Giant Magazine Interview
From Homestar Runner Wiki
In early 2005, The Brothers Chaps were interviewed by Ben Goldstein for Giant Magazine.
Matt and Mike were asked similiar questions but were interviewed separately.
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Transcript
Interview with Mike Chapman
BEN GOLDSTEIN: How many unique visitors does Homestarrunner.com get per month?
MIKE CHAPMAN: It used to be around a million. A couple years ago we were averaging between 300,000 and 500,000 unique visitors on Monday alone. But we’ve avoided looking or caring about site stats for about two years. It’s been probably two years since I’ve seen a current number.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Why don’t you care about that stuff anymore?
MIKE CHAPMAN: We’ve never really cared. This has all been by accident, you know? We just did it out of fun, and we sort of got to a point where we found ourselves caring too much about the numbers. We didn’t want to have our work affected by the number of people coming. You hope that the audience is there, but if it goes a little bit, we don’t want to be like, “Oh, we need to put something with Trogdor in there to get the fans to come back.” And since we don’t have advertising, those numbers really don’t mean anything to us. Our main concern is providing a free entertaining site.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Do you still keep track of how many e-mails Strong Bad gets per day?
MIKE CHAPMAN: He still gets 2,000, 3,000 a day, something like that. Our mail server deletes everything every three days. It was getting to a point where it was just bogging things down and we were like, “We don’t need to see all of these.”
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Would you mind giving me a ballpark estimate of the dollar value of you sell every week, or every month?
MIKE CHAPMAN: That’s something else that I don’t know.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: What’s been the most popular item?
MIKE CHAPMAN: The Trogdor shirt. We had a DVD come out in November and that was our best seller over Christmas, but the Trogdor shirt is still the top selling T-shirt. Which is pretty ridiculous. It’s been over two years and Trogdor has only appeared in one or two small things since his initial appearance. How about the figurines? Yeah, the figurines are still doing good and the Cheat plush did well. We’re actually looking into doing some Cheat Commando figurines, which will hopefully be out later this year. The CD sells well too, but as far as the main apparel goes, the Trogdor hoodie and the Trogdor T-shirt are the top sellers.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: So, the Home Star universe has its origins in the children’s book you and your friend Craig Zobel made in 1996. How did you come up with the name “Home Star Runner”? What does that mean?
MIKE CHAPMAN: A friend of ours was mimicking a local sports figure doing a radio or TV commercial–you know, one of those cheesy car dealership or local grocery store commercials. And since our friend didn’t know very much about sports, instead of saying a phrase like “all star second baseman,” he said “home star runner for the Braves.” We all thought it was hilarious. Then a year or two later we decided to make this children’s book. And we were like, “we should call it Home Star Runner.” It was just a phrase that we were holding on to.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: In the book, did Home Star Runner win the strongest man in the world contest?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Actually, Pom Pom won. The Cheat was helping Strong Bad cheat–it was a grape-holding contest–and Home Star realizes that in order to uncover Strong Bad’s cheating he has to drop his grapes. So Pom Pom wins, and Pom Pom shares the trophy with Home Star. It was a completely different universe in the book from what it is on the site. These days, Home Star would never have the wits about him to understand what was going on in that situation.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Describe the website’s typical fan to me.
MIKE CHAPMAN: I think our typical fans are still college kids. Between 18 and 24 is sort of our target audience–that’s the first demographic that we caught on. Homestar Runner was a Flash site in 2000, and there were sites that linked to cool Flash sites like ours, and there were a lot of people checking us out through those channels. And also just through word of mouth at colleges. It seemed like our sales and viewership are sort of dictated by the college calendar, in terms of things starting to pick up a little bit in August and September, and slowing down in the summer.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Why do you think college students have taken to you so much?
MIKE CHAPMAN: I don’t know. Hopefully the main reason people like it is because it’s entertaining. But they also enjoy the fact that there are no ads on it. People tell us all the time that they appreciate that it’s a free site and they don’t need to sign up for anything or worry about pop-ups or junk e-mail or getting a subscription or anything like that. And although we do sell stuff, we try not to bombard you with it.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: The characters’ appearances seem to fit perfectly with their personalities. How did you decide which characters would have no arms, or arms with no hands, or arms with hands?
MIKE CHAPMAN: It’s just the style we draw in, where the characters aren’t really animal or human. I guess the easiest way to describe it is updated versions of the drawings you would do when you were 4 or 5 years old, of your mommy and daddy with legs coming straight out of the head. It’s ended up making animating them a lot easier. Home Star has got no arms or fingers or elbows or anything like that, so he’s really easy to animate.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: But there are a few characters that are apparently hand-worthy, or arm-worthy.
MIKE CHAPMAN: That’s just pure accident. It’s not that Strong Mad is the most articulated character–he’s got actual fingers and knees and elbows and separate moving eyebrows–but that doesn’t mean he’s the most advanced character by any stretch.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: When you were creating Strong Sad, why did you decide to give him elephant feet? Or “soolnds,” as he calls them.
MIKE CHAPMAN: There’s a part of the site that’s buried deep with lots of our preliminary sketches, that shows the development of Strong Sad. He was sort of a French mime for a while, with like a beret and a striped shirt. Craig and I were doing a bunch of drawings of this character and refining it, and for whatever reasons, elephant feet seemed to have the dumpiness–you know, it’s like he’s a sad enough character as it is and then you look down and it’s like “Oh man, you’ve got elephant legs.”
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Another great thing about the site is all the hidden pages and Easter eggs scattered around. You just mentioned that there are pages buried on the site with the preliminary sketches. Does it ever bother you that so many of these things are never seen by casual fans?
MIKE CHAPMAN: No. I think the thing that outweighs the fact that casual fans are missing it is that the big fans get such a kick out of finding the secret stuff. It all goes back to video games–there was a negative world in Super Mario Brothers, and we used to sit there for hours trying to get past it, or getting the invisible dot in Adventure.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Speaking of video games, I know you’re against the idea of a Home Star Runner TV series, one reason being that it removes that interactive element. But have you ever considered making an official video game? Like to sell in stores?
MIKE CHAPMAN: I don’t think we’d rule it out. We’re able to do most of the game ideas that we have on the site, like Peasant’s Quest, which is like a King’s Quest-type game–these graphical adventures that we played growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s. To make one of those games ourselves was one of the coolest things we’ve ever done.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: But I’d imagine there’d be a huge interest in people playing a game with the Home Star characters.
MIKE CHAPMAN: Right, but we’d have to come up with an idea that we felt wasn’t just squishing these characters into a video game, and that we couldn’t do on the site for free on our own. We do pretty much everything ourselves and it’s obvious we wouldn’t be able to do that ourselves. Either we’d have to give up a lot and say “you guys do a bunch of the stuff” or we’d have to be sitting next to them the whole time and not be working on the site. We wouldn’t want it to take away from the rest of the site. So, it’s a possibility, but right now we’re working on a side-scrolling Nintendo-style game with the Stinkoman character. So yes, we love video games and the characters would work in video games, but if we can do it on the site for free first, then we’re going to do that.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Are there any other voices you do regularly besides the “Powered by the Cheat” stuff?
MIKE CHAPMAN: As far as recurring things go, the Cheat toons are the only thing. But I was the narrator for “Decemberween in July.” I was the reader of the children’s book.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: There was this Atlanta Journal Constitution article that listed “Parsnips Aplenty” as your favorite toon on the site. Is that still the case?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Probably not, but I still like that one. I would say that one of the Cheat Commandos things is probably my current favorite. Either the cereal commercial or “Shopping for Danger.” Anytime we get to do anything that’s not just the regular characters it’s a nice change of pace, whether it’s Cheat Commandos or Powered by the Cheat or whatever. I still get a kick out of the fact that it’s different and new.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Who’s your favorite character in the Home Star universe?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Old-timey Home Star is usually who I cite as my favorite character. But when we do the old-timey stuff, it’s so hot and cold in terms of fan reaction. A lot of people really hate the old-timey characters, but I love them. I also like the anime version of Home Star, whose name will be revealed at some point.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Aw come on, can’t you tell me now?
MIKE CHAPMAN: It’s either Extra Man or One Up. I don’t know which it is, but it will probably be revealed in the Stinkoman game. But I like that character. Even though I like regular Home Star and Strong Bad, they’re just such a part of my daily life that–
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Maybe a little bit of the magic’s worn off by now?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Yeah, perhaps. Sadly.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: So you guys have been at this for about five years now. Is it still exciting to you? Is the plan to do this until the fans stop caring?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Hopefully we will dictate whether or not we keep going. I would hate for us to stop just because fans don’t like it. Hopefully, when we stop it’ll be because we want to do something else or we feel like we’ve exhausted this set of characters. But we’re still having a blast doing this–just the wide variety of things we get to do, whether it’s making an album and making bad Limozeen songs or creating T-shirts and posters and patches and whatever. If we were just doing the regular Home Star cartoons, that might get a little old, but there’ll be weeks at a time where we don’t do that stuff, where we do a Teen Girl Squad toon and then a music video and then some puppet stuff. I feel like we still do some fresh stuff that isn’t just the same old thing over and over again.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Speaking of Limozeen, who does the music for the site?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Matt and I do most of it. For the CD we made, we collaborated with this band here in Atlanta called Y-O-U, who are friends of ours, and much better musicians than us. They have a home studio, and we fleshed out all these songs together. “Ballad of the Sneak” was done by a band in Baltimore called Da Vinci’s Notebook. And then our guy who programs all the games, Jonathan Howe, does some of the music for the games. He did the Duck Guardian music, and 50K Racewalker.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: What happens when you win 50K Racewalker? I’m not going to spend that many hours playing it.
MIKE CHAPMAN: There’s a cheat apparently. You can download it and you can just fast-forward essentially. You get third place if you make it the entire way. It shows you on a podium and says you got third place.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Amazing.
MIKE CHAPMAN: If you go 1K you get to a point where you sort of walk into blackness and a little note comes up that says, “Whoa, we didn’t even finish the game cause we didn’t think anyone would get this far.” And then it continues and says, “Good job, only 49K to go.” We had the idea for that game as a joke, like, “Let’s make a game that would take you two days to win it.”
BEN GOLDSTEIN: What makes you laugh?
MIKE CHAPMAN: I’m currently watching a lot of Leave It to Beaver. For a while we were watching Saved By the Bell and The Match Game. We just find old stuff to TiVo and watch. That’s the stuff I get inspiration from. I also like that show Strangers With Candy. I like Home Movies a lot. Old Three Stooges, the old Batman TV show.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Anything campy and retro.
MIKE CHAPMAN: Yeah, I mean that’s sort of where we pull from. But I just started watching Leave It to Beaver a couple weeks ago and there’s genuine humor in it. It’s not just funny because it’s 50 years old. I thought I was just going to watch it for nostalgia because I watched it growing up, but I’ve been surprised.
BEN GOLDSTEIN: Now you understand more of the jokes?
MIKE CHAPMAN: Yeah, maybe. It’s kind of a subtle humor too. It’s not all slapstick, like I Love Lucy.
Interview with Mike Chapman
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