Late Nite JengaJam Interview - 4 Oct 2007

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Revision as of 03:40, 8 October 2007

The Brothers Chaps did an interview for Late Nite JengaJam. They talk about sequels, killing off characters, puppets and Mellow Mushroom.

Running Time: approximately 67 minutes Interview starts at 4:30.

Transcript

JENGAJAM: But, without further ado, we have one of our two guests today. Matt Chapman is the man who does the voices for most of the, quote/unquote, "dumb animal characters" that comprise the Homestar Runner. Matt, how're you doing? {pause} Hello, Matt?

MIKE CHAPMAN: I'm here, I'm Mike.

JENGAJAM: Oh, Mike, hey. How're you doing?

MIKE: I just called in, like, thirty seconds ago.

JENGAJAM: Oh, wow.

MATT CHAPMAN: Matt's here too, I had muted my phone, and forgot to press unmute.

JENGAJAM: Wow, so we have Matt and Mike Chapman, Mike being the one who does half the animation, and Matt does the voices, and together they make what is arguably the most popular Flash cartoon, or cartoon of any kind, on the World Wide Web.

MATT: Hey, well, thanks for saying that. I have no facts to back that up...

MIKE: Sounds right to me.

MATT: Yeah, but the more you say it, the more it, uh...

MIKE: I believe it.

JENGAJAM: It's a self-fulfilling thing, the more we say it becomes true.

MATT: Exactly.

JENGAJAM: I'm sure you get this at every interview that you guys do, but it started out... more than 10 years ago, in '96, during the Olympics, Mike and Craig Zobel worked on a children's book?

MIKE: That's correct. We were bored one day and went to a bookstore on our time off, and thought that we could probably do something better, so we wrote the original children's book that day.

JENGAJAM: Hello?

MIKE: Just... no color, just Sharpies on typing paper.

JENGAJAM: Hello?

MIKE: We didn't really have computers... Hello? Hello? Can you hear us?

JENGAJAM: Oh, sorry about that, I...

OBOECRAZY: {overlapping} Yeah, we can hear you.

MIKE: Someone was saying "Hello, hello".

JENGAJAM: Oh, that was me, I apologize, I had a momentary lapse of reception.

MIKE: Oh, gotcha. Anyway, yeah. We just made copies at Kinko's, like, 10 copies for our friends, and there was no color or anything like that, it was just old-school Xerox stuff. And then a year or so later we scanned it in and colored it, made a souped-up version, a little bit. It was like '97. And then we started the website in 2000.

JENGAJAM: And, you know, that children's book motif sort of occurs in your work... I mean, you did something for the 10th anniversary last year, and then every now and again you'll see a children's book written by Lem Sportsinterviews?

MIKE: Yes. Leomard, for long.

JENGAJAM: You get a lot of these recurring..., I guess, site gags, or inside gags, for people who are following the site for a long time, almost rewarding them to keep up.

MIKE: Yeah, exactly. It pays off to look at... to watch all the stuff we drew, and a lot of stuff for people who've been watching for a long time, and 90% of the the people, they don't know what it means, but for the 10% that do, it's hopefully good for them.

MATT: That's something that I feel like I learned from Mystery Science Theater, I felt like they were always dropping... either references to a joke they had already made that was totally exclusive to the show, or making some weird reference to a commercial from the late '70s or something, that... they knew that only about 10 people were gonna get, but they made that joke anyway, so it was just sort of like... "This is for you 10 dudes that're gonna like this joke." I thought that was very cool, and just sort of... the way that it gets that kind of homey, grass-rootsey feel, and so we like to keep those... and it's also a part of creating the universe of the Homestar characters. Having stuff like, there's a weird children's book author inside the Homestar universe, and there's this guy who writes all the episodes of Cheat Commandos, and other things...

MIKE: The children's book author's wife writes weird...

MATT: Beverly Cleary.

MIKE: ...junior literature. It's been a while since she's written anything.

MATT: {overlapping} Beverly Sportsinterviews... I'm pretty sure she's "ex-wife", too... I don't know if we've...

MIKE: I'm sure Lem couldn't hold down a woman for very long.

{laughter}

JENGAJAM: It seems to me that you've fleshed out this universe quite considerably. I remember in the past, like, people have asked you, "Hey, you guys planning on doing other kind of projects?" but anything you can think of has almost sort of..., I wouldn't want to say shoehorned, but you've found a way to incorporate it into the larger Homestar universe.

MIKE: Yeah, exactly. Making bad metal songs and crappy, drawn on notebook paper comics; we can find a way to work into Homestar.

MATT: Yes, there really isn't anybody to not tell us to do that stuff. It's sort of, almost, the curse of Homestar Runner, where it's like, you know, there are other projects we'd love to do, but then it's, "Oh, we can just do it for this website." So why start another project when we can just do it for the cartoon? So it's like the double edged sword of we'll never get out of this... {laughs} we can just keep expanding.

JENGAJAM: Yeah, it sort of goes with a testament to your guy's creativity. Not only do you have the regular citizens of Free Town, USA, but now you have that metal band Limozeen and more recently that not so metal band, Sloshy.

MIKE: That's right.

{pause, and then all three try to speak at once}

JENGAJAM: Go ahead, I'm sorry.

MATT: Oh, no, I was going to say exactly. It's very easy to keep it going and actually work on it, especially things like that, you know... Strong Bad's favorite band was Limozeen, and it just kept developing its own thing. Teen Girl Squad started off as just a one off thing that Strong Bad did. Now Teen Girl Squad has its own recurring and crap. We recently made up this hip-hop character named Peacey P for a Teen Girl Squad, and we probably going to make.... We probably going to make a Peacey P song. Peacey P and Coach Z might do a duet.

JENGAJAM: Aw, man. I'd love that
MIKE: {simultaneously} All of the weird stuff like that.... {laughs}

MATT: So, it's just weird things like, okay this one character made this comic called Teen Girl Squad. And inside Teen Girl Squad he made up this rapper character that the characters in Teen Girl Squad like. And now that character is going to do a duet with one of the main characters. I dunno know. It's all ridiculous.

JENGAJAM: I think one of the reasons have managed to be successful to be able to extend it so much is you don't play necessarily like... I mean I guess there is a continuity with Strong Bad's technology and Cardboard Homestar and Marzipan, and you can get those gags. But, for the most part, it's not an ongoing arc story. You are able to pretty much go in there fresh having never seen Homestar Runner before and go in there an understand it because there's no continuing story line.

MATT: Right, the relationship between the characters is really the only on going thing. Like, when you watch a cartoon you get Strong Bad is a jerk and...

MIKE: Yeah, it's pretty easy to figure out which characters what role that they play.

MATT: Yeah, so that's sort of the thing. There's that story that slowly develops, things like Strong Sad has obviously gotten bolder and you a couple times when Strong Sad actually lashes out at Strong Bad. Which never used to happen. But, there's these slowly slowly moving arcs that people have been watching it for a long time.

MIKE: Coach Z has gotten a lot—
JENGAJAM: {simulatenously} —character development.

MATT: {laughs} Yeah, so, you know... there's that, and there's at the same time— Yeah, it's sort of fun to not mess with that. Occassionally... we just recently did this cartoon called "The DNA Evidence" that sort of tied together a running gag that we've been doing, just as sort of a background thing in a bunch of cartoons. And we thought it'd be funny to try to tie it all together. We sort of, there's not a lot of plot holes. At the same time, it was hard enough, it'd be a pain in the ass to try do that every week.

JENGAJAM: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, I remember some series— Well most of my audience comes from roosterteeth.com, which is the home of Red vs. Blue. You guys heard of it?

MIKE: Yeah. We've met those guys.

JENGAJAM: The reason Bernie gave for ending the series- the regular one- because they were doing an ongoing story, for a six minute off, six minutes an segment, whatever, episodes. It was sort of collapsing under its own mass. You couldn't incorporate all of that continuity after a while.

MATT: Right, right. And it makes it easier to those... to do those off shoot things when all we're doing is a sorta three to five minute cartoon every week. It's way easier to do like, "Okay, we're going to do a commercial for this fake brand of marshmallows this week." That doesn't need to follow any continuity. It's kinda of nice to jump completely out of {unintelligible}.

JENGAJAM: You guys have been at it for like, what, seven years now. The Flash animation, right?

MIKE: Yeah, this will be eight years, I guess, at the end of this year?

MATT: Yeah.

MIKE: That's pretty crazy.

JENGAJAM: I think I've been watching for five.

MIKE: Wow. Nice work. I haven't been watching that long.

JENGAJAM: Like, I remember the first time I ever had any experience with Homestar Runner was a sticker on a tunnel, underneath the train tracks, where I went to school. It was Strong Mad. "Strong Mad Has A Posse." And it had the homestarrunner.com URL.

MIKE: Nice, that was an old sticker.

MATT: Yeah, I don't know who that would've been, unless someone made their own.

MIKE: Well, we have a thing on the page for a while, a download where it just had a layout of, so they could've made their own. Yeah, that was the first Homestar Runner product we ever made. I got a hundred of those printed at stickerguy.com, I believe, I think in 2000.

MATT: It was such a big deal.

MIKE: We didn't have an online store or anything. So, we got a hundred of those printed and just gave them to our friends. If you've got an actual vinyl sticker, there's not too many of those around. I don't think I have one of them.

MATT: Tried this thing right when I moved to New York and stick them all over the cool bars in Brooklyn. And they'd be like down the next day. {Mike laughs} So much for our street team. {laughter} So the fact that you actually saw one somewhere and it made you go to the website, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, somewhere it worked.

JENGAJAM: Yeah, sure. You gotta thank your contacts out in Villanova, Pennsylvania, I guess.

MIKE: Yeah, but I don't know who those are.

JENGAJAM: But it sorta goes back to what I was saying with community. Back in the day, the way that you heard of me— I was shocked that you heard of Jengaship from the old Strong Bored. You had the old message board, you had a community there. And I remember a bunch of names, like InvisiblePedestrian and Taryn and...

MIKE: Oh, yeah, Taryn.

JENGAJAM: Yeah, you made the game for her.

MIKE: Taryn got immortalized in that, yeah, Taryn game where you kick— you just kick her around the screen, I think? And her head came off maybe? Yeah.

JENGAJAM: And a bunch of other people like Carter and M-O-E, I don't know you remember her or not...

MIKE: M-O-E, I remember M-O-E. Eh, Steve, was there an Eh, Steve? No, what did he call himself?

MATT: StrongSteve.

MIKE: He called himself Homsar, but yeah StrongSteve or Homsar, I forget which. Yeah, it was kinda funny. It was this terrible, when we were hosted on Yahoo! at the time and they didn't support PHP or any sort of backend stuff. It was just called NivaScript {?} and it was so not robust.

MATT: Do you remember what we called it when the board would crash?

JENGAJAM: I'm trying to remember.

MIKE: I don't.

MATT: Somebody, I remember who, I think there was one time when it crashed, I put up the word "BONK!" up at the top.

JENGAJAM: BONK! Oh, my goodness, I remember that!

{laughter}

MATT: So it crashed constantly, yeah, a people started call it "Bonk" and even a couple people had their screen name as something Bonk. It was kinda fun. It was fun to be that involved. You know, we read emails from folks- all the Strong Bad emails are all real- but at the same time not quite as hands on. And it was fun, too, I never really posted as me but I would usually post as Strong Bad.

MIKE: Yeah, wasn't your avatar Dennis Franz for awhile?

MATT: It was several different pictures of Dennis Franz including the one when he was on The Simpsons.

Easter Eggs

Mellow Mushroom

Homsar

OboeCrazy/Guitar Hero

Michigan

Trap

Count3D

LMay

Stinkoman L10

Vicki

John1974

Chatroom

Joss Whedon

Fame/Puppets

Senor Cardgage

Strong Bad/Closing

External Links

• See the Late Night JengaJam page
• Listen to the show
• Download the show