First off, a little history:
Originally conceived as a hand drawn children’s book, The Homestar Runner made his debut in 1996. Nothing much came of the book, shy of a small toon made with MarioPaint, until two of the creators were learning flash and needed something to practice on.
Matt and Mike Chapman, collectively known as The Brothers Chaps, launched
homestarrunner.com in 2000. Popularity was a slow burn until a supporting character by the name of Strong Bad started answering reader emails(sbemail). One in particular,
Trogdor!, went viral and the site soon saw over a million visits a month.
Rather than shy away from fame, HSR embraced it. Strong Bad and Trogdor soon became the most popular characters on the site, though the rest of the cast were certainly not neglected. New features like
Teen Girl Squad(a personal favorite),
Marzapan’s Answering Machine, and Powered by The Cheat(a feature where Strong Bad’s sidekick made his own rudimentary flash cartoons Inception style) became extremely popular as well.
Amazingly, The Brothers Chaps managed to keep the site interesting and funny for several years. Every Monday, with very little interruption, a new Strong Bad Email came out, along with one or two other random cartoons throughout the week, with longer and more involved stories centered on major holidays. There was an extensive section dedicated to games, and a lot of music videos(for lack of a better phrase) and fake commercials. Alternate versions of the characters lived in the 1930’s and in Japanese Manga style cartoons as well. The stories injected a lot of pop-culture references and surreal slapstick that kept people coming back. All this was being done essentially by only two people, with the brother’s parents taking on much of the business aspects of the endeavor. The site had never ran ads of any kind, and the brothers made a living off of extensive merchandising.
According to the artists, Hollywood often came calling on multiple occasions to make a scripted cartoon to air on TV. The Brothers Chaps always maintained that the series would remain on the web where they were born. Of course, this was before they could have found a proper home on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, which is also based in Atlanta, so I really don’t know why that didn’t happen. They did collect most of the stories onto DVDs that you can still buy in their
store, and are available from Netflix, so it doesn’t seem that they are opposed to the medium of T.V.
That’s not to say that the characters didn’t venture out into the real world, though. Puppet versions of many of the gang eventually made their way out into the world, and even into a
recording studio with They Might Be Giants .
There was no doubt that HSR was very popular, and it became that thing that spawned in-jokes and endless quotes with your friends until Napoleon Dynamite came along. The Brothers Chaps were sitting pretty.
So what happened?I’d like to say that Homestar Runner went out with a bang. Like there was some awful scandal or lawsuit that forced the site to shut down. I would even love to tell you that they went out gracefully with a series finale that wrapped up a bunch of loose ends. Or that it was all a dream or that they were in purgatory the whole time. Unfortunately, the site seems to have gone out with a whimper. Updates to the site, once so reliable, became few and far between until they just stopped. I don’t know if they just lost interest, or that flash cartoons went out of style, or they ran out of ideas or what. The last posting was in December of 2010, and that wasn’t even a real cartoon. Matt Chapman has gone on to work as a writer and director for
Yo Gabba Gabba , and
The Aquabats! Super Show!, which sounds about right. Information is hard to come by, but back in February, Matt tweeted a screenshot of the script for sbemail 206 with the message "Someday, when you least expect it..." , making fans salivate, but that’s about it. It just sort of fizzled out.
I cannot begin to tell you the kind of hole the absence of Homestar Runner has left in the hearts of a generation. The internet was just ramping up at the time, and HSR found a niche that nobody realized was there at the time. Weekly, or even daily updated entertainment/animation/comics sites are all over the place now, and are no big deal. In 2000, though? This type of thing was a rarity, and one as smart as this one even more so. I dearly hope that the Brothers Chaps revisit the characters someday, because I think they could still be relevant. With more and more of the populace getting their entertainment from the web anyway, it seems they could come back strong.
Here’s hoping they do.
A few of my favorites:
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