#you’re in GRAD SCHOOL and born after 2001?
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I gotta stop talking to people younger than 9/11
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Franny’s 30 Day Cover Challenge
Playlist
Franny’s 30 Day Cover Song Challenge: (categories are mostly from here, and here, with some from here, and a couple I made) in September 2020 one of her musician friends challenged her to do the thing and she was like “It seems like a fun way to show everyone what kind of music has influenced me as a musician, singer, songwriter, and just like, person. So I’m going to do it.”
In reality, she recorded most of them in 1-2 days to distract her from how sad she is because Wilbur hates her and he’s sad lmao
It helped a little.
(If you want me to drop the playlist she mentions in #24 let me know, I have it started I can finish it)
TW: mentions of Franny’s political beliefs so tw: politics, an allusion to suicide though the word isn’t directly used, mention of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions...nothing graphic with any of these triggers but worth a forewarning
Day 01 - A song that makes you happy
Honey Spiders by The Parlotones
“The Parlotones are this fantastic indie rock band out of South Africa. And I actually thought about doing their song, uh, Stars Fall Down for day sixteen, but I’m going with Honey Spiders for day 1. There were lots of Parlotones songs, I mean. Push Me to The Floor, We Call This Dancing, Should We Fight Back...but ah, Honey Spiders always puts me in a good mood.”
Day 02 - A song that helps you clear your head
Light of a Clear Blue Morning by Dolly Parton
“I grew up on Dolly, and it’s funny because for the longest time this song wasn’t really on my radar as much as it is now. But when I was twenty-two I was going through something really difficult, and my then-fiance now husband was abroad for work, so I was alone in our apartment and just. Really, profoundly sad and lonely. So I put on a Dolly Parton record and just laid on the bed and Light Of A Clear Blue Morning played and I had a good long cry and felt so much better after that. When I need to think about how to solve a difficult problem, or I feel overwhelmed, I just listen to that song.”
Day 03 - Song you love from a band/artist you hate
Should’ve Been A Cowboy by Toby Keith
“Honestly, he’s called me a nasty lady to my face and I’ve called him a facist enabling pig to his, so I have no qualms openly saying I hate Toby Keith. That being said, Should’ve Been A Cowboy is one of the best country songs of the 90s, undeniably. I loved that song when it came out when I was thirteen, and I still love it.”
Day 04 - A song about drugs or alcohol
Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss
“This is probably cheating, because my lovely best friend Daniel and I cover this a lot at Dara & Danny shows. But today look who I have! My friend Max from Seoul Hanoi’d! Max the Korean Scot who can’t hide his accent to save his life, so let’s see how it sounds in a Scottish accent.”
Day 05 - A protest song
Talking Vietnam Blues by Phil Ochs /// and Here’s to The State of Mississippi by Phil Ochs
“This one was hard because I. Fucking. Love. Protest music. I could have done a whole 30 days of protest music - wow, let me know if I should do that and give my husband a heart attack with all the twitter threats I’ll invite. Huh. Right, so I was going to do Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven by John Prine. But I decided to do two Phil Ochs songs because I don’t think Phil Ochs is talked about enough. It’s a shame we lost him so young. Ochs’ sardonic humor and honesty in his writing has influenced me as a songwriter deeply. When I write political songs, I don’t hold back, and it’s because of Phil Ochs’ writing that I have that courage. I’ve been singing Love Me, I’m A Liberal since I was in college with constantly updating lyrics. It was so hard to even choose which songs of his to do because for his fairly short career his songbook is lengthy and full of gems. I’m Going to Say It Now, Draft Dodger Rag, Spanish Civil War Song, I Ain’t Marching Anymore...I couldn’t pick one so I’m cheating and recording two.”
Day 06 - A song you wish you wrote
When I Think About Cheatin’ by Gretchen Wilson
“I will forever be pissed off that I didn’t write this song. I’m absolute trash for my husband, so it’s never -- I’ve never had to be in a situation to ever consider -- but this song gets me every time. It feels like I could have written it. Because we do spend a lot of time apart travelling for our work. And the sentiment expressed in the song is a little too real.”
Day 07 - A song in a language you don’t speak
Khattar by Khine Htoo
“This will either be a charming attempt to sing in Burmese or I’m about to offend a lot of people. Which, being a politically outspoken woman on the internet, I’m used to anyway. So. 1, 2, 3, okay here goes.”
Day 08 - A song by an artist no longer living
Phop Samnang by Sinn Sisamouth (inspiration)
“Haha, you thought I’d see the name of this category and not do a Sinn Sisamouth song? You were wrong.”
Day 09 - A song you want to dance to at your wedding
Devoted To You by The Everly Brothers
“I’m already married, so this was actually our first dance song at our wedding. Day three of our wedding, like the more Westernized wedding ceremony day. We had a three day long traditional Cambodian wedding and I felt like a princess. An-y-way!”
Day 10 - A song that makes you cry
Borrowed Rooms and Old Wood Floor by Emily Scott Robinson
“Unfortunately, Emily Scott Robinson and I aren’t related. Sad, I know, because she’s so talented. Almost her entire album Traveling Mercies is...sad as hell. The record reminded me of early Dolly Parton, and my second solo album. You know, all those sad-ass songs. The Dress is honestly the song that makes me the saddest but I can’t even listen to it without crying so.”
Day 11 - A song that you love hearing live
Prove My Love by Violent Femmes
“There is nobody I have seen in concert more than Dolly Parton, but Violent Femmes and George Strait come incredibly close. The Cranberries, the amount of times I saw them in the 90s and early 2000s...close fourth. Probably. The very first concert I dragged my husband to was a Violent Femmes concert, he was not prepared for how hard college me went.”
Day 12 - A song from before 1960
There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth The Salt of My Tears by Libby Holman
“This song is from 1928. I came across it when I was in grad school and it’s, as the kids say, a bop.”
Day 13 - A song you think everybody should listen to
White Man’s World by Jason Isbell
“I think perspectives of people of color should of course take precedence in these conversations. But I find this song to be a good faith attempt of a white man coming to terms with the institutional racism and sexism in the world around him. And I think this song can be a useful tool to explain certain concepts of racial justice to ignorant but well-meaning folks. As a woman of color I think Jason Isbell did a great job not centering himself even though it was from his perspective. This song is great musically and necessary socially.”
Day 14 - A song from the 1970s
You’re No Good by Linda Ronstadt
“Linda Ronstadt is grossly underrated, that’s all I have to say here.”
Day 15 - A song people wouldn’t expect you to like
Racists by Anti-flag
“I mean, I’ve talked about how much I like punk in the past, and I remember a video of Seoul Hanoi’d doing Spanish Bombs at a San Antonio show made the rounds, but I don’t think I’ve talked about how much I like Anti-flag. People don’t expect me to like punk for some reason. But I agree with...everything punk music is all about.”
Day 16 - A song that holds a lot of meaning to you
Blue by LeAnn Rimes
“It’s silly, but I won a county fair singing competition with this song in high school and it really fueled my passion for music, that win. It’s also the first song Cornelius heard me go full Georgia on, with the yodels and all, at the little bar in my hometown on his first trip meeting my parents. The song doesn’t cut to my very soul ot anythin’, but it’s special to me.”
Day 17 - A song attached to a memory
Supernova by Liz Phair
“I remember buying Liz Phair’s Whip-smart album when I was eleven. And in college, when I was getting ready for dates with Cornelius in my dorm room, I would dance around to a CD I burned and wrote on it with a sharpie, ‘Pre-date Movie Scene Music.’ God, what was even on there? I’m about to expose myself as the most basic 1999-2001 bitch. I remember Head Over Feet, I mean, Alanis Morisette? I was a young woman in 2000, obviously I loved her. Mm, Dreams by The Cranberries...oh, Kiss Me, Sixpence None The Richer...yeah, anyway, Supernova was on there.”
Day 18 - A song from the year you were born
Call Me by Blondie
“...I can’t believe Call Me is as old as I am.”
Day 19 - A song that reminds you of someone you miss
Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (yes, of course she does a cover with banjo)
“This was my late best friend Molly’s favorite hymn. And I sang it at her funeral at her husband’s request. Molly and I grew up together in the small town of Payne Lake, Georgia and Molly was the most devout Christian...but she was also the first person I came out to as bisexual when I was a teenager, and she said that Jesus taught her that love was the greatest commandment and that meant I was automatically twice as good at it as her. Her faith guided her every action but she never talked down on her two best friends - Dan(iel Maitland) and I for not sharing it. Molly was doing the whole emulate Jesus thing beautifully. I miss her every day and it’s been seven years. If you ever think that people won’t miss you...you’re wrong. All right, let’s see if I can get through this without crying.”
Day 20 - A song by an artist you discovered this year
Hello, Anxiety by Phum Viphurit
“I just discovered this quirky Thai-Kiwi singer and not to be dramatic, but he’s my favorite thing in the world right now.”
Day 21 - A song with a city or country in the title
Oh! Phnom Penh (track 20)
“This song was written after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and after people began to make their way to what was left of their homes, alone, or with what was left of their families. If you want to learn more about what that was like to actually live it, my cousin Reena Boran has a video interviewing her parents and paternal grandfather and uncle about it. Reena is a journalism student currently studying in London but she lives in Cambodia. Her mother is my aunt Malisruot, my mother’s youngest sister. The video is English subtitled on her channel, I’ll link it in the description box below.”
Day 22 - A song from the 1960s
To Sir, With Love by Lulu
“I didn’t actually discover this song until I heard it covered at a 10,000 Maniacs concert in the 90s. My friend Allison was standing next to me and I just started crying and she’s like ‘are you okay?’ and all I just blubbered out ‘My dad!’ For the uninitiated, my dad married my mom, who’d raised me alone until then, when I was six and he adopted me when I was eight. My dad didn’t have to adopt me, he didn’t have to call me his daughter, he could have just been like half of my friends’ stepdads and give me a place to live and nothing else. But my dad was my biggest supporter from day one. He convinced my mom to let me join the dance team and show choir instead of science club, he was the one that talked my mom down from probably killing me when they found out I was only studying music and not music and political science at NYU. I am who I am today because he is my dad. And this song just says everything I’ve always thought about him.”
Day 23 - A song from your childhood
Una Lacrima Sul Viso by Bobby Solo
“But Franny, aren’t you a Cambodian raised in the US? Yes, but you were fooled. My very white father is also an immigrant. He is from Switzerland and while he didn’t teach me to speak Italian and German growing up, he played German, Italian, and French records all the time. My parents often spoke to each other in French and I picked up some French but properly studied it starting in high school, and I didn’t study Italian until college -- and my German is still …. [points to a spot on the screen where she later inserted a card linking to a video on her cousin Köbi Framagucci’s YouTube channel titled ‘Can My American Cousin Speak German?’ where he tests her Standard and Swiss German speaking and comprehension]. But hell if I couldn’t sing every one of the songs from my father’s French, German, and Italian record before I knew what the words even meant.”
Day 24 - A song that gives you chill vibes
Glorify by Ivan & Alyosha
“Dan(iel Maitland) and I actually have an entire playlist on my Spotify accounts of songs to listen to to get us out of writers’ block. And one that I often will put on repeat and just absorb through my headphones with my eyes closed is a song called Glorify by Ivan & Alyosha. I think it touches on a lot of the themes I include in my songwriting. Christian mythology, the darker side of humanity, it often reminds me of what I love about songwriting. If you say please I might drop a link to that playlist.”
Day 25 - A song that’s your signature song
Long Gone Lonesome Blues by Hank Williams“Right, so I chose this instead of a Kitty Wells song or I Get A Kick Out of You (her being
featured on a 2005
recording propelled her career majorly) because if you’re familiar with me you might have seen a video that went around in like….2017? 2016? of Dan(iel Maitland) and I doin’ the song at our hometown bar in 2014. I posted it in response to some tweets because hoes mad when a WOC calls out racism and sexism in the Nashville music industry. ‘Bet she don’t even know Hank’, really? You think I wouldn’t know the history of one of the two music industries I work in? Please. Anyway, she knows Hank and nails the incredibly technical yodel -- the
most difficult
one in Hank’s songbook - in Long Gone Lonesome Blues. Mm...Lovesick Blues though, that also strikes fear into my heart. Anyway stay mad I guess?”
Day 26 - A song by your favorite band
Gun Shy by 10,000 Maniacs
“10,000 Maniacs was one of my favorite bands when I was in like 5th grade through 10th. I listened to them for a little while after Natalie Merchant left for a solo career, but the Natalie Merchant era was really what resonated with me the most. Gun Shy was a bit too advanced for my little 5th, 7th grade ears to really appreciate when I first discovered the album In My Tribe. Merchant’s voice -- because like, I don’t have a very conventional voice either, so her and Dolores O’Riordan really changed my entire perspective on what a woman’s voice can sound like in rock music. Um, yeah, so her voice more than the lyrics just wowed me. And as I got closer to graduating high school and especially in college I actually understood what What’s The Matter Here, Hey Jack Kerouac, and Gun Shy were talking about. Gun Shy...really became a significant song to me because...being born in 1980 I grew up in a relatively peaceful time. The Cold War was all but thawed by my tenth birthday. But I was getting ready to leave my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s apartment for class at NYU on the morning of 9/11. We stood in line for hours to donate blood. And then my government invaded two completely unrelated countries and jingoism and terrifying, fervent nationalism, and xenophobia just smacked me in the face. And friends of mine from high school were convicted to drop out of college and join the Army, and died, for an unjust, imperialist war, and suddenly Phil Ochs, John Prine, and Bob Dylan lyrics hit a lot different, and I understood what Gun Shy was really about.”
Day 27 - A song you hate by an artist you love
Mrs.Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel
“Paul Simon is one of my favorite songwriters ever, um, and I actually used to like Mrs. Robinson….until I got married and everyone sang it at me. It’s kind of my fault, I did choose to take my husband’s last name. And I leaned into it by making my social media handles all Mrs. Robinson...but still. Only play the song around me if you want to die.”
Day 28 - A song that a younger you would have loved
Mean by Taylor Swift
“I’m so genuinely glad that I am older than Taylor Swift. Middle school Franny did not need Taylor Swift to enable me and fuel my ego. Some of her singles, while not really 35 and 40 year old Franny’s cup of tea, young me would have played until my mother hid the record or cassette from me. Although - fuck if Tim McGraw didn’t immediately give my happily married ass flashbacks to my first love and make me bawl like a baby? Right, so when Speak Now came out and I listened to it, Mean, while not a song that adult me has listened to maybe more like ten times, I immediately thought ‘wow, I needed this song when I was in middle and high school.’ I could literally picture 7th grade me with my little guitar and my little cowboy boots my dad bought for me singing this at the talent show making eye contact with the kids who bullied me as if it was some kind of own when it’s not. I could still, almost thirty years later, name them if I really wanted. So, for 7th grade me, Mean by Taylor Swift.”
Day 29- A song that reminds you of your partner/spouse
ផាត់ជាយបណ្តូលចិត្ / Phat Cheay Bon'dol Chet by Sinn Sisamuth (translation) (female singer covering it) (modern, studio recording of a male and female singer dueting it) (a cool violin cover) (another female singer) (cool guitar cover)
Feat. some members of Seoul Hanoi’d. Andy Chaiyaporn (violin), Max Cho (piano), Jodie Batbayar (cello), Aisulu Niyazova-Li (percussion) and Franny has her guitar
“The song, lyrically, only reminds me of my husband a little bit. But Phat Cheay Bondol Chet has several memories with my husband attached to it. The first time he heard me sing in Khmer was at my mother’s house in Atlanta when I had him visit the first time to meet my parents. My mom had a little dinner party at our house to show him off, like Asian moms do when they think their daughter snags a good one, and I was hand washing the dishes while my mom and the other Cambodian parents were listening to Sinn Sisamuth records. I’ve always loved the song I’ll be showing y’all today, like I’ve always just stopped what I was doing and -- so it came on and I just started singing along without really being aware of it. And then at a different diaspora get together that summer, that song came on and I just kinda. Pulled him aside to the side yard of that person’s house to look at the stars with him and translated the song. It’s one of the Khmer songs he instantly recognizes now, so it’s special.”
Franny did NOT say in the video that college her 100% had him sit in the grass with her outside that person’s house, where nobody could see, so she could makeout with him
Day 30- A song by one of your favorite songwriters
Reincarnation by Roger Miller
Feat. Seoul Hanoi’d, done more in the style of the Cake cover
Also instead of singing the lyric “you’re a girl, I’m a boy” she goes “you’re a girl, so am I” because she doesn’t ever change pronouns, she just makes it gay because she is a bi-con
“Roger Miller, to me, is as important as Dolly Parton, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, in the American songbook. He’s not as talked about which is a shame because his discography is iconic. Getting to be a part of King of The Road was one of the highlights of my career.”
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How to Get Diagnosed #ActuallyAutistic in Just 26 Years
First off, this is not a poor-me story.This is a journey to #AutisticJoy story…
I’m a singer/songwriter, pretend Rock Star with a decent following… after at least 5 other careers.
I’m also #ActuallyAutistic. Or my fave hashtag… #AutisticAF.
Two most frequent private-message questions I get?
Not about lyrics, my guitar playing, or even my mohawk…
1. Could I be autistic?
2. Should I get a diagnosis?
Well, here’s my way-long, way-detailed, way genuinely autistic answer…
I was born in 1953. Long before autism or Asperger’s were widely discussed in medicine or popular culture. More or less, just beginning in the 70s.
At least by 1957, at 4, I knew I was “different.” Family and neighbor kids told me so.
A lot.
In kindergarten, a teacher reported I was unusually creative, but “stayed to myself.” After 2nd grade intelligence testing, I was tagged “gifted.”
But my behavior was “odd.” Solitary. Formal in speech, a know-it-all. “Insensitive to context,” liked talking and playing in class. “Inattentive” to lessons.
I had one close friend at a time… In fact, only one I remember in all of primary school. In 4th & 5th grade. Jeff.
Wonder what he’s been up to the last 56 years…
My intelligence: uneven. My reading skills were off the chart, but verbal learning, most of education at the time, was difficult for me. Math tested high, but I was so impulsive on quizzes, I needed remedial classes.
Tests were a silly game to me. It was fun to be the first-one-done. I couldn’t have cared less about grades. I’m a process-, not results-oriented guy.
And most glaring? I was disliked, even hated, by schoolmates, cousins, perhaps even parents.
I was a target for mockery, hate speech, bullying, physical and sexual attack, and later molestation. And universal disappointment: “You’re not living up to your potential.”
A history of dozens of jobs, dozens of relocations, lost years in a cult, lost years in badly matched relationships…
And honestly? A history of causing great pain to others. Inadvertently perhaps, but not always. Then circling back to the couple of decades in what most would label a “cult…”
Something was just not right with this picture.
I first sought diagnosis at 17 following suicide attempt #1 in 1970. The experience was horrific.
I felt badgered by the therapist, “I know you have a secret you want to tell me.” I wanted so badly to please her. But had no idea what I was feeling, much less why.
As still happens under great stress, I temporarily lost language ability. I became mute. Which has several times been interpreted as “resistance,” “guardedness,” or even “passive aggression” by “helping” professionals.
I didn’t try therapy again until my first year in grad school, 1980. The psychiatrist summarily dismissed me without a plan when I didn’t respond to imipramine (an anti-depressant)– possibly I pissed him off. I seem to have a talent for stepping on therapist toes.
But in 1991, I entered the mental health system and essentially never left. Every new psychiatrist, psychologist, therapeutic social worker confidently diagnosed me… with something entirely different.
Between 1991 and 2016, I was diagnosed with adjustment disorder, major depression, type II Bipolarity, rapid cycling bipolarity, malingering, borderline personality disorder, dissociative disorder NOS (including discussion of multiplicity), PTSD….
There have been additional discussions of various anxiety disorders (especially social anxiety), attention deficit, schizophrenia, TIAs, stroke damage…
Pretty sure I’m leaving a few out.
With each new diagnosis, each and every professional confidently told me he or she had nailed it.
This time…
And they could help.
I was medicated accordingly with imipramine, Prozac and all the modern SSRIs, Welbutrin, Effexor, Lithium, depakote, tegretol, gabapentin, klonapin, lorazepam, respirdal, the occasional syringe of haldol, provigil and other narcolepsy drugs, sleep aids, supplements like fish oil, more I’ve forgotten….
And offered suggestions of Abilify, Seroquel, other anti-psychotics, electro-shock (ECT)…
As well as therapies including Jungian, supportive, interpersonal, analytical, psychodynamic, cognitive, task-centered, solution focused, dialectical behavior, cognitive behavioral…
I was myself a counselor from 2001 to 2011. Strange, but true.
Not one of these interventions helped me materially.
Not one.
And I experienced some very concerning side effects: tics, emotional numbness, difficulty thinking, feeling like a stranger in a strange mind. I totally gave up on treatment and medication in 2011. Bouts of suicidality ensued.
A very few friends and one wife threw the term autistic around over the years, but I never followed up. It seemed so unlikely. I was so bright. So articulate. Even somewhat successful… for a few months at a time.
And without conscious awareness, I had become adept at hiding the fact I was actually dysfunctional… perhaps the majority of the time.
Plus, I could pass for “normal” by masking… when not under stress. I learned by junior high to practice my favorite classmates’ neurotypical behavior in the bathroom mirror. Hide stimming, meltdowns, panic attacks, the total autistic burnouts lasting sometimes months, years…
In 2011, the intimacy of the most successful relationship of my life forced me to look inwardly as deeply as I could in order to avoid losing my third wife. (We are still together, deeply in love, but live in separate houses a few hundred feet apart. She needs breaks from my intensity. I find even her company exhausting after a few hours.)
My now-third wife had a family member with “high-functioning” autism, what we used to call Asperger’s (and what we now call, simply, autism). Watching this young boy negotiate his world was like watching myself in a magnifying mirror.
We had so many behaviors in common. Mine were just somewhat better disguised. With my wife’s encouragement in 2012, I began reading articles, books, online forums…
In 2016, when we separated briefly, I finally re-entered therapy. This time, I contacted various experts in adult autism through Indiana University’s Indiana Institute For Disabilities Community (IIDC).
Bingo.
Every symptom…Explained.
Every “flaw” in my character… traced back to this pervasive developmental diagnosis.
I am making progress in a kind of task-oriented counseling. Working on strategies to accommodate characteristics that just ain’t gonna change…
But the key gifts that external, credible diagnosis gave me:
Accepting I really am different, with very different needs from neurotypical folks.
Providing for those needs, as I discovered them. For instance, understanding my “special interests” are not hobbies. They are central to my survival. My job.
Reducing stimulation, sensory & social. Accepting I will have few intimate relationships in my life and becoming cautious about “friendships,” only those few folks who take the long, long journey to know and like me. After a lifetime naively assuming each new stranger was a new friend, my motto became, “Don’t like me? Don’t hang.”
Spending unashamed time… alone. I have a radical need for autonomy, while simultaneous difficulty managing independence when any other human is present. As much as I crave intimacy, I must manage my time with humans. Say less than 5 minutes with a stranger before anxiety or panic sets in, maybe 2 hours with my wife. Which brings me to…
Over the last few years, I’ve not only experienced reduction in anxiety, depression, suicidality, dissociation, night terrors, meltdowns, panic… I’ve come to realize my natural state.
Finding love. My neurotypical wife and I respect, admire, encourage, and desire one another. Pretty much a first for me.
Autistic joy.
Not disease…
Joy.
When I’m creating words or music, walking alone in Nature, watering my garden, cooking, fermenting pickles, making bread, decorating, yard sale-ing, reading, loving my pets, meditating, even shaving…
I’m in the flow.
There is no time. There is no space. No surroundings. No memory. No pain. Just lizard-warming-in-the-sun…
Joy.
Everything that restricts that joy? Gotta go. Good riddance…
So, diagnosis?
Yeah.
That’s my story.
And this time, I’m sticking to it.
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What are your favorite memories from watching season 1 of Ed, Edd n Eddy?
Ah, the ’90s (and early 2000s). Nostalgia is once againhitting me like a pillowcase stuffed with a ton of bricks. I had to revisit my childhood favourite last night for pure nostalgia’s sake, and looking back at the show through the lens of an adult, it’s no wonder why it had a relatively long life from 1999 to 2009. Now, I wasraised on Cartoon Network (because it broadcasts in India, too; it was actually my country’s first kid’s channel in 1995). Though I enjoyed a good majority of the shows thataired between the late ’90s and early 2000’s (including but not limited to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy,and Codename: Kids Next Door), allgreat shows, mind, none of these titles were quite so wacky as Ed, Edd n Eddy. EEnE was not as artisticallyendeavoured as Samurai Jack (2001-2004,recently rebooted in 2011) or the original Teen Titans(2003-2006), two shows that were targeted at the big kids, and the storytellingwas not nearly as absurdly unsettling and atmospheric as Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999-2002; its original short film whichwas nominated for an Academy Award). Yet, it was unconventional in its own way,and an artistic milestone, if I may be so frank. EEnE broke boundaries in waysthat animation hadn’t quite attempted before or since, and it still resonateswith me today as a 28-year-old post grad English major (with a hobby in animation). I believe EEnE has thatimpact on a good majority of millennials of my generation. Whereas many people regard SpongeBob as the modern day equivalent of The Looney Tunes in its cultural impact and popularity, I think a lot of kids of my era will think otherwise. I love SponeBob, but EEnE, to me personally, is a classic in its own right, a classic that never truly died. I won’t say it’s an underrated gem, though; the cult following is enormous! It’s a show I keep returning to for nostalgia and comfort, a show I can watch again and again and relive the memories of my idealistic and troubled youth. Much to everyone’s surprise, the show was one of Cartoon Network’s mostsuccessful and popular, seeing as it lasted awhopping ten years, which secured its legacy as the longest-running CartoonNetwork original series at the time. So whatmakes EEnE so special?
I was nine-years-old when the show premiered in India on 22 August, 1999. (Yes, it was dubbed in Hindi; years later I discovered the English version on YouTube and I much prefer it.) I remember going to a friend’s house to watch it because I didn’t have a television set. I was born and raised in rural Jaipur, Rajasthan on my Dadiji’s goat farm, so us kids had many responsibilities before and after school. We didn’t have much time for the telly, but it was a luxury after our chores and homework was completed. EEnE was a nice escape for me, even if the kids in the show didn’t exactly live the life I did, but that’s what I liked about it. As much as I love my country, I didn’t want to watch the daily life I knew of hard work and blazing sun. I wanted to pretend like I lived in the quiet suburbs of an undefined Western country, spending lazy summers doing absolutely nothing (except to conjure up ingenious ideas to swindle the allowances of your poor, unsuspecting peers). Of course, one of the kids on the show happened to live on a farm (Rolf), and that’s what makes EEnE so universal, no matter what country you’re from. Sure, my childhood village didn’t look like the cul-de-sac of Peach Creek, nor was I surrounded by people of diverse backgrounds and colours, but though EEnE seemed to be more pandering to American and Canadian audiences, I never once said to myself, ‘’No, I can’t relate to these characters; they don’t look like me or share my culture!’’ Nope, not once. The thought never crossed my mind. I immediately fell head over heels for the three pre-teen protagonists. They were as differing in personality as they were ridiculous and charming. I don’t need characters to look like me in order to relate to them. (In fact, maybe that’s why I didn’t pay as much attention to Rolf upon my first viewing–perhaps he reminded me too much of myself and I tended to ignore him.; he was a foreigner to the characters in the story, not necessarily to me, so he wasn’t that interesting to me as a child, even if I do find European cultures fascinating. Luckily times change–I’m proud to say that he’s one of my darling favourites now. And no, contrary to popular belief, Rolf is NOT Indian or South Asian, I beg to differ.)
No, I was not the exact age of a middle schooler when I first started watching the show (I was still in lower primary school which is the equivalent of elementary school in the U.S.), but ironically enough, I could still relate. I was old enough (and I started puberty fairly early, which isn’t uncommon for children living in developing countries). I remember my initial excitement… the network advertised the living hell out of the show.
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It didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before. I remember it was a lot better than I anticipated; I still, to this day, think it’s the funniest show that ever graced prime-time television. After all these years, it still makes me laugh. ‘’The Ed-touchables’’ in particular, is comedy gold (more on that later). I didn’t have the happiest childhood, but I won’t say it was the worst either. Much like the kids in EEnE, my childhood wasn’t Walgreens Perfect, sugar-coated or ideal; it wasn’t like the ‘’Save the Children’’ ads either. It was just somewhere in-between, back in the day before cell phones became popular, back when children had no limits to their imagination and played outside, back when times seemed simpler in our fond recollection, but was it really? Life became worse for me around 13, 14, after we sold the farm and relocated to the city, so I associate EEnE with happier times on the farm, when my Dadiji and Papa were still alive, when the family was still together. EEnE got me through my worst years; it gave me a piece of mind, so it will always hold a special place in my heart, with its ugly grotesqueness, salty, greasy rule-breaking agenda and otherwise high-cholesterol self-indulgent art style to dry those tears and put a smile on my face. Ronald McDonald who?
Don’t ask. It’s an Ed thing.
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Blinded by the Light: Part One
So I just got back from vacation, and one of the places we spent a bit of time was the coast in British Columbia, a place I frequented when I was 17 and had just moved out of my mother’s house. And it got me thinking back to that time, which is something I have steadfastly and consistently not done since that time in my life ended, which was when I was 19, which was in early 2001. Because the truth is, it scared me. It scared me that I could become so lost, that I could have been so naïve, that I could have put myself in the face of such dangerous and violating circumstances and still have such a hard time saying no, that the nice-girl smile was so firmly smeared on my face. It scared me that there were people as fucked up as the ones I had met in the world. Yes, my sheltered suburban childhood was abruptly shattered when I went looking for utopia.
So, like many other things I write about in my blog, it’s probably a good thing to talk about, face, process, learn from, and let go of. And also, like many other things I write about in my blog, I’m going to do all that here. So grab your patchouli oil, your tie-dye, your hemp and your bong, and take this cringing walk down memory rut with me.
The beginning-beginning of this story is actually way before the actual beginning, but I need to tell it from here so you understand why it all happened the way it did.
As I’ve mentioned before, my parents are divorced and I have never gotten along well with my mother. After my dad moved out and it was just our mom, my older sister and I, my sister was sort of the buffer zone between my mother and I. If she was gone, the room became palpably tense. If she was there, all was laughter and ease. So when she announced one day that she was getting on a Greyhound with nothing but her backpack, bound for the wild blue yonder with no fixed plans and no intention on arriving, the shock and “Oh crap” moment was multi-layered. I was fifteen, she was nineteen, and she was my world. Maybe because my dad was “gone” and my mother wasn’t “there” for me, but her leaving totally crushed me, yet in retrospect, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me, because I was forced to define my own personality, something I had avoided doing up until that moment. I worshiped her, so being her was good enough for me. It was uncomfortable, but much needed. This rose was long past due blooming.
So she left that summer, and my mother and I barely spoke anymore, and it only got worse as high school progressed. So the following spring break, when I was sixteen and my sister had been landed in the mountain/snowboarding town of Whistler for a while and asked me if I wanted to visit her, it’s pretty obvious that I said yes. My mind was about to be opened to hitherto unknown horizons of possibility.
My sis picked me up from the airport in Vancouver, where I was still dancing-eyed from my first flight ever (it was a cloudy night, a solid blanket of cloud, and once the plane was above them, the crescent moon lit the grey blanket to silver, and the stars were brighter than I’d ever seen. It was a new planet. I had a window seat.) We stayed the night in a hostel in Vancouver, then took the bus to Whistler the following morning. She wanted me to experience the ride, the transition from ocean to deep mountains, and damn, did I ever experience it. My eyes were opened.
From town we hitch hiked north, then walked onto a logging road where she told me with an evil grin we would be hiking up a mountain. I had a massive travel bag with me, so this was extra fun. But it was well worth it when we arrived. Understatement of the last eight millennium.
She was living in a tiny log cabin with a wood burning stove, on the side of a mountain, no electricity. There were still patches of snow on the ground, and lots of firewood. Candles to read by, battery-powered speakers for music, paper and pens and books and little pieces of art everywhere you looked. An eight sided window over the bed showed a sky I had never seen. And silence. A silence that’s indescribable when you’ve only lived in a houses that are always filled with hummings, beepings, clickings, distractions. A silence that’s closer to real peace.
And so there I stayed for ten days. My clothes quickly became saturated with the heavenly smell of woodsmoke, I explored the town and found treasures everywhere. People smiled knowing smiles and their eyes sparkled with secrets that I somehow knew too.I listened to new music and met people who, if you glanced at them quickly enough, you were sure were really gnomes, dwarves or faeries concealing themselves from you beneath their hood. And when it was time to go home, I cried like a baby.
That summer, and the following spring break, I went out and visited her again, and gradually a dream grew in my heart: that when I graduated high school, I would move out to B.C. permanently. One way flight. A new home. I couldn’t wait.
So I graduated in June of 1999, and I was still seventeen, being born in August. But I was determined to go. I worked for a few weeks prior to grad to save up enough for a plane ticket, and I was set. I thought.
My mother, obviously, had serious misgivings about me leaving when I was only seventeen, and I was a young seventeen if you know what I mean. So very, very naïve. But I was bound and determined, and I don’t think I would have stayed even if she had said I had to. In my mind, my hometown of Winnipeg was over, done, and paradise awaited me. I remember cleaning out my room, blithely throwing away things that had huge sentimental value to me then, thinking breezily that I was becoming a new person, that the old me was dead. I honestly thought that I would get out there and all my problems, my bad habits, anything that hurt or was less than perfect, would just magically disappear. Little did I realize back then that, as the Buddhists say, wherever you go, there you are. And I wish I’d kept those sentimental things. I’m just glad I didn’t throw away everything.
I planned my flight so I left on the new moon, July 12th, 1999. New beginning. My mom drove me to the airport in silence, a silence that I realize now was filled with her fear for her seriously naïve, young daughter who was sailing off into the Blue with no money and no life experience. My sister was meeting me at the airport on the other end, something my mom probably insisted upon.
My dad and a couple of my friends were there to see me off, and I remember feeling their sadness and being kind of baffled by it. I was too excited to be sad, and back then I don’t think I really knew the value of a true friend. I was looking ahead, not back.
So I flew and I landed and I almost exploded with excitement, but finally my feet were on the “soil” of “home” as I thought of it then. My sister met me at baggage claim and we hugged and she said, “Hello,” like I was a baby, fresh and new to the world. I totally was.
We hung around Van for a day, and at one point she asked me, “What do you want to do?” I think that was the first moment that I saw the other side (the shadow side?) of freedom: responsibility. I wasn’t in high school anymore, with everyone else making all the decisions about my time, my energy, my life. And I must admit, I didn’t have an answer for her. I had just sort of assumed that once I got out there, my “path” would just sort of unfold before my feet, the Universe (as I saw the Divine at the time) directing me to where I needed to be, who I needed to meet, with no conscious volition on my part. At the time I would have told you that that was the most enlightened way to live. Looking back, I see that I was just a girl who was shit scared to make any real decisions, and I was serenely covering it up under a thin veneer of “spirituality.” (I was soon to meet many, many other people who bullshitted their way through their lives in much the same way. . .and the reflection wasn’t pretty. But we’ll get to that.)
So I followed my sister back up to Whistler, partly because I actually wanted to, and partly because I was way too scared to be on my own. We hung out there for a couple weeks, swimming naked in Lost Lake, this amazing place (the nudey dock was on the opposite side of the lake to the touristy beach; they couldn’t see us, which amused us) and being forest dwellers, which I loved. The full moon approaching, we hitch hiked back to the city, hopped the ferry, and headed to Sombrio Beach on Vancouver Island for our very first Rainbow Gathering.
[Excerpt from The Oxford Hippie Dictionary:
A Rainbow Gathering (reyn-boh gath-er-ing) is a gathering of people, usually self-proclaimed neo hippies, held on the three days leading up to, the day and night of, then the three days leading away from, the full moon in the months of July and August. The Gatherings can range anywhere from a handful of people to the hundreds, sometimes the thousands in the larger gatherings in the US, and are usually held on a large public beach that is not frequented by the public. Many speculations exist as to why this is, one of the most common being that it is to curb the stench of unwashed bodies which is prevalent at large gatherings of neo-hippies. Sometimes tea tree oil just doesn’t cut it.
A communal kitchen serves everyone three meals a day, generally consisting of certified organic, healthy food, which many of the neo hippies are quite happy to eat on a piece of bark with a stick serving as a utensil. This food is often a bland beige in colour with a taste to match. Whether the majority of the neo-hippies are just pretending to like it, or that their taste buds have somehow been damaged by an unknown plague that afflicts them all remains a mystery. Kitchen helpers are all volunteers, as no money is ever officially exchanged at the Gatherings.
Nudity is accepted among both women and men, and a general “do whatever you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone” attitude is pervasive.
Hallucinogenics such as mushrooms and LSD are common, as is marijuana, hashish, and other mind-altering substances, mostly of the “natural” persuasion.
Alcohol is not as common.
The majority of the neo hippies pitch tents as their shelter of choice, but some will brings campers or fifth wheels, and of course the presence of VW microbuses from the 1960’s is always prevalent. Some of the more die-hard among those at the Gatherings will simply string a tarp between a few trees and sleep under it, while others won’t bring any shelter at all, trusting in “the Universe,” “Gaia,” or “Jah” to provide for them. (Luckily for them, their comrades are more often than not willing to share everything they have, including shelter. And if not, well, the hospital is only a four hour drive away, after you’ve bushwhacked through the rainforest for two hours to get to the highway with an acute case of pneumonia or exposure.)
Side note: “The Universe” as used in this context does not refer to ‘the totality of known or supposed objects and phenomena throughout space’ (from http://www.dictionary.com) as most people think of it, but rather a benign, sexless spiritual force that is constantly guiding, but never forcing, humankind to their various destinies; Gaia is a reference to the ancient Greek mother goddess of earth; Jah refers to the Rastafarian singular male God or the Holy Trinity, being Father, Son and Holy Ghost (Psalms 68:4, King James Bible.) The fact that most of the neo-hippies at Rainbow Gatherings are not astronomers, Greek or Rastafarian doesn’t seem to bother them.
There are not many widely organized activities at the Gatherings beyond the three standard daily meals and the nightly “drum circle.”
The aforementioned drum circle unofficially starts around sunset each night, and consists of everyone who owns a hand drum making a circle around the large central bonfire and drumming spontaneously together until the late hours. Unchoreographed dancing and fire spinning often accompany this activity.
Beyond these described activities, the neo-hippies generally keep to their own smaller groups and do whatever they please. Meeting other neo-hippies, bartering for handmade clothing, jewellery, drums and other instruments such as didgeridoos (an Australian aborigine wind instrument) is also a common practice.
Many times during a Gathering you will hear the unified cry of “Leave only your footprints behind!” no doubt as a respectful nod to Gaia. To any newcomers to the group, “Welcome home!” is often called out, meaning that at the Rainbow Gathering, everyone is loved unconditionally and wholly welcome. The pretentiousness of this saying appears to go largely unnoticed.]
So we hit up this hippie gathering, and yes, I am ashamed to say, I was one of the people eating their gruel off a piece of bark with a stick. It added some flavour to it, if nothing else.
I should probably state here that, despite my all-consuming sarcasm and rather excessive cynicism, there were some cool experience I had at these gatherings that still make me smile and think and wonder when I recall them today.
For example, at the first one we went to in July, on the first night that I heard the drumming, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I can’t explain why, but something in me heard those deep bass tones and just went, “Yeah.” So I was sitting there in the firelight, listening to the rhythm, the pounding, feeling it in my bones and my blood, struggling to overcome my shyness and actually ask someone if I could try their djembe, wondering if it would be alright to ask that. I mean, would it be like asking someone if I could make love with their partner? I can attest that the bond between a person and their instrument (or an instrument and their person?) can be deep. So as I’m sitting there, I gradually started eavesdropping on a conversation between a girl around my age and a guy who was slightly older that were sitting near me. The girl was passionately explaining that she believes that when someone chooses to follow their desire, their passion, their “calling,” it’s not a selfish choice, but rather a gift to everyone around them as well as themselves. I sat pondering this for a few minutes, kind of struck by the irony that she was talking about exactly what I was struggling to do, and then the guy she had been talking to got up and left. I steeled myself and spoke up, telling her that I really liked what she had been saying. She immediately and effusively began talking about it again, reiterating what she had been saying to the guy a few minutes before. She paused then, and asked me, “What do you really want to do?”
I kind of sat there for a minute, struggling against all the self-doubt, then I blurted out, “I want to drum!”
She looked right into my eyes, smiled, and said, “I’ll be right back!”
She came back a moment later with a huge djembe, the exact kind I had been wanting to play, and handed it to me.
I hesitantly took it from her, but as I swung it around so it was facing the fire and I could straddle it like I had seen the other players do, it was like something I’ve done a million times before, as comfortable and natural as breathing. I just sort of started improvising along with the “song” that everyone else was already playing, not even really able to tell if I sounded good. But I found myself slip into it and become part of it, and what it sounded like didn’t really matter after a few minutes.
The drum jams at Rainbow Gatherings just sort of start and finish as they do; nothing is planned, it all just kind of flows, kind of like strawberry jam. As if to complete all of the synchronicities of the whole experience, when I stopped drumming I noticed a guy on the other side of the circle, who I had never met before, stand up and look directly at me. I looked back at him, flushed and elated, and he bowed and said, “Thank you.” I don’t think he had heard my conversation with the girl.
Other noteworthy experiences? At that particular gathering, I remember one, and it was small and doesn’t sound like anything when I retell it, but I think it was one of my first experiences in opening up to nature – really opening up.
I was sitting on a rock by the ocean, and back then the ocean was still a complete marvel to me (it still is, really), because I had barely ever been around it. I was transfixed by how powerful it was and yet how gentle, by the feminine beauty of it, yet the raw power it holds that can be terrifying (go figure). By the way that alone, a drop in the ocean is “weak”; yet when combined with millions and millions of other drops, the power of water can destroy stone, brick, whole cities. Interestingly enough, I read the exact meaning of what I was struggling to grasp several years later in the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, which is a book of wisdom:
Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.
Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;
It has no equal.
The weak can overcome the strong;
The supple can overcome the stiff.
Under heaven everyone knows this,
Yet no one puts it into practice.
Therefore the sage says:
He who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people
is fit to rule them.
He who takes upon himself the country’s disasters deserves
to be king of the universe.
The truth often seems paradoxical.
I’ve always been really, really bad at expressing the things most close to my heart.
So anyhoo, I was sitting on this rock, gazing at the ocean, feeling the ocean (not physically), and I just remember feeling myself start to expand outside of my former borders, like I was being initiated into something bigger than anything I had previously known. Druids will know what I’m talking about.
Being a Virgo sun sign with Virgo rising and Virgo in Mercury, I really, really love (need?) the earth and the solidity of it, and I have to say that to this day, the ocean and I don’t really get along. It feels too wavey, too shifty, too unsolid energetically. It overwhelms me the way a wave crashing over your head and filling your nose up with salt water might overwhelm you. I can visit her, have an amazing conversation with her, learn from her, humble myself before her, but then I gallop back to my mountains and gleefully dig my roots in deep again before the stars come out. (Well, maybe a bit later than that, sometimes.)
Now, the dark side of Rainbow Gatherings – yes, there is a darkness beyond the gross food and lack of showers. Some people go to them searching for something they can’t exactly describe, and in that searching, they somehow lose themselves. Sometimes it’s from doing too many hallucinogenics. Sometimes it’s from not being mentally stable enough to do even a little bit of hallucinogenics (more about this later). Sometimes it’s from being really, really gullible and naïve and, maybe, not strong?
One of the last ones I ever went to was held at a huge, deep lake in the Kootenay mountain range, and a guy got really high on mushrooms and somehow decided that the meaning of life was on the other side of it. He swam out into the middle of it, and no one ever saw him again.
At this same gathering, two of my friends were told by a woman who claimed to be a shaman and had taken a name for herself from Aboriginal history even though she was white (side note: in my opinion, being a shaman is something you just are. If you have to call yourself one so you can convince other people, something isn’t adding up) that they were soul mates, and they were promptly attacked by a pack of dogs. It turned out later that they weren’t soul mates.
And the interesting thing is, when that Gathering was starting, all of my friends and I had a bad feeling about it. You know that CCR song “Bad Moon Rising”? Well, that about sums it up.
So my first summer was spent at Gatherings, in Whistler having awkward sexual interludes that never actually amounted to anything, and on the nude beach my sister introduced me to in Vancouver, which is called Wreck Beach. An interesting experience, but after careful consideration, I decided that I will not be naked in public places anymore, whether they’re officially called “nude friendly” or not. I don’t care if you call yourself a hippie or a nudist or an enlightened being or what-have-you; humans are still human, and men still stare, and it’s really hard to ignore their huge erections when they’re not wearing any clothes. Ew.
Wild blackberries grow all around on the coast where I first flew in that summer, and I think they were the main staple of my diet. Nothing bought in a grocery store will ever compare to that. Ever.
I remember that summer a friend asking me once, “How are you eating every day if you don’t have a job and you don’t have any money?” I smiled a glazed kind of smile and blathered something about the Universe providing, but in actuality, I have no idea how I ate on a regular basis that summer. Well, I did go through a short “damn-the-man” period in which I was stealing lots and lots of groceries from the huge grocery store (the fact that a huge corporation owned it justified the theft in my mind back then). It earned me the nickname Belly Jean Sticky Fingers (the first half of which needs explaining, but we’re getting there) and it ended after I got caught and arrested (we’re getting there too.)
Still, even though I look back now and shake my head at some of the beliefs I held back then (or at least grabbed, tossed back and forth a few times, then replaced), there were still moments in which I really had to question what I thought I knew about reality, and ultimately have made me a more open minded person. Because do any of us really know?
Example: I was hitch hiking one day, and it was a long journey; I don’t remember where I was going, but it was hot and I was thirsty, and all of a sudden I got a craving for an apple and ginger ale. The thought came and went, and I got a ride about ten minutes later. I hopped in the guy’s car, and after the usual “Hey, how’s it going? How far are you going?” he turns to me and says, “Are you hungry? Thirsty? Have an apple and some ginger ale.”
I shit you not.
Another time I was at the nudey dock in Whistler, hanging out with a mutual friend of mine and my sister’s for the afternoon. Among our conversations, we both said how our favourite “beach food” is bagels with hummus, purple grapes and cheese. About half an hour later my sister showed up, sat down, and opened her bag to produce. . .yup, bagels, hummus, purple grapes and cheese.
Maybe the Universe (?) does provide if you believe it will.
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If you grew up on the internet, Homestar Runner represents a time when the world wide web felt a little bit smaller. It was hilariously sarcastic, but unlike the rest of the Flash landscape in the early 2000s, Homestar was never hateful or cheap.
Matt and Mike Chapman spent a childhood cutting up Super 8 tape, writing amateur comic books, and absorbing every nugget of disposable pop culture they could get their hands on. Years later, they would distil their fascination with the fringe edges of Americana into their very own online cartoon show. Homestar Runner is a place of screwball public access television, byzantine parallel universes, and miles-deep references to sports, music, video games, and everything else they loved. The Chapmans may have chided the stupidity of cultural debris, but they still loved it.
Today, we carry infinity in our pockets and bounce selfies off of satellites. But, in the early 2000s, there was something kind of remote about a homemade Flash animation site. The internet still felt like a secret, and in a moment where it’s hard to feel hopeful about the cyberspace coursing through humanity’s veins, returning to Homestar Runner offers a shred of optimism.
In recent years, Matt and Mike Chapman parlayed the legacy of Homestar Runner into a number of rewarding (and lucrative) jobs at Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, making television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba!, Gravity Falls, and most recently, Two More Eggs. The era of the weekly Strong Bad email is in the past, but the brothers still make time to update the site when their busy lives afford them the time. We called up the Chapmans, and asked them to tell us the story of Homestar Runner from start to finish.
A Foundation of Snark
The Chapmans’ spend their early years learning how to make fun of things and amassing decades of pop culture references in a very short time.
Mike Chapman: We were the youngest of five kids. We grew up in the ‘80s and I think a lot of our humor sort of developed from taking some terrible Atlanta commercial and exaggerating part of it, and repeating it 5,000 times to make a joke. It wasn’t something funny, but the five of us made it funny.
Matt Chapman: We had the collective knowledge of four other siblings, like pop culture knowledge including the ‘60s and ‘70s. So from early on we had stuff. I started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 from a young age, and I would get jokes because I’d be like, “Oh my brother has been saying that since I was a little kid! I know it’s from some old bubble gum commercial that isn’t around anymore!”
Mike: Our older brother Donny taught us how to be snarky, before we even knew what it meant or how to use that type of humor. I remember him watching The Love Boat just to make fun of it. He did not like The Love Boat at all. He would just sit there and rag on everybody the whole time. He thought it was hilarious. He had this kid’s book called The Daddy Book, a very ‘70s kid’s picture book, and it was just a nice book about different dads. “Dads, they’re all different! They do different things! They look different!” And he would go through it and add his own commentary, where the dads would do horrible things to the kids, and it was really awful. I mean, that’s like straight-up a Strong Bad move.
Mike: When the five of us get together we’re gonna reference some dumb commercial from 30 or 40 years ago. I feel like as a big family, it’s almost like a defense mechanism. It makes you stick together and bond more. “Look at that sad guy selling used cars! We’re all better off than that guy!” Or there’s some kid who said something in 1983 that we continue to repeat to this day that would mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t know why we felt so threatened at the time. Apparently, we had to put on this weird rough exterior.
Matt: We’ve tempered it as we’ve gotten older, but it’s probably always been in us to sorta assume everything is gonna suck.
From Kid’s Book to Cartoon
The Chapmans decide to author a tongue-in-cheek homemade children’s book called Homestar Runner as a goof between friends.
Mike: The whole thing came from our friend Jamie who, again, was mimicking a local terrible Atlanta grocery store commercial with one of the Braves in it. He said, like “Homestar runner for the Braves Mike Lemke!” And Matt and I laughed like, “what the hell is a homestar runner?” That was probably in 1995 or something, the phrase was just bouncing around in our head because we thought it was hilarious. One day Craig [Craig Zobel, filmmaker and friend of The Brothers Chaps] and I went to the bookstore because we were bored and we were just looking at kid’s books and were like, “Let’s make a kid’s book.”
Matt: It was like “hey, let’s make one of these! Look at these weird kid’s books! Kid’s books are terrible! Let’s make our own terrible kid’s books!”
Mike: We decided to just use Homestar Runner. We made that his name, and then we drew all the characters that day. In that one day, we came up with Homestar, and Pom Pom, and Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and Strong Mad. They were all created in a roughly two-hour period. The characters hadn’t existed in our head for a long time, and while they’ve changed a bit since then, they were all born at once.
Mike: We didn’t want to publish it. We just made it for ourselves. We probably printed five or 10 copies and gave it to our friends. It wasn’t like “our hopes and dreams depend on Homestar Runner!” But our dad actually sent it out to like 80 publishers without us knowing, and I remember being pissed at him when I found out. I think he got a couple rejection letters. A couple years passed without us doing anything with Homestar when we were in college, so it wasn’t until we started making web cartoons and learned Flash that things took off.
Matt: We were just trying to learn Flash using those characters. Once we had enough stuff we were like “we should put this on a website or whatever.”
Mike: We had Flash tutorial books and I dropped out of grad school for photography and was like, “I gotta learn this web design stuff man! I mean, it’s on the web!”
Matt: I think we intended the cartoons to be similar to early Cartoon Network, like Dexter’s Laboratory or Power Puff Girls. Like, those were kid’s cartoons but anyone could enjoy them. Very early on, in like 2000 or something, we pitched that version of Homestar Runner where it’s like, “every episode there’s a new competition! And Strong Bad’s the bad guy and Homestar’s the good guy!” They passed on that, and we were like “well, let’s keep doing this!” The next cartoons were like, “wouldn’t it be funny if we made this be about the moments in between the competitions?” And so that was the stuff that was funnier, the stuff happening between the plot points, which is hilarious because we hadn’t even established a routine of making cartoons about competitions, we’d made like one.
Mike: A lot of the world-building stuff happened quickly, like the old-timey 1936 version of the characters happened within the first three or four months. We had made like one or two cartoons and were like “we should do old-timey versions!” and soon after that, we were like “we should make anime versions!” The world started building from the get-go.
A Home Run
Without any advertising or publicity, Homestar Runner started to catch on through pure word of mouth, and Matt and Mike Chapman found themselves with truly unique full-time jobs.
Mike: We started selling our first shirt in 2001. There wasn’t huge demand or anything. I wouldn’t say it had caught on yet.
Matt: I was living in New York at the time and I remember Mike sending me a picture of himself in our shirt, I was very jealous.
Mike: For the first shirt we had, you needed to send a check to our parent’s house. So we sold a few dozen shirts by check only. Our dad was our accountant, so he started reviewing all that stuff. It wasn’t anything we intended to do full time.
Mike: I had a Cartoon Network calendar, and I kept our traffic stats in it. This was early on because shortly after we stopped looking at our stats entirely because we didn’t want that to affect how we made stuff or what we did. But I wrote down how many new visitors we got each day, and I remember hitting 1,000 visitors in a day sometime in 2001 or 2002.
Matt: We started doing a weekly cartoon when I moved back from New York. That’s when we first made Strong Bad Emails. I have to thank Earthlink Corporation for funding a year of Strong Bad Emails. I wouldn’t actually work on them at work, but I’d come into work after having stayed up all night making Strong Bad Emails on a Sunday night. The fact that I was allowed to go into work at 11am instead of 9am definitely contributed to the rise of Homestar.
Matt: Once we started getting angry emails when we were late getting a new cartoon up, I think it hit us that folks were counting on new stuff from us. That’s a cool feeling to know you’re as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks. And then definitely when we received our first wedding/dating stories from people that bonded over our cartoons or met because of them and put a Homestar and Marzipan on their wedding cake. That’s nuts! Makes me feel like I should email the ghost of Paul Newman and tell him that my wife and I bonded over Cool Hand Luke!
Mike: In 2003, our dad told Matt to quit his job and do Homestar full-time. This is our financially conservative dad, telling us to quit our jobs to make Flash cartoons.
Matt: Mike and I would collaborate together all the time when we were kids, and when were home for Christmas break we’d always end up making something together, so doing Homestar full-time was really fun - but I remember friends saying “can we come over when you make a cartoon?” And we would be like “okay,” and we’d have a couple beers while we brainstormed an idea, and then it’s like “okay, Mike and I are going to put on headphones for 18 hours now and you’re not going to talk to us anymore until we’re done.” It was super fun, but it could also be hard work, which is also why once we had children and wives it made it a little harder to pull all-nighters and not sleep for three days to make a cartoon.
Matt: The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn’t believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded ‘Working Man’ so I’ll take it!
Matt: I have no idea when our peak was viewership-wise, but 2002-2005 was definitely when we got to go the most nuts creatively. We expanded into weird live action and puppet stuff, CD’s, DVD’s, video games, toys, all kindsa crazy dream-come-true stuff we never thought we’d get to do. But, for me, if you want a more precise moment, I would say February of 2004, when on the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember specifically thinking, “It’s okay if no one watches another Homestar Runner cartoon or buys another t-shirt now, because today happened.”
“...Never a Real Business Plan.”
By 2010, Matt and Mike were both married with kids and were looking for other jobs in the television industry. They’ve had a hand in a number of acclaimed kid’s shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! Gravity Falls, The Aquabats Super Show, and Wander Over Yonder. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave a lot of time for Homestar Runner.
Mike: We always knew our business model was temporary. Everyday it was like, “We’re on borrowed time here, there’s just no way to make a living off of this, because it’s unsustainable.” We didn’t want to start selling ads, and this was before the era of Kickstarter or Patreon and other ways of artists monetizing directly from their audience. We were just like, “Let’s just do it this way, rather than try to change our business plan,” which was never a real business plan. Our mindset was, “We’re lucky to make money off this in the first place, and if it’s no longer making enough money to not have other jobs, we’ll not worry about it and get another job.” We didn’t to be one of those things that started selling e-cards or whatever.
We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture.
Mike: There [were] definitely people who bought way more shirts than they had any business buying, and it’s great that people felt that way without us having to be like,“Hey guys, we’re having a pledge drive.” It’s just a double-edged sword. Homestar needed to be supported somehow, but you never wanted to come out and say,“Hey, remember the only way we’re able to do this is if you buy a shirt, so buy a shirt!” We’ve always been uncomfortable with that. Our dad suggested adding a button to the end of the cartoons that said “Buy a shirt with Strong Bad on it!” And we were like “No, dad! That’s so lame!”
Matt: We have a property in Homestar called Cheat Commandos, which is basically making fun of old G.I. Joe cartoons. We eventually made Cheat Commandos toys and we wouldn’t even put an ad for the toys in the cartoon. That’s like, part of the joke, why didn’t we just do that and make some money? Like there was someone who told me recently that their favorite thing we ever did was Cheat Commandos, and they had no idea we’d even made toys! Probably a missed opportunity there! If anything we might’ve taken our punk rock status too far.
Mike: We went on hiatus after Matt had his second daughter. Around that time we knew we were going to have to start looking for other jobs, and we really just didn’t know how long it’d be before we could get back to Homestar. Maybe one month, two months, six months. After a certain point it almost became weird to say something about the break. In retrospect, we probably could’ve handled it a little better, but we just didn’t know.
Matt: We didn’t want to believe it either. I didn’t want to come out and say “hey we’re not doing this anymore for a while,” because that sucks! I wanted to be like “yeah we’re gonna make one this week! I swear! We’ll have time this week to make a new Strong Bad Email!” I know we probably bummed people out or lost some people’s respect for not saying anything, but we also wanted the site to be focused on the characters, so it would’ve felt like pulling back the curtain too far to suddenly be like “Hey! We’ve got kids! And it’s hard!” It didn’t seem worth it to be like, “We wrote the Yo Gabba Gabba! Christmas special! That’s why we’re taking a hiatus!”
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Mike: There was also some creative burnout too. We had been doing it for 10 years and we probably stuck to that weekly schedule a little more strictly than we needed to, so we needed a break. It was definitely a slog sometimes. Like Saturday you’re at a friend’s house and it slowly dawns on you that “ah shit, we don’t have an idea for a cartoon.” Even during the hiatus I’d feel weird on the weekends because for 10 years there was this cloud looming over me that I had 20 hours straight of sitting in front of a computer bleary-eyed on Sunday night.
Done Running
On April 1, 2014, a new Homestar Runner cartoon was posted to the site. A few months later, Matt Chapman announced plans to continue the series, and since then they’ve done new Homestar content every couple of months. Right now the brothers are living it Atlanta again, working side by side on the Disney XD show Two More Eggs.
Mike: When we made the April Fool’s cartoon it had been about four years since we put anything on the site. Matt had moved to Los Angeles three years before to work on Gravity Falls and some other Disney stuff. I think he’d just decided that he was moving back to Atlanta, and we knew Homestar was going to make sense for us. The joke of that cartoon was Homestar finally updating his website, which is all dusty and unattended. The process wasn’t quite the same because we weren’t living together, but we pulled an all-nighter for the next one we did. Well, an all-nighter for us now means like staying up til 1am.
Last October, the Homestar Runner gang emerged from obscurity, and now it's the moment we have … Read more Read more
Matt: We really had no idea how many people would care or check back in if we made something new. It was a little scary tiptoeing back into things which is why we made it an April Fool’s cartoon. If nobody cared or everybody hated it, we could just say, “that was part of the joke! See ya in another 10 years!” and disappear. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that. And even though we’ve only been able to make a few cartoons every year since, people still seem genuinely psyched when we are able to update. Coolest fans ever, man.
Mike: It’s kind of funny how much it feels the same when we make Homestar cartoons today. for I’m still sitting across my brother with my headphones on, working for 12 hours, putting it up in the early morning, and maybe stopping at Waffle House on the way home.
Matt: We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture. We recently did a couple Homestar 20th anniversary live shows here in Atlanta and the response was bigger and farther reaching than we could’ve imagined. A father and son came all the way from Anchorage just to see the show. That blew our minds and made us want to pay for their airfare.
Mike: It was always a very singular creative vision. It’s pretty much just the two of us, and there’s never a moment where one of us writes something and the other one doesn’t agree. Any joke is something either one of us could’ve written. It’s pretty crazy that we have four or five hundred cartoons that are all largely tied together, and it’s nuts that 20 years since making that initial book I’m still talking about it.
Matt: We’ve felt so many times over the years that we are super fortunate, that it can’t get any better, that no matter what else we do, we did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while. Is that a good epitaph, “He did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while?” We always say that we could get jobs making donuts at a grocery store bakery and be totally happy for the rest of our lives since we got to do Homestar. And now we’ve been saying that for over a decade.
Mike: We do Two More Eggs with the exact same process. We do one cartoon a week. We think of it, write it, animate it, and it’s done pretty quickly. I get the same weekly feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Some of the other projects we’ve done force you to think about the same thing for a month, and my brain just doesn’t work that way.
Matt: It’s great to be back working in the same room with my brother, surrounded by the weird junk we hang on our walls, flanked by the wood-paneled television from the basement of our childhood home and a wall of outdated video games and electronics. A few weeks ago we got to spend all day 3D printing a fake action figure and filling it with beef stroganoff for the Walt Disney company. Once you hit that point, I don’t think you’re allowed to complain ever again.
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego and living in Austin, Texas. He writes about music, video games, professional wrestling, and whatever else interests him. You can find him on Twitter @luke_winkie.
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An Oral History of Homestar Runner, the Internet's Favorite Cartoon
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If you grew up on the internet, Homestar Runner represents a time when the world wide web felt a little bit smaller. It was hilariously sarcastic, but unlike the rest of the Flash landscape in the early 2000s, Homestar was never hateful or cheap.
Matt and Mike Chapman spent a childhood cutting up Super 8 tape, writing amateur comic books, and absorbing every nugget of disposable pop culture they could get their hands on. Years later, they would distil their fascination with the fringe edges of Americana into their very own online cartoon show. Homestar Runner is a place of screwball public access television, byzantine parallel universes, and miles-deep references to sports, music, video games, and everything else they loved. The Chapmans may have chided the stupidity of cultural debris, but they still loved it.
Today, we carry infinity in our pockets and bounce selfies off of satellites. But, in the early 2000s, there was something kind of remote about a homemade Flash animation site. The internet still felt like a secret, and in a moment where it’s hard to feel hopeful about the cyberspace coursing through humanity’s veins, returning to Homestar Runner offers a shred of optimism.
In recent years, Matt and Mike Chapman parlayed the legacy of Homestar Runner into a number of rewarding (and lucrative) jobs at Nickelodeon and Disney Channel, making television shows like Yo Gabba Gabba!, Gravity Falls, and most recently, Two More Eggs. The era of the weekly Strong Bad email is in the past, but the brothers still make time to update the site when their busy lives afford them the time. We called up the Chapmans, and asked them to tell us the story of Homestar Runner from start to finish.
A Foundation of Snark
The Chapmans’ spend their early years learning how to make fun of things and amassing decades of pop culture references in a very short time.
Mike Chapman: We were the youngest of five kids. We grew up in the ‘80s and I think a lot of our humor sort of developed from taking some terrible Atlanta commercial and exaggerating part of it, and repeating it 5,000 times to make a joke. It wasn’t something funny, but the five of us made it funny.
Matt Chapman: We had the collective knowledge of four other siblings, like pop culture knowledge including the ‘60s and ‘70s. So from early on we had stuff. I started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 from a young age, and I would get jokes because I’d be like, “Oh my brother has been saying that since I was a little kid! I know it’s from some old bubble gum commercial that isn’t around anymore!”
Mike: Our older brother Donny taught us how to be snarky, before we even knew what it meant or how to use that type of humor. I remember him watching The Love Boat just to make fun of it. He did not like The Love Boat at all. He would just sit there and rag on everybody the whole time. He thought it was hilarious. He had this kid’s book called The Daddy Book, a very ‘70s kid’s picture book, and it was just a nice book about different dads. “Dads, they’re all different! They do different things! They look different!” And he would go through it and add his own commentary, where the dads would do horrible things to the kids, and it was really awful. I mean, that’s like straight-up a Strong Bad move.
Mike: When the five of us get together we’re gonna reference some dumb commercial from 30 or 40 years ago. I feel like as a big family, it’s almost like a defense mechanism. It makes you stick together and bond more. “Look at that sad guy selling used cars! We’re all better off than that guy!” Or there’s some kid who said something in 1983 that we continue to repeat to this day that would mean nothing to anyone else. I don’t know why we felt so threatened at the time. Apparently, we had to put on this weird rough exterior.
Matt: We’ve tempered it as we’ve gotten older, but it’s probably always been in us to sorta assume everything is gonna suck.
From Kid’s Book to Cartoon
The Chapmans decide to author a tongue-in-cheek homemade children’s book called Homestar Runner as a goof between friends.
Mike: The whole thing came from our friend Jamie who, again, was mimicking a local terrible Atlanta grocery store commercial with one of the Braves in it. He said, like “Homestar runner for the Braves Mike Lemke!” And Matt and I laughed like, “what the hell is a homestar runner?” That was probably in 1995 or something, the phrase was just bouncing around in our head because we thought it was hilarious. One day Craig [Craig Zobel, filmmaker and friend of The Brothers Chaps] and I went to the bookstore because we were bored and we were just looking at kid’s books and were like, “Let’s make a kid’s book.”
Matt: It was like “hey, let’s make one of these! Look at these weird kid’s books! Kid’s books are terrible! Let’s make our own terrible kid’s books!”
Mike: We decided to just use Homestar Runner. We made that his name, and then we drew all the characters that day. In that one day, we came up with Homestar, and Pom Pom, and Strong Bad, and The Cheat, and Strong Mad. They were all created in a roughly two-hour period. The characters hadn’t existed in our head for a long time, and while they’ve changed a bit since then, they were all born at once.
Mike: We didn’t want to publish it. We just made it for ourselves. We probably printed five or 10 copies and gave it to our friends. It wasn’t like “our hopes and dreams depend on Homestar Runner!” But our dad actually sent it out to like 80 publishers without us knowing, and I remember being pissed at him when I found out. I think he got a couple rejection letters. A couple years passed without us doing anything with Homestar when we were in college, so it wasn’t until we started making web cartoons and learned Flash that things took off.
Matt: We were just trying to learn Flash using those characters. Once we had enough stuff we were like “we should put this on a website or whatever.”
Mike: We had Flash tutorial books and I dropped out of grad school for photography and was like, “I gotta learn this web design stuff man! I mean, it’s on the web!”
Matt: I think we intended the cartoons to be similar to early Cartoon Network, like Dexter’s Laboratory or Power Puff Girls. Like, those were kid’s cartoons but anyone could enjoy them. Very early on, in like 2000 or something, we pitched that version of Homestar Runner where it’s like, “every episode there’s a new competition! And Strong Bad’s the bad guy and Homestar’s the good guy!” They passed on that, and we were like “well, let’s keep doing this!” The next cartoons were like, “wouldn’t it be funny if we made this be about the moments in between the competitions?” And so that was the stuff that was funnier, the stuff happening between the plot points, which is hilarious because we hadn’t even established a routine of making cartoons about competitions, we’d made like one.
Mike: A lot of the world-building stuff happened quickly, like the old-timey 1936 version of the characters happened within the first three or four months. We had made like one or two cartoons and were like “we should do old-timey versions!” and soon after that, we were like “we should make anime versions!” The world started building from the get-go.
A Home Run
Without any advertising or publicity, Homestar Runner started to catch on through pure word of mouth, and Matt and Mike Chapman found themselves with truly unique full-time jobs.
Mike: We started selling our first shirt in 2001. There wasn’t huge demand or anything. I wouldn’t say it had caught on yet.
Matt: I was living in New York at the time and I remember Mike sending me a picture of himself in our shirt, I was very jealous.
Mike: For the first shirt we had, you needed to send a check to our parent’s house. So we sold a few dozen shirts by check only. Our dad was our accountant, so he started reviewing all that stuff. It wasn’t anything we intended to do full time.
Mike: I had a Cartoon Network calendar, and I kept our traffic stats in it. This was early on because shortly after we stopped looking at our stats entirely because we didn’t want that to affect how we made stuff or what we did. But I wrote down how many new visitors we got each day, and I remember hitting 1,000 visitors in a day sometime in 2001 or 2002.
Matt: We started doing a weekly cartoon when I moved back from New York. That’s when we first made Strong Bad Emails. I have to thank Earthlink Corporation for funding a year of Strong Bad Emails. I wouldn’t actually work on them at work, but I’d come into work after having stayed up all night making Strong Bad Emails on a Sunday night. The fact that I was allowed to go into work at 11am instead of 9am definitely contributed to the rise of Homestar.
Matt: Once we started getting angry emails when we were late getting a new cartoon up, I think it hit us that folks were counting on new stuff from us. That’s a cool feeling to know you’re as important as a cup of coffee or morning crossword to some folks. And then definitely when we received our first wedding/dating stories from people that bonded over our cartoons or met because of them and put a Homestar and Marzipan on their wedding cake. That’s nuts! Makes me feel like I should email the ghost of Paul Newman and tell him that my wife and I bonded over Cool Hand Luke!
Mike: In 2003, our dad told Matt to quit his job and do Homestar full-time. This is our financially conservative dad, telling us to quit our jobs to make Flash cartoons.
Matt: Mike and I would collaborate together all the time when we were kids, and when were home for Christmas break we’d always end up making something together, so doing Homestar full-time was really fun - but I remember friends saying “can we come over when you make a cartoon?” And we would be like “okay,” and we’d have a couple beers while we brainstormed an idea, and then it’s like “okay, Mike and I are going to put on headphones for 18 hours now and you’re not going to talk to us anymore until we’re done.” It was super fun, but it could also be hard work, which is also why once we had children and wives it made it a little harder to pull all-nighters and not sleep for three days to make a cartoon.
Matt: The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn’t believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded ‘Working Man’ so I’ll take it!
Matt: I have no idea when our peak was viewership-wise, but 2002-2005 was definitely when we got to go the most nuts creatively. We expanded into weird live action and puppet stuff, CD’s, DVD’s, video games, toys, all kindsa crazy dream-come-true stuff we never thought we’d get to do. But, for me, if you want a more precise moment, I would say February of 2004, when on the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000. I remember specifically thinking, “It’s okay if no one watches another Homestar Runner cartoon or buys another t-shirt now, because today happened.”
“...Never a Real Business Plan.”
By 2010, Matt and Mike were both married with kids and were looking for other jobs in the television industry. They’ve had a hand in a number of acclaimed kid’s shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! Gravity Falls, The Aquabats Super Show, and Wander Over Yonder. Unfortunately, this didn’t leave a lot of time for Homestar Runner.
Mike: We always knew our business model was temporary. Everyday it was like, “We’re on borrowed time here, there’s just no way to make a living off of this, because it’s unsustainable.” We didn’t want to start selling ads, and this was before the era of Kickstarter or Patreon and other ways of artists monetizing directly from their audience. We were just like, “Let’s just do it this way, rather than try to change our business plan,” which was never a real business plan. Our mindset was, “We’re lucky to make money off this in the first place, and if it’s no longer making enough money to not have other jobs, we’ll not worry about it and get another job.” We didn’t to be one of those things that started selling e-cards or whatever.
We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture.
Mike: There [were] definitely people who bought way more shirts than they had any business buying, and it’s great that people felt that way without us having to be like,“Hey guys, we’re having a pledge drive.” It’s just a double-edged sword. Homestar needed to be supported somehow, but you never wanted to come out and say,“Hey, remember the only way we’re able to do this is if you buy a shirt, so buy a shirt!” We’ve always been uncomfortable with that. Our dad suggested adding a button to the end of the cartoons that said “Buy a shirt with Strong Bad on it!” And we were like “No, dad! That’s so lame!”
Matt: We have a property in Homestar called Cheat Commandos, which is basically making fun of old G.I. Joe cartoons. We eventually made Cheat Commandos toys and we wouldn’t even put an ad for the toys in the cartoon. That’s like, part of the joke, why didn’t we just do that and make some money? Like there was someone who told me recently that their favorite thing we ever did was Cheat Commandos, and they had no idea we’d even made toys! Probably a missed opportunity there! If anything we might’ve taken our punk rock status too far.
Mike: We went on hiatus after Matt had his second daughter. Around that time we knew we were going to have to start looking for other jobs, and we really just didn’t know how long it’d be before we could get back to Homestar. Maybe one month, two months, six months. After a certain point it almost became weird to say something about the break. In retrospect, we probably could’ve handled it a little better, but we just didn’t know.
Matt: We didn’t want to believe it either. I didn’t want to come out and say “hey we’re not doing this anymore for a while,” because that sucks! I wanted to be like “yeah we’re gonna make one this week! I swear! We’ll have time this week to make a new Strong Bad Email!” I know we probably bummed people out or lost some people’s respect for not saying anything, but we also wanted the site to be focused on the characters, so it would’ve felt like pulling back the curtain too far to suddenly be like “Hey! We’ve got kids! And it’s hard!” It didn’t seem worth it to be like, “We wrote the Yo Gabba Gabba! Christmas special! That’s why we’re taking a hiatus!”
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Mike: There was also some creative burnout too. We had been doing it for 10 years and we probably stuck to that weekly schedule a little more strictly than we needed to, so we needed a break. It was definitely a slog sometimes. Like Saturday you’re at a friend’s house and it slowly dawns on you that “ah shit, we don’t have an idea for a cartoon.” Even during the hiatus I’d feel weird on the weekends because for 10 years there was this cloud looming over me that I had 20 hours straight of sitting in front of a computer bleary-eyed on Sunday night.
Done Running
On April 1, 2014, a new Homestar Runner cartoon was posted to the site. A few months later, Matt Chapman announced plans to continue the series, and since then they’ve done new Homestar content every couple of months. Right now the brothers are living it Atlanta again, working side by side on the Disney XD show Two More Eggs.
Mike: When we made the April Fool’s cartoon it had been about four years since we put anything on the site. Matt had moved to Los Angeles three years before to work on Gravity Falls and some other Disney stuff. I think he’d just decided that he was moving back to Atlanta, and we knew Homestar was going to make sense for us. The joke of that cartoon was Homestar finally updating his website, which is all dusty and unattended. The process wasn’t quite the same because we weren’t living together, but we pulled an all-nighter for the next one we did. Well, an all-nighter for us now means like staying up til 1am.
Last October, the Homestar Runner gang emerged from obscurity, and now it's the moment we have … Read more Read more
Matt: We really had no idea how many people would care or check back in if we made something new. It was a little scary tiptoeing back into things which is why we made it an April Fool’s cartoon. If nobody cared or everybody hated it, we could just say, “that was part of the joke! See ya in another 10 years!” and disappear. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do that. And even though we’ve only been able to make a few cartoons every year since, people still seem genuinely psyched when we are able to update. Coolest fans ever, man.
Mike: It’s kind of funny how much it feels the same when we make Homestar cartoons today. for I’m still sitting across my brother with my headphones on, working for 12 hours, putting it up in the early morning, and maybe stopping at Waffle House on the way home.
Matt: We are constantly amazed that we were able to wriggle our way into a tiny, poorly animated corner of popular culture. We recently did a couple Homestar 20th anniversary live shows here in Atlanta and the response was bigger and farther reaching than we could’ve imagined. A father and son came all the way from Anchorage just to see the show. That blew our minds and made us want to pay for their airfare.
Mike: It was always a very singular creative vision. It’s pretty much just the two of us, and there’s never a moment where one of us writes something and the other one doesn’t agree. Any joke is something either one of us could’ve written. It’s pretty crazy that we have four or five hundred cartoons that are all largely tied together, and it’s nuts that 20 years since making that initial book I’m still talking about it.
Matt: We’ve felt so many times over the years that we are super fortunate, that it can’t get any better, that no matter what else we do, we did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while. Is that a good epitaph, “He did this one little thing that mattered to some people for a while?” We always say that we could get jobs making donuts at a grocery store bakery and be totally happy for the rest of our lives since we got to do Homestar. And now we’ve been saying that for over a decade.
Mike: We do Two More Eggs with the exact same process. We do one cartoon a week. We think of it, write it, animate it, and it’s done pretty quickly. I get the same weekly feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Some of the other projects we’ve done force you to think about the same thing for a month, and my brain just doesn’t work that way.
Matt: It’s great to be back working in the same room with my brother, surrounded by the weird junk we hang on our walls, flanked by the wood-paneled television from the basement of our childhood home and a wall of outdated video games and electronics. A few weeks ago we got to spend all day 3D printing a fake action figure and filling it with beef stroganoff for the Walt Disney company. Once you hit that point, I don’t think you’re allowed to complain ever again.
Luke Winkie is a writer and former pizza maker from San Diego and living in Austin, Texas. He writes about music, video games, professional wrestling, and whatever else interests him. You can find him on Twitter @luke_winkie.
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