Late Nite JengaJam Interview - 4 Oct 2007
From Homestar Runner Wiki
The Brothers Chaps did an interview for Late Nite JengaJam.
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 Homestar Runner. Matt, how're you doing? Hello, Matt?
MIKE CHAPMAN: I'm here, I'm Mike.
JENGAJAM: Oh, Mike, hey. How're you doing?
MIKE: I just called in, like, 30 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: 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 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 site gags, or inside gags, for people who are following the site for a long time, almost rewarding them.
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 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: 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.
This article is a stub. You can help the Homestar Runner Wiki by expanding it.
