SxSW: Homestarrunner!
Mike Chapman- Co-Creator/voices
Matt Chapman- Co-Creator/Animator
Ryan Sterritt- Homestarrunner dvd guy
If did not realize it, Homestarrunner.com is one of my favorite sites, so this was a great way to cap of a long day! It all started with a video of the adventure to get to Austin. The Homestar guys live in Atlanta, and tried to buy plane tickets to Austin a few days ago. Well, the tickets were so expensive that they flew to Houston and drove. The opening video was the documentary of trip. True greatness, these guys are hilarious. Within the documentary Homestar was convinced he was going to the Bywest show in Boston! A great opener.
As they continued we learned that Homestarrunner.com started about 5 years ago in late 1999. They showed off some stuff that they had never released. Things like:
>Etch A Sketch Homestar
>Homestar flying episode
>Homestar/Strongbad animated cross-stitch
>Homestar and gang on a roller-coaster
>Lego Homestar
>Rock legends Lymozeen album covers
However, all that was good, but true greatness was the uncut and unreleased “lil brudder” episode. If you are not familiar with the Homestar lil brudder episode that you are missing out. View it now! [link]
Question for the audience:
>How many Strongbad emails do you get a week?
4-5k a day in the past, now about 1-2k per day.
>Where do you get your inspirations?
Video games, Atari, ColecoVision, music, dumb stuff in our lives, Three Stooges (civil war episode)
>Did you realize that you would reach such a young audience?
No, the audience is getting younger, and younger. Now we are reaching a larger kid/toddler audience and we really don’t understand it.
>Any chance we would see a full length dvd?
No, its too expensive.
>Any contact with TV, or Cartoon Network?
Yes, and they said no in the past (years ago), and now we have decided not to go that way.
>What do you want to do, where do you want this all to go?
Well, this is pretty much it! This is what we do. We go into the office around 10 am or whenever we want. There is 3 of us and our dad runs the store and deals with the crap with the t-shirts. when it is not longer fun, we will stop doing it.
>How does it feel to be a part of the culture?
We hear that but we don't see it. It is really cool, but there are tons of people that have not heard of homestarrunner.
>What does your hosting look like?
Sago Networks hosts the site and they are out of Tampa, FL. We were on a Yahoo shared hosting until 2003 or so. We were doing 2 or so terabytes a month and paying for 40 meg. account! That was real cool. There was a homestarrunner fan that we worked with and he let it go! Once they could not do that any-longer the site went down. That is when the Sago guys emailed us and said they were fans and gave us a great deal. The Sago guys rock!
>Is everything done if Flash?
Yes, at this point it is all in Flash. Everything is drawn in flash and animated in Flash.
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