HRWiki:Sandbox
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The Sandbox is an HRWiki namespace page designed for testing and experimenting with wiki syntax. Feel free to try your skills at formatting here: click on edit, make your changes, and click 'Save page' when you are finished. Content added here will not stay permanently. If you need help editing, see Help:Editing.
Quick 'N Nasty attempt at trimming down the HRWiki: article into something more direct. Obviously the later quote section could use rework.
Contents |
Hiatuses
- See also HRWiki:Hiatuses
The Brothers Chaps have taken hiatuses large and small from producing the Homestar Runner body of work. By 2002, the site had established a schedule of updating weekly; between 2005 and 2009 there were several minor hiatuses from this pace. The site underwent a major hiatus from 2010 through 2014. Since then, homestarrunner.com has adopted a new, slower pace of updates.
Minor Hiatuses
Minor hiatuses lasted 30-50 days. Typically minor updates would continue through the hiatus — the weeklies, main pages, games, and store sales would still be added despite the lack of new Toons or Strong Bad Emails.
- December 5, 2005 to January 8, 2006 — 34 days
- Between portrait and high school
- May 16, 2006 to July 3, 2006 — 48 days
- Between isp and Weclome Back
- Weclome Back explains what the characters had been up to during that time.
- This was due to the birth of Mike Chapman and Missy Palmer's baby daughter.
- Between isp and Weclome Back
- December 18, 2006 to January 22, 2007 — 35 days
- Between Decemberween Short Shorts and looking old
- June 26 to August 7, 2007 — 45 days
- Between Ever and More and Quality Time with Cardboard Homestar
- This was announced in a main page pop-up as a "baby break" for the birth of Matt and Jackie Chapman's child.
- December 23, 2008 to January 26, 2009 — 34 days
- Between A Death-Defying Decemberween and Hremail 62
- This was the first hiatus without any minor updates to the site.
2009 - 2013: The Big Hiatus
2009
Matt and Jackie had their second child in the fall of 2009, which was announced in a special entry on the FeedBurner page that requested readers "please be patient with updates". The November release of Punkin Show was the final update of the year — 2009 was the first year in the site's history without a Decemberween Toon.
2010
Updates continued to be scarcer in the new year. The first update was April Fools' Day toon Xeriouxly Forxe, with a Xeriouxly Forxe-themed main page shortly thereafter. No major Halloween toon was produced in 2010 — another first for the site. The next major update was in December: A Decemberween Mackerel on the 14th, shortly followed by Which Ween Costumes? on the 22nd.
2011-13
No new toons were produced for three years.
A few character appearances were made during this time: Puppet Strong Bad appeared at an Aquabats concert in January 2011, while Strong Bad and Homestar Runner made a surprise appearance at W00tstock 5.0 in July 2013.
In September 2011, Matt created the Twitter account @ronginald in which he hinted that Homestar Runner would be updated "sporadically and without warning". On February 27, 2012, Matt posted an out-of-focus image of the apparent script for Strong Bad Email 206, with the message "Someday, when you least expect it...". He deleted this Twitter account in January 2013.
2014 - Present: Transitioning to the New Status Quo
The site was updated with April Fool 2014. The toon acknowledged the length between updates by making the index page look dilapidated; at its conclusion, Strong Bad and Homestar Runner imply there might be years before the next update. However, activity continued in October with Fish Eye Lens, I Killed Pom Pom (the first full-length Halloween toon since 2009), and updates to Quote of the Week, Weekly Fanstuff, and Sketchbook.
The @StrongBadActual Twitter account began posting regularly on September 26, 2014; it has since become the most active facet of the Homestar Runner body of work.
In the October 3, 2014 Rolling Stone interview, Matt specified that the Brothers Chaps were updating the site for fun and not full-time, due to the stress and deadlines of the website's former weekly schedule, and that they would only release a toon every couple of months.
2015 was the true start of the modern pace of updates; there was new content every second month. In the years since, the site has been updated slowly but semi-regularly, with new content every 1-4 months; Halloween toons have been released annually since 2014.
Reasons for the hiatus
In interviews from 2014 and 2015, The Brothers Chaps attributed this to the birth of Matt and Jackie's second baby, side projects, and creative burnout. Matt to Los Angeles for several years to work on TV shows, moving back to Georgia in 2014.
MATT: I just had my second daughter, and then it was right at the ten-year mark which, you know, if you're gonna take a break ten years felt like a nice time to take a breather. And then during that time we decided, "Hey, let's start talking to some of the people who we've heard from over the years in the industry, and see if there's something there to work on or try to grow." And so we started talking to people out in Los Angeles, and then some of that stuff started to actually move forward. So we were like, okay, if we want to keep pursuing this we kind of need to put Homestar on hold to try to put all our weight behind that stuff. And so that's what we started doing, and I ended up actually moving out to Los Angeles for a few years and we got to do a bunch of cool stuff and work with a bunch of cool people and work on a bunch of cool shows.
MIKE: When we stopped doing stuff, we didn't know if we were stopping for two months, or six months, or one year, or four years. We just knew that we couldn't make a cartoon in the next couple weeks. So all of a sudden, "We're really trying to!" turned into this multiyear hiatus. Matt was moving back to Atlanta from LA, and we had over the years been talking about the characters more, and situations would come up, and we'd say, "Oh, Strong Bad should say this!" Once we decided that we had some ideas, the fact that people still cared was fantastic.
JEFF RUBIN: This year, April, first cartoon in a while — it sounded like you were testing the waters a bit to find out if there was still interest?
MATT: Sort of. We had heard from people that were like, "Hey, where did it go? We wanted more," which is always super cool to hear.
JEFF RUBIN: I bet you get that on a daily basis, whether you know it or not, like in your email or somewhere. That must happen all the time, right?
MATT: Well, I hope it does, 'cause that would be very encouraging. I feel like the consensus is that we stopped because we didn't want to do it, and I hate for people to think that we've been sitting in a pool with a martini sort of laughing at the Internet, like, "What fools! We'll never make you a Strong Bad Email again!" It's very much the opposite. My brother and I have lived the last three or four years still thinking in our brains that we're gonna be making a new cartoon next week, and we would routinely text each other dumb jokes from a Homestar line or a Strong Bad line that will probably never happen. So, we've been wanting to do this stuff. [...] It's not that we were like, "We hated it, we wanted to take a break." No, the rest of the world has influenced us in a way where we have to take a little time off, and there literally hasn't been time to do them. So that's why the April Fools' thing was definitely like, "All right, we've got the time. We're gonna do it. We're gonna see if anybody gives a crap anymore. And if they do then the goal will be to start making more stuff, hopefully on a more frequent basis."
JEFF RUBIN: And I think we can conclude people still gave a crap, right?
MATT: It seemed like it. Maybe it was a fluke just because it was the first one we've done. I don't know if there will be diminishing returns or not, but just based on that alone it's enough to make us want to give it a try again.
