At the Paste Rock n’ Reel festival this past weekend, Adriene and I attended a Q&A session by Matt and Mike Chapman of homestarrunner.com. If you don’t know what Homestar Runner is, check out the link and prepare to waste a couple hours.
They showed some clips from the website (some Strong Bad e-mails and a couple music videos) and also a couple unrelased things. The Q&A session was a lot of fun, they even brought out the Homestar and Strong Bad puppets and answered some questions in the character’s voices. I thought I’d share some interesting trivia tidbits for the Q&A session:
– Their biggest cartoon influences are Bugs Bunny and 80’s Saturday morning cartoons. They never intended for their cartoons to be so “clean”, but it mainly came out of the fact that their influences were relatively innocent and they also said they were backlashing against the proliferation of “South Park” knock-offs that filled the web about five years ago.
– Matt and Mike are actually close to my age (32 and 29) which explains their love of the Atari and Nintendo game systems. They kept joking that they figured they would be doing something a lot more mature by the time they reached this age. Matt does a large majority of voices. Mike does much of the animation and design.
– The name “Homestar Runner” comes from one of their friends who knew very little about sports, he once described a football player as a real “home star runner” and it stuck.
– They actually had a friend in school (from here in Dunwoody) who was nicknamed “Bubs”, who actually ran a concession stand and had a voice like Tom Waits.
– They make enough off of the merchandise that H*R is actually their full-time job. Matt used to work at Earthlink customer support, but quit once they started making enough off of the website. The orders from the store are actually filled by them or their wives or parents.
– The Strong Bad e-mails are actually real e-mails. Matt says that they usually read the e-mails and try to respond to them with Strong Bad’s voice and the ones that they are able to talk about for a while are the ones that they use.
– They’re always surprised and think it’s funny when they are out in public and hear someone use a quote from one of their cartoons.
Good fun… I tried to get some pictures of them with the puppets, but the lighting wasn’t good and the pictures didn’t turn out well at all.