Creators of homestar runner make money

Melissa Palmer became involved with HomestarRunner. She is the voice — and the persona — for Marzipan, the only girl on HomestarRunner. View Slideshow Every Monday morning, a bare-chested Flash cartoon creature with an indeterminate accent, a potbelly and a Mexican wrestling mask entertains almost , people with antics like composing an impromptu techno song. Not everyone gets it, but enough people flock to Mike and Matt Chapman's HomestarRunner website that its stars, Strong Bad , Homestar , Marzipan and The Cheat are gaining cult status with pre-teens, the Gen-X crowd and everyone in between.

To boot, the Atlanta-based brothers have made a tidy business selling T-shirts featuring their creations.

Wired News interviewed the twenty-something Chapman brothers, with contributor Melissa Palmer, who is the voice of Marzipan. Here is an excerpt from the interview ;. How would you describe Homestar? He's like the really dumb captain of the football team, the clueless figurehead. Even if he's mean to you, he doesn't know it.

And when you're mean to him, he can hardly imagine it because why would anyone be mean to someone? But he has a little edge, too. He's really nice; he's nice to nerds. But then there's this 5 percent mean streak where he can just be a jerk. Was Homestar first and then Strong Bad came later? Homestar and Pom-Pom were best friends and Strong Bad and The Cheat were the bad guys, the foils.

When we started, it was going to be centered around Homestar, and for the most part the early cartoons were. In , when we started Strong Bad e-mail , he'd already become everybody's favorite character. Everybody loves an asshole. Are the characters modeled after anyone? Watch Strong Bad answer his e-mail. It's composites of everything from junior high to last week.

I'd say the dynamic between Strong Bad and Strong Sad , his baby brother, the depressed one — there's a little bit of me and Mike in there, obviously very exaggerated. I was kind of the tortured little brother and Mike….

He fed you cupcakes with toothpaste in them. There's stuff like that…. Well, Marzipan didn't start out like that. As soon as Melissa started doing the voice, she's just kind of become Melissa. She's just pretty much become my personality.

There's no acting involved. Is Marzipan really Homestar's girlfriend? Definitely back when she was created she was Homestar's girlfriend, but now…. She's kind of independent now. So there's been no official breakup? It will probably take a little while for it to sink in with Homestar, even if they did break up.

He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Can you describe The Cheat?

He's the adorable, evil sidekick, sort of the whipping boy, not a generic whipping boy because he knows he's the whipping boy and gets pissed off about it, so he's a little more proactive. He lives in the King of Towns' barbecue grill.

He slept in a refrigerator crisper once, too, didn't he? Yes, he loves that. Whenever he gets the privilege to sleep in the crisper, he's very excited.

But he's definitely the bad guy's right-hand man who's always getting smacked by the bad guy. With The Cheat you get to see what he does when he goes home at night — he's a Flash animator. How long have you all been doing this? I started HomestarRunner with a friend in I started the website in I do half of the graphics and animation and writing. Mike dropped out of graduate school and I graduated from college. We moved back in together.

I've been involved since we put the website up. I do the other half of all the writing and animating. With the exception of Marzipan and the occasional odd voice that Mike does, I do all the voices. I produced a movie that Mike and Matt worked on, and they were the only ones that listened to me! Then Mike and I started dating and I became the voice of Marzipan. The concept arose during the Olympics.

Tell me about that. We'd been in a bookstore browsing through the children's section and didn't see any books that we thought were very good.

We were bored so we did some sketches and made up a little story, went to Kinko's and made copies. We didn't really know how to use computers at all. They're just little black line drawings on paper. What are some of your influences? We grew up watching old Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons back when Daffy was insane … and definitely Peanuts and Charlie Brown, where it's this group of characters that are either slightly animal or not necessarily human with no definite age, but they're sort of kids.

Talk:irexapezoren.web.fc2.com PAY PLUS! - Homestar Runner Wiki

And the old '60s Batman show. In high school we started listening to indie rock and underground indie music. That definitely comes out, that punk rock DIY vibe the site has, that "We're not going to use advertising and we're not gonna go on TV! We've all done the indie rock, "let's play in a band" thing.

What are your tools of the trade? Pretty much just Flash on a PC. We made movies all through junior high and college and junk like that, so we'd like to incorporate more QuickTime movies on the site. With animation on the site, people might assume you have some technology background.

We'd like to continue to fool people to think that. Any other people involved in HomestarRunner. We have business types who do the stuff that me and Mike don't ever want to think about or touch with a foot pole…. In we started selling shirts. Our dad offered to send out the shirts. It was maybe a shirt a day. Then about 6 months ago it became overwhelming. The neighbors would come over and fill orders. We ended up having to divide their pingpong table into quadrants in the basement of their parents' house….

Christmas was a lot of fun this year.

How do the creators of irexapezoren.web.fc2.com make money

The minivan would run to the post office twice a day with lots of packages. In December it was ridiculous … orders a day. Now we have a fulfillment company. Our average is about a day. We can't believe that many people want to wear T-shirts with our dumb animal characters on them. How many visitors do you get on the website? On Mondays, we get between , to , unique visitors.

On Fridays and Saturdays, our smallest days, about , to , We get a few million unique visitors a month, which is pretty awesome. Do you do any kind of PR? That's the coolest part. We've never done any kind of advertising. Word-of-mouth has done its thing. Certain bands would link us on their site and we were Shockwave's site of the year a couple of times.

Things like that get it into a mainstream Internet audience. What's with the new "legal stuff" section of the website? Are you going corporate? We had people ripping our stuff off, selling bootleg Homestar stuff on the Web, so we've had to do that to protect ourselves.

It doesn't mean that we are legitimizing and we're gonna have a TV show — it's so we can stop people from taking money out of our pockets.

Somebody was making bootleg plush Cheat dolls, which looked awful, and we shut them down. It's flattering that we're getting to the point where people are ripping us off, but we have to put the legal crap in place to protect ourselves. Are there other projects that you're working on? Our friend David Green made a movie called All the Real Girls. Mike did graphic design work for props and I ended up being in it. They had me listed as Strong Bad in the credits, which is pretty funny. It's very, very, very small — I don't have any lines or anything.

Free Country, USA, is the world the Homestar characters live in. David Green made a movie called George Washington and it says, "A Free Country USA Production" or something. Mike did stuff for that too, and we did the website.

Any aspirations that might make you stop doing the site? I'm doing exactly what I always wanted to do in life. Matt went to film school and I went to art school, so there are other worlds we have interest in.

But I think it would be the kind of thing where we do it for a month or so and just take a little hiatus from Homestar. Or Homestar could morph into something that's not on the Internet. I feel like we could do Homestar for as long as we wanted, but the goal is to just keep doing creative stuff on our own and make a living at it.

Hopefully that involves HomestarRunner in one way or another. Think we'll be seeing pop-up ads anytime soon? We'll just quit if that's the only way to survive. A One-Man 3-D Moviemaking Marvel.

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