right? Because it's never finished, except for the fact that it's always kind of finished. So you got interested in Flash animation and Flash in general. And this is interesting to me because it gave an opportunity to have a more dynamic experience on the web, something that was totally new at that time. Today, we take it for granted. You know, every website is dynamic in some way or another, or it has some sort of dynamic element worked into it. But at that time it was pretty new. And the concept of creating episodic content, that you could very easily see the next episode, that was new as well. There weren't a whole lot of examples of that before you get into, say, the mid-2000s when stuff like YouTube started to show up. So, from what I understand, is it true that essentially the reason why Homestar Runner exists as a cartoon is that it was kind of a way to practice with Flash? Like you were— you needed to animate something, so why not use this character you had created?

MIKE: Yeah, we were really learning web development stuff, like that's why we were learning Flash and graphic design and stuff like that, was for job-type stuff. And we just used the Homestar characters as, like, how are we going to learn this new software Flash?

MATT: Well, and more so than "we need to animate something" it was like "we need to make something." I mean, I had graduated from film school and moved back to Atlanta from Tallahassee, Florida and, you know, they weren't shooting Avengers movies in 1998 or whenever that would have been. They weren't really shooting much of anything! Other than fantastic local Winn-Dixie commercials. {others laugh} And so I, you know, there wasn't a whole lot to do, and like, there was— You were not ever going to try and put video on the web at that point, like lots of people still had dial-up modems... It was just not something that you could afford the bandwidth for either. So, I mean, we just wanted to make stuff. Mike moved back from— he dropped out of grad school and moved back, and any time we've been together, from when we were kids, we've made stuff together. And so we were like, "all right, well, what are we making?" And Flash was a way that was like: oh, wait, we don't need a budget. We don't need a crew. We don't need to go rent a camera. We don't need film stock or whatever. We can start making content. And so it was like, all right, well, I guess we're going to learn how to animate, because— And we had done stop motion stuff when we were kids and we were fans of animation, obviously.

The first Homestar Runner animation was created in Mario Paint.

MIKE: Mario Paint.

MATT: Yeah, exactly. Mario Paint for the Super Nintendo. But we never— that wasn't what either of us were schooled in. We were always artists and creators of something, but never specifically animation. So we didn't look at it initially as like, "oh, we can't wait to start animating!" It was more like, "This is a way to tell stories, so what is the best thing we have for that medium?" And it was like, "Oh, what if we turn that Homestar Runner character and his friends into a cartoon?" And so that was kind of what it was born out of. And the same reason that we would, you know, leave each other dumb... answering machine messages, voicemail messages, where it was like, "Oh, wait, here's some content! I have a medium to produce something on: it's the 30 seconds before the beep happens! Here, Mike, here's my little narrative I'm going to give you, when I'm asking you if you remembered to get some High Life at the Publix or whatever." So anyway, so Flash was kind of the next one of those, you know, it was the next one.

MIKE: Yeah, you know, Flash was also easy. I mean, it was easy enough for people that weren't animators to, you know, stumble their way through and produce something that was halfway decent.

MATT: Yeah. So two guys in their apartment with, like, a couple of keyboards could make something that sounded, you know, 75% as good as the— at that time, there were these studios making Flash things that had, like, you'd watch the credits of a 30-second Flash cartoon and it had like 30 people involved. One for each second of the cartoon, I guess.

JONATHAN: Right, right. And this is so interesting to me because it parallels so nicely with the rise of computer games. I did an episode recently about Sierra games, which I know you guys love.

MATT: Oh, yeah!

JONATHAN: I got to talk to Ken Williams.

{Brothers Chaps react with appreciation}

JONATHAN: He actually came on, he tried to get Roberta on...

MIKE: I was going to say, not Roberta?

JONATHAN: No, he tried to, but she was busy trying to figure out how to work their cable box. So... {all laugh} Yeah, no, all of that is actually in the episode, too, so it's great. And I was very thankful for him to participate, but it was so interesting because the whole reason why Sierra Games got started was that he was programming. Roberta had started to encounter games, and a lot of those games were being written by people who were teaching themselves how to code. So games were great because it was something that had structure. Right? You had an idea, you then had to learn how to bring that idea to fruition... And so the game was really the tool they were using in order to educate themselves on how to code, and then eventually a whole industry kind of grew out of that. And it's very similar to what you guys are saying, like, necessity is the mother of invention. You had this tool there. You needed to learn how to use the tool. You had certain limitations placed on you, but those limitations ended up just shaping the direction, didn't hold you back necessarily. And, in fact, I could argue that without those limitations, you could end up being paralyzed by choice, right? You have so many options open to you, you don't even know what to tackle next.

MIKE: That's why Homestar cartoons are still 550 by 400, because that was the default in Flash, and still animated at 12 frames a second. Those limitations are still... 17 years later!

JONATHAN: Wow. Yeah. And it's interesting now because we're in an era, the sort of the post-Flash era as well, where we're starting to see Flash being, you know, pushed further and further away. There's not really any development on that. And I know that has posed something of a challenge for Homestar Runner as well, because, you know, that whole archive, it's all in Flash. So I'm sure there's the... some of it has been ported over to YouTube, obviously...

MIKE: Yeah.

JONATHAN: ...Which is great because, you know, that's a fantastic way for people to find it. Although, I think you guys ended up following a strategy that I've heard several creators say is incredibly important — for you, it was necessary — which was that you created your own space where stuff would go and live, in that... Homestar Runner's own domain. Burnie Burns of Rooster Teeth has talked about the same thing: that you need to have a space that's your own, because if you start depending upon someone else's platform and that platform changes, you're at their mercy. So you were actually ahead of the game, but only— really, because that was that was the only way you were gonna go forward!

MIKE: There wasn't any other option!

JONATHAN: Yeah. Like, pioneers because "what else was there to do?". But it ended up being, again, like that inspired Burnie Burns over at Rooster Teeth to do the same sort of thing. He knew he didn't want to put everything just on another platform — like, at that time it would have been MySpace or YouTube. So it's something that has since gone on to inspire others. So... you go in, and you start making this cartoon, and you're having a good time. At what point during the process did you start to feel like this was going to be something bigger than just a fun project to do occasionally and become something a little more serious than that?

MIKE: So we're... what, early 2000s here? We've been doing it for a couple of years, maybe? 2000, 2001 was sort of when we were just... that was the sort of early years. And I think it was sometime in 2001 when we started doing Strong Bad Emails every...

MATT: Yeah.

MIKE: Every week, yeah. I think that was a turning point. And it certainly didn't feel like it at the time. But I think looking back, having... giving the fans something to look forward to every week and knowing, "okay, I'm going to check back on Monday morning, I'm going to check back on Monday morning..." That sort of snowballed into, sort of where we... I don't know.

MATT: Yeah, and then we think of the point where we realized, like, "oh, wait, I think lots of people are watching this" — more than maybe we thought — was when... For the first couple of years, we were just on a Yahoo shared hosting account that was supposed to be, like, 30 bucks a month and you got five gigs of bandwidth or something. And — I don't know how many cartoons would have been on the website at that point, but — I remember printing out this thing, and I think we got kind of a tip-off, right? From somebody at Yahoo that was just like, "hey, I'm a fan of what you guys are doing. You're going to have to find another solution." And he was like, "I've been looking the other way for a while now." And so I get onto our account and download the, you know, bandwidth chart thing. And we'd done like 13 terabytes of transfer or something?

JONATHAN: Wow!

MATT: On our thirty...er, five gigs, or whatever. We always just pictured this server in the back of some Yahoo data center, like smoking, sparking in the back.

The System is Down was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of actual site downtime.

MIKE: Yeah, that's when it... we got shut down at some point, right. That's when... "The System is Down." So the site was actually down for a day or two.

MATT: Yeah. But that was kind of when we were like, "oh, wow, okay!" You know, we'd gotten some emails from people, we knew that there were some— but we just sort of assumed it was like, "oh, these few people that know about Flash animation on the web have found our stuff, and that's awesome." We thought that was great. I think that was kind of the moment where we're like, "oh, wait, maybe this is something we could do, we could continue to do." Because at the time we still had regular day jobs.

JONATHAN: Sure.

MATT: And I think that was probably about the same time we decided to sell some merch, and then a year or so into that was when our dad, who was a CPA, basically told his two screw-up artist sons to quit their jobs. So he was like: "This is dumb. You quit your jobs and make these cartoons for a living, would ya?" Which is where we've always feel like is probably the best moment you could ask for from a father-son...

JONATHAN: Oh, yeah. When you get a retired public accountant saying, "Hey, guys, no... You know that that regular, steady gig you have?"

MATT: Yeah.

JONATHAN: "Quit it." What? That's amazing!

MATT: "Go make cartoons with your brother in the basement!"

JONATHAN: Good grief. That's like... yeah, dream-come-true moment right there!

{ad break}

[edit] Homestar Runner toons

JONATHAN: Tons and tons of shorts that you guys have made. Lots of wonderful characters, not to mention all the alternate versions of those characters.

MIKE: That was always the most fun, was to sort of worldbuild and do other... Yeah, I always enjoyed that.

JONATHAN: I love the Old-Timey ones.

MIKE: Good! I always like people that like those, that's my favorite too.

JONATHAN: Well, there's a...

MIKE: Sort of polarizing.

JONATHAN: It's— no! To me, it's just the level of absurdity coupled with the transatlantic accent {brothers laugh} is my favorite. There's a video that that we did here at HowStuffWorks about the transatlantic accent. They got me to be the one to do it and, I have to say, there's certain influences that went into the absolute nonsense that I was spouting off randomly at the end of the video, just to kind of give examples of transatlantic accent, and the Old-Timey Homestar Runner ones were way up there.

MATT: Nice!

JONATHAN: I was like, I know what I'm saying has no meaning, but it doesn't matter! And also it's just fun to do! Until somebody tells you to knock it off, and then it's actually fun to do for about another five minutes.

MATT: Yeah. You got to get past that point.

JONATHAN: Right? It's that thing where you tell a joke until it stops being funny, and you keep telling it and it gets funny again.

MATT: Volume and repetition. Get louder, too! {laughter} These are the two keys.

MIKE: I remember the, um, I always think of Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes in the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons. It's like, "wait, he's going to do it again?" It's happened so many times that it's like, "whoa, he did it one more time!"

{laughter}

JONATHAN: And it's— "I thought they were going to draw the line at nineteen," and then bam! Number twenty. Well, out of all that massive amount of stuff that you guys have done, are there any things that just stand out in particular in your minds as things, like, when you came up with it, or when you first animated it, it brought you guys just genuine joy? And whether or not it went on to have a life of its own afterward, I'm always interested to hear the kind of stuff that when someone writes it — and I know this gets self-indulgent, but — when you write it and you just think, "that's great, that's just a great little moment there," you know, even if even if you have to disassociate yourself with it a little bit. Is there anything like that stands out in your mind?

MIKE: For me — and it may be, I don't know if it's the same for Matt — you mentioned Sierra games, we did Peasant's Quest, which is a riff on King's Quest. It's sort of in the Trogdor universe. And to me, making that whole game was probably the most fun thing we ever did Homestar-related. Just, making the graphics for it, making the puzzles, do— I mean, just, and implement— being able to make a game that was not only... it wasn't a parody of those games, it was an homage to those games, and it was those games. You know... it was functional, it wasn't just a joke.

JONATHAN: Right, yeah.

MATT: I feel like when we made... There's a email, is it... 118? What's "virus"?

MIKE: 118 or 119. Yeah, 118, I think.

MATT: ...Strong Bad Email where he gets a computer virus, and all this kind of crazy stuff happens and it gets a little meta. And then it ends up with him getting a new computer in the next one, because he has to sacrifice his computer. But I remember that was one where we stayed up all night. We did, uh, is that another one where we messed with the frame, in Flash?

The Strong Bad Email virus memorably altered the typical framing used in toons.

MIKE: Yeah, he goes outside the frame, yeah.

MATT: So we resized the size of the movie, but the viewer wouldn't know because we still always had this black border around it. But then at some point in it, the border moves and so, like, kind of messes with your head, in the cartoon. And then we... there's a part where pop-up ads start showing up in the cartoon, and then we made a real pop-up ad, like we did some Act— like, I forget what it was, ActionScript made one happen in your browser too! So it was this, "broke the fourth wall," you know, outside of your normal computer realm. I just remember finishing that one up, like, I'm pretty sure we stayed up all night for that one. And then the next day, we went to... what, Steak n Shake? Was that where we'd always...?

MIKE: Yeah.

MATT: ...we'd, like, finish it up and be like, "yeah, that's good!" Just had a good feeling. And we didn't even, like, go look— because we tried not to be— We always want to know, stay in touch with the fans, but never, like, tried to... we didn't, like, dissect every comment or every — at the time, it would have been, like, a LiveJournal page or something! — like, there weren't just message boards or comment sections like there are now. But I think we didn't even look at anything. We were just like, "They're all going to love it. Everybody's going to love this one, and we love this one, and we had a really good time with it... Let's go get Steak n Shake." {Mike laughs} That was just, I don't know. That sort of moment where you're confident enough in yourself to be like, "I think we hit a home run here" and then you went back and it was like, "oh, I think people did like it."

MIKE: I remember always thinking along those lines when you would make a good one, it was like, "Okay, we did a good one. People liked it." And then my thinking was that, "okay, that just buys us three or four bad ones." {Jonathan laughs} Like, now they'll forgive three or four bad ones. Every good thing you do is like, okay, now we've got a little more currency to... mess up.

JONATHAN: Well, you know, that also brings me... there was a recent piece I read that was interesting. It was about people who are in the creative industry — they were specifically focusing on YouTubers, but to me it really could be anyone from Twitch streamers to podcasters to cartoonists, really any creative endeavor, especially a creative endeavor where you're trying to deliver consistent content on a schedule — that one of the dangers is always this fear of burnout. It's not just the idea of writer's block, which is something that we all deal with at one time or another, where you're just you're staring at the empty page and there's just nothing coming to you. But just that pressure of delivering, especially when you've built up a reputation of certain kind of material, was that ever anything that was threatening you guys while you were working on it?

MIKE: Yeah, I mean, it definitely made things, you know... Early on, we made cartoons because they were fun. And then, you know, there was definitely a period where Saturday, Sunday came around and we're like, "{sigh} no ideas for this Strong Bad Email, we have to make one..." And then you just kind of have to power through. Which is, it wasn't really that big of a deal, but— if it wasn't for the expectation that was there you wouldn't have done it, you know.

JONATHAN: Sure. It's tough! When you're trying, when your goal is to entertain someone and it feels like, you know, you're going to have to push through it, then that adds that extra layer, right?

MIKE: Yeah.

JONATHAN: Like, it's not just that I need to do it — I need to do it and make someone laugh! {mock sigh}

MIKE: Yes, and "I'm not having fun, I don't want to be doing this."

JONATHAN: Yeah.

MIKE: But, I mean, I think working in the way we worked, where most of the stuff we did we made in the 48 hours or so before it was, you know, thrown out into the world. We made most everything from Friday to Sunday.

JONATHAN: Wow.

MIKE: So it was a double-edged sword. I mean, sometimes it was terrib— probably the results were terrible, but other times you use that same energy and it's like, if you sit there for two weeks and overthink things, you're going to talk yourself out of something, some dumb idea that could have, you know... Trogdor, for instance, is probably something that, you think about it long enough it's like, "I don't know, maybe we can just... maybe he shouldn't have this beefy arm sticking out of his back," but when you've got fifteen minutes before you're going to put it live, it's like, "ah, let's just leave it in. Let's do it."

JONATHAN: {chuckles} It's a design choice at this point.

MATT: We also had the... I feel like we had the luxury of being able to do kind of whatever we wanted. And so even if there were those times where we were, like, out of ideas for a Strong Bad Email or something, that's when we'd be like, "well, let's do an Old-Timey...! What do we want to do? Let's do an Old-Timey cartoon this week. Let's do, uh..." You know, we invented an 80s hair metal band for the Homestar universe. We invented an indie rock band because that's kind of where we were in high school and college. And so it was just sort of like, "I just want to make an indie rock song this week." And so it was like, "All right, well, let's invent a band and put it in a cartoon." So it was kind of nice where we just have to stop thinking of, like, "we're delivering this formula to everybody." And then a lot— you know, especially if it wasn't in the form of a Strong Bad Email, I'm sure there were fans that were disappointed. But it was like, "all right, well, that's what you got to put up with" for, like, I didn't get burned out and hated the thing that you like that I do, because I got re-energized by taking a little flight of fancy or whatever and doing something kind of out of our normal wheelhouse, or whatever. And so I think that we would employ that a good bit to help stave off any sort of burnout... where it was just like, "all right, I should shut up... because not only do I get to make cartoons for a living, but, I got to blow off making cartoons and go make a Sierra game or make an 80s hair metal song this week," so.

JONATHAN: Well, yeah. And you guys also had stuff on the site that went beyond— like, the games are a good example. There were various interactive elements on the website, besides games and little sound boards and things like that. You had the live action Trogdor trailer, which is one of my favorites — partly because I know some of the people who were on there, so when I was watching I was like, "Ahh, Z!" Yeah, so fun. And that's the beauty of living in Atlanta. And you guys got to work with some great Atlanta talent. Which I imagine is just exploding at this point, because we've got so many things happening in Atlanta, I'm sure that opens up a lot of different opportunities as well, which is fantastic. But, I also want to thank you guys for this idea of being able to branch out and try different things and open up different universes, because I like to imagine that it was one of those weeks where we got blessed with Teen Girl Squad, which is probably my favorite of all of the variations that have come out. It's one my wife and I still quote consistently. So we're always happy whenever we get a Teen Girl Squad. So, you know, the popularity of Homestar grew and grew, and it's really interesting that you guys were, you know, you weren't really focused on the analytics. It's not like you were, you know, watching those counts. Like, there are people who are obsessed over that, whether it was back in the old web days where you had the little visitor counter...?

MATT: {laughs} Yeah.

JONATHAN: That would go up by one little digit, counter that would go up every time? Or, now it's obviously YouTube views and subscriptions, that kind of thing. It seems like that was never really something that you guys were terribly focused on or concerned with. You were just, you know, looking at the content and creating that.

MIKE: Yeah, and we didn't want— we sort of actively didn't look at that because we didn't want, you know, if we did something that we liked, that it maybe didn't get the views that something else, we didn't want that to affect, like, "okay... let's just make another Trogdor, or make another Stinkoman," or something. So we would actively sort of try to distance ourselves from knowing what was hitting and what wasn't, just so it wouldn't mess with the creative process.

MATT: Yeah, we talked to a couple of younger YouTube guys a few years ago. And they were talking about how they use the "live" thing. There's a live analytics thing on YouTube, like, you can upload your video and then right then it's showing you— it's just like any other, you know, Google Analytics thing where you can see who is watching it right now, and you know if they commented on it you know exactly who did what comment. But they're interacting with the comments and they like or they did the thumbs-down or whatever—

JONATHAN: Or the moment they stopped watching the video.

MATT: Yeah, yeah.

JONATHAN: {overlapping} The exact second...

MATT: And so he said it was like, he's immediately watching this focus group. But this is not— he's not testing this, this guy just made this thing and uploaded it to the world! And now he's having to watch this judgment happen, like, a user at a time.

JONATHAN: Wow.

MATT: And I was just like, "How can you do that?" He was like, "I know! It's terrifying! But I can't look away, and brave is part of the process." I'm happy that we didn't even— for a long time it was, this'll sound like a humblebrag or whatever, but we actually were doing crazy enough amounts of traffic that our— I don't know if was just that our web hosting guy was, like, lazy and didn't want to compile these logs so we could see the— because we occasionally would ask, we'd say "so can you give us our actual numbers and stuff, like, what are we doing?" And he'd always be like, "eh, it's going to take like a couple of days because it's all these, like, log files and it kind of, like, chokes on them..." So we just never had those numbers. I kind of feel fortunate that we didn't, because I think we could have obsessed over that stuff. And now it's carried into... even though we are, you know, we're putting stuff on YouTube now and have a Twitter account and stuff like that, but like, we just don't care.... Like, it kind of helped inform those decisions now, where I don't think we'll be affected by it, even though it seems like that is the way where if you're going to make money on this stuff, you need to, like get a million viewers, and you need to have ad revenue, and all that stuff. But it's kind of like, I'm glad that I'm not sweating that... it's not crushing if we put up a new cartoon and it doesn't hit well.

JONATHAN: Yeah. I mean, again, going back to the example of not putting all your eggs in one basket: with the YouTube example, we've just seen YouTube changed their policies that, in my mind, really hurt people who specialize in short-form content, because a lot of the metrics that they're using is the number of collective hours watched per given amount of time, like per month or whatever. And obviously, if you're producing short-form content, you need to have way more people watching your stuff to get that collective number of hours up. And it's not a comment on the quality of the content so much as just the quantity of it, which seems kind of backwards to me.

MIKE: Yeah, so now if you just— I didn't realize that's... I knew there was a change recently.

JONATHAN: Yeah, it was something along the lines of like... in order to even be considered for monetization at this point, your videos need to have achieved something like 4,000 hours worth of viewing time, which, obviously, if you're doing short-form, and even if you have an engaged, dedicated audience, you got to write a whole bunch of different episodes or instances in order to achieve that. Whereas if you are someone who, maybe you record a two-hour or a three-hour gaming session and you upload it and there's a proven audience for that content, because it's three hours and because a lot of those people will watch the entire three hours of material you rack those hours much more quickly.

MIKE: I mean, one 40,000-hour video and you're set!

JONATHAN: I know, right?

MIKE: Just watch it yourself!

JONATHAN: "Wow, I remember when that little black spot was an orange. And now here we are, and it's just desiccated into nothing." {all laugh} "This isn't good, but it's consistent!" {laughter continues} Yeah, it's... again, a great reason why going into any one platform is a bit of a danger, because you might end up having a policy change that you have no control over. And it's not that your stuff isn't great, or that it doesn't have an audience, it's just that because the rules changed above you, you suddenly have a door closed in your face. Which seems kind of unfair for anyone who's not a big-time content creator, one of the superstars. And obviously YouTube has gone through numerous changes over its history. I did a three-part series about YouTube recently, and really talked about how it's changed dramatically. So there's no guarantee that it's going to keep that policy. Maybe if there's enough resistance they'll change it again. But it's one that draws concern from people who, maybe they want to get a start, they have an idea and they want to indulge in that idea, and they hope that it brings delight to others. And maybe one day they can make a living out of it! But it's... not only is discovery difficult now, but when the rules change like that, it's difficult to even get to the point where you can start monetizing it. You guys, however, had monetized your stuff mostly through merchandise, and without advertising it! That was also interesting to me because... I own some Homestar Runner stuff, but it was the sort of thing that I went and searched for as opposed to, you know, watching a cartoon where halfway through it tells me, "hey, by the way, if you want a shirt that has that funny thing that Strong Bad just said, you need to click this link here!"

MATT: Yeah.

MIKE: Or even at the end where there wouldn't have really been obtrusive in any way. Our dad always wanted us to do that, and we were always too.. our street cred was...

JONATHAN: More important.

MIKE: Too valuable, yeah.

MATT: We kind of shot ourselves in the foot. We admit that now.

MIKE: Or amazed that people found the... because, it was almost like the store was this Easter egg that you had— if you really searched for a shirt, you could find it. But like, we were very reluctant to...

MATT: Well it's funny, in, like, 2001 or 2... we were approached by someone from Hot Topic. And this wasn't, like, they walked up to us with, like, a contract for "hey, we want to turn your characters into t-shirts and make millions of dollars." But they were starting a conversation that could have led to any different variation of that scenario. And we just wanted nothing to— you know, we didn't want to do it. We kind of pitched them, "oh, what if we did these other kind of weirder jokes from our website that weren't the characters..." Like, they want to do Teen Girl Squad shirts and this other stuff, and we ultimately said no. And I forget who I was talking to, but it was like a small — not like an audience I was talking to, but it was a... lot younger kids. And I said it thinking that, uh... I was like {confidently} "Yeah, then we got approached by Hot Topic...! and, you know, so of course we said no to that!" And then they all just stared at me like, "...why did you say no to that?" And I was like "'cause it was Hot Topic! Hot Topic came to us. That would have just, killed us instantly. Like, yeah, maybe a bunch of kids would have bought stuff, and whatever..." And they were like, "Yeah, and you would like, made a million dollars or something...?" like, "Well, I don't know that! And, and then I probably would have hated what I did after that!" And they're just like, "...that was a bad decision." {chuckles} We made a bad decision, and you should've put your stuff in Hot Topics.

JONATHAN: It's good to have life lessons, really...

MATT: Yeah.

JONATHAN: ...is what it comes down to.

MATT: But I don't know, I get to...

JONATHAN: I like to think that Homestar Runner is therefore responsible for the "shut up and take my money" meme. {All laugh} But, I mean, I appreciate that too, because, again, it was that sort of philosophy that... while it wasn't something that was being overtly stated, it was something that a lot of fans appreciated. And, you know, taking the effort to try and find a way of supporting was great because it was a show early on that, you know... I think a lot of stories about internet content focus on the negatives, like the idea of people who don't want to pay for content so they find workarounds so that they can get it for free.

MATT: Right.

JONATHAN: But the opposite is also true, where you'll find people who are encountering content that is seemingly being presented... there was no advertising, there was nothing where there was like a donate button or anything. It was like, there's a store and you could go there and you could purchase things. And they said, you know, I want to support the content creators that I love and the stuff I love, I want them to keep making the stuff because I'm enjoying it. And it tells you that there's really a place for that, too. And of course, now we see platforms like Patreon, that have come out to do more direct support of artists that have proven that point, that there are people who are willing to do that if you give them the opportunity.

MIKE: Right. We've had people tell us like, "Yeah, I bought ten Homestar Runner shirts. I never wear them. After the second one, I didn't need any more, but I did it to support you!"

MATT: Yeah, and now people will say, "I've purchased enough merch — it's not that I don't love you! but I don't need any more t-shirts. Can you please start a Patreon or something {Mike laughs} so I can give you some money every once in a while when I want to? I just don't need another Homestar shirt." And so that's good to hear that people are willing to do that.

JONATHAN: "Every kid at my local elementary school now has a Homestar Runner shirt."

MATT: Yeah, exactly.

MIKE: "The thrift store in my neighborhood is stocked full!"

JONATHAN: But that's a great story, because it tells you that what you have created has actually had a meaningful impact on people. And I know it sounds weird to call it a meaningful impact when you're talking about a world that has a character called the Poopsmith. But it's true! And it's great because it's... again, I think it illustrates that positive side of the internet. We will so quickly focus on that negative side, and it's good to have something you can point at and say, well, you know, look at this. It shows that if you have the structure in place, and if you have the right content in place, people flock to it and people want to support it. And you guys have have also — I know I mentioned you were incorporated into the Buffyverse in an episode — you had lots of references in various types of pop culture. What was that like seeing the thing that you had created start to get referenced by other pop culture icons? Everything from... and They Might Be Giants? Making music for you?

MIKE: Yeah, that one was pretty amazing because I was, we were huge hey Might Be Giants fans growing up, so when they emailed us that was pretty mind-blowing.

JONATHAN: Yeah.

Joss Whedon circa 2003, wearing a Strong Bad shirt in a promotional photo on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

MATT: And yeah, we heard from... the Buffy thing, I think, was somebody at Fox was like, "hey, don't sue us! Nobody here knows what you guys are, but don't— We put a Trogdor reference in this upcoming episode. Joss is a big fan." And they sent us their— or, no, was it in Entertainment Weekly? — There was some picture that they referenced, he had a Strong Bad shirt on set of something he was shooting. And so that was really cool. That was, at the time that was pretty mind blowing, just to know that "okay, so people outside of whatever weird world we thought we existed in, as far as fanbases go, people were finding that stuff." And we've since found out things like, a friend of ours worked with Damon Lindelof and said that he was like "Me and Joss Whedon would get in trouble, I was supposed to be writing Lost episodes and we'd be quoting Strong Bad to each other!" So I was like, "Holy crap! I was watching Lost when you were wasting time watching what I was making, that's amazing!" So that kind of stuff has been super cool. What was the show... There was that show The Magicians that's on now...? It was nice because it felt like a nice little bookend to the, like, Buffy thing, where I guess they reference Trogdor in, I think it's the season two finale or something. I still haven't even seen it, I just— people, everybody told me, or sent me little clips of it, or whatever. Which, um, it's always cool to see that stuff.

JONATHAN: Yeah. And then that actually led to other things like collaborations where you guys did the animations for a They Might Be Giants video, which is fantastic. And you've appeared on— Well...

MIKE: Yeah, we've done several collaborations with them.

Puppet Strong Bad appears live onstage at a 2006 They Might Be Giants concert.

JONATHAN: The characters have appeared on stage with They Might Be Giants, because I've been to some of those shows!

MIKE: Oh, nice!

JONATHAN: At the Variety Playhouse! And that was always a joy. To the point where you— I would imagine that was part of the inspiration for them to come up with their band, the "Them" band, the sock puppets.

MATT: The Avatars Of They?

JONATHAN: The Avatars Of They. Where they would... Wow. When I would see that come out, I was like, "this is mind-blowing that this is happening right now." And seeing Homestar and Strong Bad in-person is always a big thrill for me, despite... It's so weird to say that out loud to the people who actually made that, but it's absolutely true. So, you go through, you're doing the series. It's got some, not just fan support, but it's also blossoming in various areas of pop culture. We see "Trogdor" get into Guitar Hero II, which is still another amazing thing. When I found out that that was a bonus track, I was so thrilled. Immediately I was like, "This is my quest: to master 'Trogdor'." Ah, that solo, by the way: impossible.

"Trogdor" was included in Guitar Hero II because the Harmonix CEO was a fan of Homestar Runner.

MATT: Hey, you want to know something? This is— We didn't find this out until later, or I think we knew it but we didn't realize it, so... we played as Limozeen. The band that plays other ones...

JONATHAN: Yes.

MATT: ...live, we play with these guys that are in this band, Yacht Rock, and another band called Saved By The Band. They learned the song. Our friend that plays guitar for us, Chris Arrison, he learned the song and he... really knows his stuff as far as, like, squeedly wanky guitar parts — it's amazing. He can do the tapping, he can do all this stuff, and it's incredible. And so he learned "Trogdor". And then we came in to practice and he played it and he, like, nails that solo. And then one of the other guys was like, "you know, when we originally recorded that—" because he wasn't on that song, "—that's like, that's keyboard. That's like a keyboard."

MIKE: That's, like, a keyboard arpeggio thing, where it's just like, playing four notes, doing that.

MATT: Yeah. And he was like, "Wait, what?" And he was like, "Yeah, no one can play that fast!" He's like, "Oh, well, I learned it!" So, yeah, it didn't surprise me when I learned that— I think we kind of told the Harmonix people that at the time, and they were like, "Ah, that's fine, we'll just make it the guitar solo. They can try that."

JONATHAN: {laughing} That's fantastic. And I've watched YouTube videos of people who have done the perfect run on that on the hardest setting, and it's just mind-blowing.

MATT: I bet!

JONATHAN: I can't see as fast as they're playing, which is the crazy thing.

{ad break}

[edit] Other projects and returning to Homestar Runner

JONATHAN: But then we get up to about 2010. And it was then when you guys were starting to get other opportunities that also were pulling you away from Homestar. And as I understand it, it was getting to a situation where... it wasn't that you wanted to leave the series, it was that you were having other demands on your time, whether it was family or it was other gigs that were coming up. And it just became one of those things where, week after week, it just wasn't— you just didn't have the time to dedicate to making more content for Homestar Runner. Is that more or less accurate for how things turned out?

MIKE: Yeah. I mean, we had no idea how long it was going to be either. When we— Matt's second daughter was born, I think that was basically when we stopped doing stuff, and we didn't know if it was going to be, "oh, let's take a break for two months..." or... four years.

{all laugh}

JONATHAN: Well, and that's the thing is that, you know, you take those breaks and then other things come up, and obviously you've got all these commitments on your time. And then you're thinking, "well... how do I communicate this to a fan base?"

MIKE: Yeah. And then at some point it was like, "Wait, we've waited too long," or "Is it weird to try to say something when we don't know what we're saying?" We don't know if we're going to say, "Hey, we'll do some Homestar stuff in a year...!" We— you know.

MATT: Yeah, there was no definitive answer. And then, at that time, we didn't know... We had, like, a development deal at Disney! and a development deal at Nickelodeon! And we were going to make some Yo Gabba Gabba episodes. These things that were just, like, "that doesn't mean anything to a Homestar fan!" And maybe we undervalued that, maybe they would have been excited to hear that stuff. But then it was like... that Nickelodeon thing went nowhere, and that Disney thing went nowhere. And so that would have been, like, after the fact would have been depressing. And I was like, "oh, they were like, 'Oh yeah, so their Disney thing didn't work out, and their Nickelodeon thing didn't work out? Oh, that Yo Gabba Christmas episode they directed was horrible!'" ...like, I don't know. So it just felt weird. Especially because we never— aside from being, like, we intimated that "we'd had babies! So we're going to take some time off." That's kind of the only time Mike and I ever inserted our creator lives into the fans' heads. I mean, we always intentionally — aside from some, like, fake things on a DVD where we're spoofing how we make things — we wanted us to be separate from it. We never wanted to have the, like, "creator blog" side of it.

JONATHAN: Sure.

MATT: Definitely not the the way that most of the, like, YouTube personalities are. Like, even if their content is not that, they're always after the fact like, "Hey, I'm the star of the YouTube thing you just watched! Remember to go to the store and buy the new merch! and blah blah blah!" It's always just like... we didn't want to be the face of any of it, you know?

JONATHAN: That's fair.

MATT: So it felt weird to then have that conversation after, like, never really talking to the fans as Mike and Matt, at least through the website, to give a weird half-assed explanation of, like, "I don't know, we don't know!" And then, that just felt like I would be super unsatisfied if I just got a "we don't know what's going on" from the creator of my thing that I liked. So, I don't know. We always apologize; we didn't handle it right! We didn't know how to handle it right. And we, like, there was— it was so funny: the day before we put up the first cartoon we'd made in forever, which was this April Fools' cartoon in... 2014, I think?

MIKE: Yeah, right.

MATT: I got a— somebody found my personal email address, a fan, and sent this pages-long thing, like, tearing us apart and saying...

JONATHAN: For radio silence.

MATT: Yeah. And for— and just being like, "here's what this meant to me, here— like, every week..." So it was like, the first half was, like, super-awesome fan testimonial. {all laugh} And the second half was like, "and here's why I hate you, and will never support anything you've ever done ever again..." And literally, we're finishing up this cartoon to send, like, upload at midnight. I get this at, I don't know, 7 pm the day before, and I think I just, I forget, I think I wrote back and I just said, like, "Hey, I'm so sorry. Thanks for being a fan." And just kept it vague, and was sort of hoping that then maybe that cartoon would happen and that they would be like, "wait, they listened to me!"

MIKE: "They made that cartoon!"

JONATHAN: "What an amazing turnaround!"

MIKE: "In the last half an hour, they made this cartoon for me!"

MATT: So, yeah. So that was the main reason we never... we just, the explanation was never exciting enough to, like...

JONATHAN: Sure...

MATT: ...to peel behind the curtain and be like, "hey, look behind here, we're making a new project!" because none of those projects ever really happened. Um... so, yeah.

JONATHAN: Well— {Mike starts speaking simultaneously} Oh, sorry, go ahead.

MIKE: I was going to say, we actually made a... Strong Bad sort of addressing, talking to the fans about it. And I forget when that was, that was maybe six months or so after we had stopped doing stuff, and we made this thing and then never ended up putting it out because we were just like, "this is weird..." We showed it one time at a conference we were at last year.

MATT: And it went over kind of weird.

MIKE: {chuckles} Yeah.

MATT: So I think we made the right call!

JONATHAN: I think my favorite... I'm also fortunate in that, because I live in Atlanta, I'm a frequent patron of Dad's Garage theater. So I actually got to see the special Strong Bad Emails..

MIKE: Oh, yeah, right! Yeah!

JONATHAN: ...from Dad's Garage theater because I've been supporting them since 2000. So, I was there at their old theater, and when they went to move into 7 Stages for a while — now they have their new theater — and that was one of the things they showed one night! And the crowd reaction when that came on was pretty phenomenal— they showed it at the Fox Theater!

MATT: Oh, I didn't know that!

JONATHAN: They had a special event, a special fundraiser at the Fox Theater. And it was kind of a variety show, giving an example of the sort of material that they would do. And they showed the Strong Bad special Email to Dad's Garage, and hearing the Fox Theater erupt in applause at a Strong Bad Email was something really special.

MATT: That's awesome!

MIKE: Nice! Yeah, I think that was the second cartoon. I think that was the next thing we made after that April Fools' in 2014, was that Strong Bad Email. So it had been four or five years since we'd made a Strong Bad Email.

JONATHAN: Was the reaction to that April 1st 2014 video, was that something that was really gratifying for you guys? Because I know at least in my own personal circle of friends, when people found out that there was a new Homestar Runner cartoon up, it went nuts on my Facebook page. {Chaps laugh} It was, like, what half of my friends were sharing. So I imagine, when you've been away from it for four years, was it surprising to you to see a reaction...? Like, a positive...

MIKE: Yeah, it had gotten, I think Gizmodo and some of the blogs had linked to it. So that was surprising. And, you know...

MATT: Yeah, we didn't know— We just sort of assumed that the few people that sadly still checked homestarrunner.com entered this URL into the yellowed keys of their mechanical keyboard.

MIKE: Yeah, 'cause Strong Bad didn't have a Twitter yet or anything. Right?

MATT: No.

MIKE: I mean, there was really no... I guess we had a YouTube page, but we didn't... so there was really no way to communicate to the fans that, "hey, we've got this new cartoon up" unless you went to the site.

MATT: We didn't know if anyone would really see it. And then if people did stumble across it, if they would be excited about it, or pass it on, or whatever. So that was cool. And that definitely led to, it just sort of coincided with the fact that I was living in LA at the time when we made that, actually. And then we— but I knew my family was moving back to the Atlanta area. And so the fact that Mike and I were going to be back in the same town again and that, like, "Oh, it seems like people don't hate us and maybe want to see more things...!" It just kind of was like, all right, if we're back in the same town again, we should at least start doing stuff, as often as we can, between whatever other gig we were doing.

MIKE: Yeah. So since then, we've been doing Homestar stuff, you know, every few months or, you know, depending on what the other stuff we're working on is, so.

JONATHAN: Sure. So what other stuff are you working on since we know that Homestar Runner is in good hands, it's going to continue... coming out and keeping hope alive so that when we do that jump to Homestar Runner, there's a good chance there's going to be something new there. But what else are you guys working on?

MATT: We're just talking to for the first time ever, we've been talking with Adult Swim locally here...

JONATHAN: Oh wow!

MATT: And so we'll see— yeah, we have no idea if that will go anywhere or not, but we've known people that have worked on shows there. We've known creators of shows there and stuff before. But we've never actually spoken with them, and it's actually, it's great because there's a hilarious... I think it's been debunked enough now. But for a very long time, if we would ever talk to people (and not that we do so many interviews, but) they would come up, they'd be like, "...and I heard that you guys stormed out of an Adult Swim meeting and said no to them!" And we were like, "No...? I mean, I don't know if there was ever an overture either way, and we'd love— we love that channel, and..."

JONATHAN: You probably the heard the Hot Topic story and just...

{All laugh}

MATT: Yeah, exactly. But, so, that's exciting. We were like, "yeah, they're down the street, it kind of makes sense..." Like, I moved to LA, even though there was like an entire Cartoon Network here as well.

MIKE: Yeah, everyone assumes when they find out we're from Atlanta, "oh, you guys must work with Cartoon Network and Adult Swim." And it's like, "No, we do stuff with Disney and Nickelodeon that are three thousand miles away."

MATT: But that's exciting. So we'll see where that goes. And, uh... and what else? ...we have a couple of Homestar like, sort of top secret-y things that we'll be revealing soon that'll be exciting, that we've been spending a lot of— taking a lot of build-up time...

MIKE: Secret time!

MATT: ...secret time!

JONATHAN: Fantastic.

MIKE: I've been, um... speaking of Sierra games, there's a park down at the end of my street, and so I've been making King's Quest style graphics of a couple little parts of the park.

JONATHAN: Awesome!

MIKE: There's a little waterfall, and so I made this little King's Quest looking waterfall.

JONATHAN: Oh, man.

MATT: This is what Mike does with his time.

MIKE: Roy Moss, Senior Memorial Garden. It's called "the garden," and it is not a garden in any sense of the word. It's a retention...

MATT: Runoff, retention pond. But...

JONATHAN: I guess that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

MATT: But actually, it's featured, it's heavily featured in the Peasant's Quest live action trailer.

JONATHAN: Fantastic.

MIKE: The Jhonka's cave, yeah.

JONATHAN: And I also have to give you guys props for Two More Eggs because I've been...

MIKE: Yeah, so that was, we did that with Disney for... two years, we ended last summer, or so. But that was really good. That was great. We made 90 shorts, little shorts for Disney.

JONATHAN: "Panda Bractice" is one of my favorites.

MIKE: Oh, nice. That was our— that was the last five we did.

MATT: Kind of our "swan song."

MIKE: Yeah, that was our most fun. We did that with our daughters. Our three daughters are the voices. And so that was... Yeah, glad you liked it. That was certainly fun to make.

MATT: That was good to know, too, we actually get that back, so we can actually try and give Panda Bractice some more life. A bunch of the stuff we made for Disney, like, they own and we can't do anything else with.

JONATHAN: Sure, sure.

MATT: But Panda Bractice is one of those few that's like, uh... especially, like, making cartoons with your kids, there's nothing better than that. So maybe that'll find more life.

MIKE: We gotta hurry up! My daughter's 11.

MATT: Yeah, she's not gonna want to do that with you anymore.

{all laugh}

MIKE: No, she's—

JONATHAN: "I am so over—"

MIKE: Their voices are going to be changing. We're not going to be able to...

JONATHAN: I recommend to my listeners, if you have not seen the series Two More Eggs, go to YouTube. And especially the Panda Bractice episodes, they are amazing. And they will make you want to play drums on people's faces.

MATT: As a local Atlantan, too, did you get our Lois Reitzes, uh...?

JONATHAN: Yes. We did. Yes. As I was watching it, I was like, "this is so clearly a beautiful homage to the Atlanta treasure of Lois Reitzes."

MATT: Yeah, of course, I mean, I've been hearing that voice forever. And yeah, it's not meant in any sort of insulting way, I hope—

JONATHAN: No, you can tell!

MATT: I hope it's respectful.

JONATHAN: I can tell as I was listening like, "this is someone who has genuine affection for that voice." It's not making fun of that voice. And, she's also a friend of Dad's Garage theater. So sometimes you hear that voice if you go to see a show there. Which is amazing! So again, that's the other thing I love about about watching your content is that it gives me another connection to my home. So that's always fun. And to occasionally explain to people where certain little things come from is always kind of fun, too, because it gives them a chance to go down that rabbit hole that the internet was really created for. I mean, ultimately, that's what the internet is, right? It's just one giant black hole of information.

MIKE: There's a, one of the series we did for Two More Eggs is called "Trauncles". It's this fake British show. And so there's a part with some of the background drawings of buildings and structures in this town of Trauncles are local buildings, like around Decatur.

JONATHAN: Wonderful.

MIKE: So keep your eyes open for the library at Decatur High School, which is this weird sort of spaceship... that appears there. Yeah.

A Trogdor cutout was created for a Trogday event in 2018.

JONATHAN: Yep, I know it well! Ah, man. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on TechStuff and spending this time. I really appreciate it, it's been a thrill for me, and anyone out there who's not familiar with your work, they need to go out and seek it out, because it's that level of surreal absurdity that just... the first time I think anyone watches anything, they might just be confused. {laugh} And then after they watched the same thing a second time, they're like, "okay, I'm starting to get it." And then next thing you know, they've watched the same thing fifteen times and you say, "you realize there's 900 more of these, right? That you can watch in sequence or out of sequence, if you prefer, you can really just jump around if you like." But... it's great, I can't wait to make more references with my friends. I really hope that we can get that giant Trogdor portrait with the cutouts...

MIKE: Oh, yeah.

JONATHAN: ...over to the Georgia Renaissance Festival.

MIKE: That would be a dream come true.

{laughter}

JONATHAN: I'll talk to the entertainment director, I know him, so we'll see if we can get it there.

MIKE: Just hidden somewhere, like off in some forest somewhere where you have to... go off the beaten path to find it.

JONATHAN: I know exactly where it should go. It's like, "listen, I know it's a big hill, and I know it looks like there's not much up there, but you will find treasure, right? Like, trust me." Ah, thank you so much for joining the show. I really appreciate it.

MIKE: Thank you for having us.

MATT: Yeah. Thank you.

[edit] Closing

STRONG BAD: {in a smooth n' smarmy public radio voice} So that's it for this episode of TechStuff, thank you for tuning in. My guests were... a small piece of potato that has been sitting inside of a transistor radio since the 1970s. Thank you for being on, potato. {whining sound} Yes, that's... that's nice, potato. All right. And so join me next week when my guests will be... what's that? Apparently it'll be that same piece of potato next week. Thank you very much. Don't forget to support this podcast if you like what you're listening to! Next week, I hope to raise-a maybe a-sixteen dollar-as.

JONATHAN: I'd like to thank Mike and Matt, and Strong Bad, for coming on the show and telling me all about the stuff that I was enjoying years and years ago, before I ever became part of the HowStuffWorks family. It was a real special moment for me. And if you are not familiar with their work, I highly recommend you seek it out and find out if that brand of silliness is up your wacky avenue. Because I find endless hours of enjoyment from that work, I can watch an old cartoon again and find new things to laugh at. And I think laughter is something that should never be in short supply, so go check that out.

{show closing}

[edit] Fun Facts

[edit] Explanations

• A prominent, early example of "dog" being intentionally misspelled as "doge" on the internet was in Biz Cas Fri 1. The dog-related "doge" meme began gaining momentum in 2013, though there is little to no connection to its utterance in Biz Cas Fri.
• Strong Bad Emails adopted a weekly schedule in January 2002. brianrietta was the first released on schedule, subsequent email i love you established the practice of releasing new sbemails on Mondays.
• A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes.
• Both brothers were able to quit their jobs to focus full-time on Homestar Runner by September 2002, as their father Don Chapman had encouraged them to.
• The "shut up and take my money" meme is adapted from a line in Futurama.
• The birth of Matt's second daughter was announced to fans December 1, 2009. 2010 saw dramatically fewer site updates than usual, and the site entered an extended hiatus after December 22, 2010 that lasted until April 1, 2014.
• In a 2014 interview, Matt briefly discussed the pilot they produced for Disney: it was about "a robot foreign exchange student". As mentioned here, it did not develop into a series.

[edit] Trivia

• The cliched "Under Construction" banner image was memorably parodied with Sticklyman in Under Construction.
• Both brothers have expressed a fondness for Old-Timey toons over the years, even listing The Homestar Runner as their favorite character on the site at various points.
• An early iteration of Homestar Runner had been pitched to and rejected by Cartoon Network in 2000.
• Matt had previously addressed the Adult Swim rumors in a 2003 interview: "We know people who work there, and no one has ever asked us anything about a TV show. It's funny that someone from Adult Swim claims that they approached us and we said no. I even read that somewhere."

[edit] Remarks

• Matt mentions frequently leaving comedic answering machine messages for Mike, which may have helped inspire recurring series Marzipan's Answering Machine.
• Matt describes J. Christopher Arrison's exceptional skill in learning to play a synthesizer solo on guitar for "Trogdor". However, in a 2007 interview, he had described the dueling solos in "Trogdor" as having been performed on guitar (by Arrison and another guitarist) in the original recording; as such, this synthesizer-to-guitar anecdote may actually be about the solo in "Because, It's Midnite".
  • The Guitar Hero incarnations of "Trogdor" and "Because, It's Midnite" both feature solos that are notoriously difficult in their speed and complexity. In the NTSC version of the game, the notes per second in the "Trogdor" solo exceeds the engine's strum limit.
• Mike mentions showing the video they prepared of Strong Bad addressing the hiatus "at a conference we were at last year." This was likely the XOXO 2016 festival.

[edit] Inside References

• Both "Trogdor" and "Because, It's Midnite" were featured in the Guitar Hero series of games.
• Matt describes the cast of characters as "non-humanoid ageless organisms", in a manner similar to frequently-used term "dumb animal characters".
• The story of Jamey Huggins and Mark Lemke indirectly inspiring the name "Homestar Runner" has been shared on many occasions.
• The brothers refer to their history of using stop motion and Mario Paint to create animation.
• Sierra adventure games, particularly their influence on Peasant's Quest, are discussed.
• virus, the 118th Strong Bad Email, is brought up as a standout episode for its breaking of the fourth wall.
  • ActionScript is a programming language used alongside Flash.
• "80s hair metal band" Limozeen and "indie rock band" sloshy are referred to.
• Jonathan Strickland recalls recognizing Z. Gillispie (who played the King of Peasantry) in the Peasant's Quest Movie Trailer.
• Strickland mentions Teen Girl Squad as his favorite series.
• The visitor counter typical to early websites was parodied on Strong Bad's Website.
• Making "another Trogdor" (or otherwise repeating a previous email topic) is mentioned as the sort of creative limitation the brothers sought to avoid.
• Collaborations with They Might Be Giants are discussed.
  • Various Homestar puppet characters have appeared at four TMBG concerts at the Variety Playhouse: in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010.
• "Yacht Rock" refers to the band Yacht Rock Revue (formerly Y-O-U).
• Matt discusses how the Brothers Chaps rarely appeared as themselves to directly address fans —
  • "fake things on a DVD where we're spoofing how we make things" refers to Sample of Style and its sequel.
  • Everything Else, Volume 1 had three featurettes with tongue-in-cheek presentation video from the duo: Bubslegum Comics, Exaggerations, and From the Vault.
  • The Brothers farcically appeared onscreen in Sbemailiarized! (to date, the only time they have appeared as themselves in a toon on the website), and provided fictionalized narration in Halloween Safety.
• Exclusive Strong Bad Emails were shown at Dad's Garage in 2014 and 2015.
• Jonathan mentions an oversized cutout of Trogdor, a display piece created for a Trogday event earlier that year.
• Strong Bad's manner of speaking in the sign-off calls back to his "public radio" voice from radio.

[edit] Real-World References

• The "Buffyverse" is a media franchise built off of the shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, created by Joss Whedon. Both shows featured brief references to Homestar Runner.
• Beginning in 2002, the film industry in Georgia has grown to be among the largest in the United States. As Matt alludes to, both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were filmed in Georgia.
• The transatlantic accent is an affected accent of English that was particularly commonly-heard in American media produced from the 1920s through the 1950s (as parodied in Old-Timey toons).
• Mike refers to a famous gag from "Cape Feare", an episode of The Simpsons.
• Damon Lindelof served as co-showrunner for the series Lost.
• The Magicians includes a brief mention of Trogdor.
• Lois Reitzes is an NPR radio host who has been with the Atlanta station since 1979.
• Decatur High School features a recognizable library built into a cylindrical facade over the building's entrance, giving it a "spaceship"-like appearance as Mike suggests.
  • The library's design can be seen in Two More Eggs episode "Not Done".

[edit] Fast Forward

• The "top secret-y" project alluded to may have been Trogdor!! The Board Game, which was officially announced a month after this interview.
  • Burnie Burns is among the playtesters thanked in the credits of the game.

[edit] External Links

• Listen to "An Interview with the Creators of Homestar Runner"
• Photo taken during the interview shared on the @howstuffworks Instagram account