Trivia / Homestar Runner

• Acting for Two: All of the major characters except Marzipan, Pom Pom (who only speaks in bubbles), and The Poopsmith (who has only spoken twice in the cartoon's entire history), are usually portrayed by one guy (Matt Chapman). And let's not get into the ramifications of the characters impersonating each other's voices...
• Ascended Fanon: The Brothers Chaps themselves forgot that the Fhqwhgads Robot's Fan Nickname "Visor Robot" was Fanon, and upon realizing their mistake, gave the nickname a "why not" instead of debunking it.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • The real Strong Sad never said "I'm saaaaad that I'm flying"; it was his Powered By The Cheat version. Similarly, the line "Oh, some animal died," was originally said by Homestar impersonating Strong Sad. Even the creators get this one confused. He eventually got around to saying at least some variation of both, though. His line "I don't like food anymore" was something Strong Bad dreamed up.
  • One of Homsar's more notorious quotes involves him claiming he was raised by a cup of coffee, but he initially wasn't the one to say it; Strong Bad made it up in "interview". It wasn't until the 2017 Halloween toon that Homsar actually said it, and even then, it was recorded backwards. When the brothers uploaded the "interview" short to Youtube, the description noted that they completely forgot that Strong Bad came up with the line until re-uploading it in 2017.
  • The Quote of the Week often supplies misquotes to some lines, such as Strong Sad himself saying "Some animal died!" or Senor Cardgage saying "You bet small girl! How 'bout I hit you on the slant?" This could be attributed to the creators using outtakes as quotes of the week.
  • "Holy crap!" is attributed as Strong Bad's catchphrase, despite the fact that outside of flashbacks, recordings, and home pages, he has said it all of six times^note (in The Reddest Radish, A Jumping Jack Contest, A Holiday Greeting, action figure, Strong Bad is in Jail Cartoon and Accent), the last of which was in 2007. Also, in the flashback in "lady...ing", Strong Bad overuses the phrase, despite the fact that he didn't say it in Marshmallow's Last Stand, the toon that the flashback is based on.
• Corpsing: Mike Chapman can faintly be heard breaking into laughter at the end of one Senor Cardgage Quote of the Week.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The Brothers Chaps admit on the faux-FBI Warning splash of "Marshmallow's Last Stand" that the characters are "not very funny". Because of this, the toon cannot be found normally on the website, only through YouTube uploads and the Everything Else Vol 2 DVD.
  • "A Jumping Jack Contest" was also taken off the site in 2003 for similar reasons, and the only way to view it is YouTube or by buying the Everything Else Vol 2 DVD. It could also be seen on a mirror prior to January 2021.
• Creator's Favorite: The favorite character of The Brothers Chaps is The Homestar Runner, the Old-Timey counterpart to present Homestar.
• Defictionalization:
  • The fictional band Limozeen did two live tours in 2008, played by Matt Chapman (Larry) and the real-life band Y-O-U (everyone else).
  • Eventually, real Cheat Commandos were up for sale.
• Descended Creator: Co-Creators and writers Mike and Matt Chapman do the majority of the voices. Mike does the "Powered by The Cheat" characters while Matt is basically everybody else bar Marzipan (played by Missy Palmer), Pom-Pom (no voice, but the sound of milk being blown through a straw by Mike), and the Poopsmith (usually no voice, but played by John Linnell twice).
• Doing It for the Art:
  • For the first two years of the website's existence, Matt and Mike constantly updated the website as a labor of love. Only around 2003 they had started living off the website.
  • Companies like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney had all offered them a chance to make a Homestar TV show, but they declined, citing creative freedom as the primary reason. (Matt and Mike [mostly Matt] later took on jobs with Disney, but with content that has nothing to do with Homestar Runner)
• Dummied Out:
  • A number of pages were formerly linked from the main part of the website, often via one of the main pages, but are only accessible now by typing in the URL directly. Many are documented here, as are some pages and cartoons that were fully removed and are only accessible on a mirror site.
  • A few of the site components also remained at their respective URLs despite not seeing use beyond the few weeks they showed up as a main page pop-up.
  • The old Flash-based website is still accessible at old.homestarrunner.com, as are some secret pages that have yet to be copied over to the Ruffle site.
• Executive Meddling: The fake phone number displayed at the end of "Strong Bad Sings" was originally 1-800-BAD-SONG. That was changed due to fans discovering that it was a real number for a limousine service in Brooklyn, New York upon calling. Complaints ensued and in Spring 2004, the Brothers Chaps changed the number to 1-800-555-SBSINGS.
• He Also Did: The Stinkoman 20X6 intro animation was done by Husband and Wife animation team, SmallBu (consisting of Alex and Lindsay Small-Butera), creators of Baman Piderman and Later Alligator.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • "Marshmallow's Last Stand" and "A Jumping Jack Contest", two early toons, were removed from the site by the Brothers Chaps in 2003 for "personal reasons". Until the demise of Flash, fans mirrored them on other sites. They were also uploaded to YouTube.
  • There are a handful of short toons that are no longer (or never were) linked from the main page; the only way to see them is if one knows the URL. The wiki helpfully maintains a list of them.
  • Since the store's switch from Yahoo to Shopify, the Strong Bad Email DVDs (with the exception of, for a time, the fifth one) and the third Everything Else DVD were unavailable, leaving only Everything Else Vol 1 and 2 available to purchase for a while. Even buying them used was unlikely, especially considering H*R's pride of not being mainstream. It was averted at first when the Strong Bad DVDs were reprinted in 2020 as one package, and later all three Everything Else DVDs in 2021. But sadly both DVD sets are sold out and the Everything Else set was removed from the store.
  • The "Strong Bad's 50 Greatest Hits DVD" was only available for a brief period of time around 2009, just before the hiatus. The DVD had exclusive commentaries that are not available on any of the other DVDs, and fixed a few mastering errors that were on the original DVDs.
  • The Wii release of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People is unavailable for purchase now that the Wii Shop Channel is down, and the closure of the PS3 PSN store now gives us the PC version as the only way to play the game legally.
  • Despite having not been updated since 2005, one Strong Sad's Lament post was mysteriously deleted in early 2021, which is suspected to be because it was offensive to Native Americans.
• The Pete Best: Site Co-Creator Craig Zobel (best known these days for directing the controversial thrillers Compliance, The Hunt (2020), and directing episodes of TV for HBO) left very early on in the franchise's history to pursue his own film career, although he'll occasionally help contribute something to the site from writing to voicing a one off character.
• The Red Stapler: Strong Bad's BMW lighter. Though the Brothers Chaps had nothing to do with them eventually getting made, they weren't actually available when Strong Bad first started flashing one around and continued to be so for years.
• Schedule Slip:
  • The creators have been guilty of this from time to time, mainly when the creators' family lives get in the way. Also, while Strong Bad Emails were originally meant to be released every week, they were later reduced to being "updated somedays" so that other kinds of cartoons could get their fair share.
  • From November 2009 to April 2010, then until December 2010, the Brothers Chaps went without producing any new cartoons, a combination of family matters (both brothers are parents now), creative burnout (having done a cartoon or video game a week for about 6 years plus the videogame with TellTale) (itself about four years worth of content), and working on other projects. The site began updating again in December before resuming the hiatus so that Matt Chapman could work in California on animation freelance work and Mike would take care of the families during this time. They finally updated again on April Fools' Day 2014, hanging a lampshade on the fact that the Brothers Chaps hadn't updated in years.
    
    As of July 2014, Matt Chapman confirmed on the Jeff Rubin Show that he is back in Georgia and seriously wanting to bring back the series. The Brothers Chaps said they planned to rev the series back up sometime in Summer-Fall 2014, following through on October 3 with "Fish Eye Lens". Since then, however, toons hosted on homestarrunner.com have been scarce, with toons hosted on YouTube eventually becoming semi-regular; in 2019 and 2020, the only on-site toons were the annual Halloween toons and their respective teasers and Fan Costumes.
• Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • According to one the Brothers Chaps' sisters, this is the reason why the "Spin-N-Say" game was changed to "Who Said What Now?". The legal implications are apparently so extreme that the original version has been UnPersonned by the Homestar Runner Wiki. The "Spin-N-Say" version could be seen on the site as a secret page until Adobe ended support for Flash, though fans later uploaded it to YouTube.
  • When "Strong Bad Sings" was released to DVD, the song The Cheat played for Strong Mad had to be changed to "Hot Cross Buns". At the time of its release, the original song, "Happy Birthday to You!", was not widely known to be in the public domain.
  • Legal issues surrounding the "Funky Drummer" sample in "Everybody To The Limit" have kept the original version of the song off of the Original Soundtrack. The version on Strong Bad Sings and Other Type Hits was an extended re-recording, presumably for similar reasons.
• Throw It In!:
  • The small "i" in Trogdor the BURNiNATOR's official all-caps name is there because that's what the capital "I" of the font the Brothers Chaps used looked like, making it funny enough to keep.
  • Matt would put two markers in his mouth to provide the voice of Dijjery Doo, but they tend to fall out of his mouth. This was worked into Dijjery Doo as a character trait.
• Vaporware:
  • Level 10 of Stinkoman 20X6, which was revealed to be because the person who did the coding for The Brothers Chaps moved away. It would remain this way until 2018 (which is described in-universe as Stinkoman taking a 10-year nap between levels 9 and 10). Level 10 was eventually completed and released in December 2020, over 15 years after the release of level 9 (and only a few weeks before support for Flash ended permanently).
  • Subverted in the case of Dangeresque 3, which was referenced for years before finally being made the plot for an episode of the point-and-click adventure game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Brothers Chaps toyed with the idea of making the King of Town Marzipan's father in the early days of the series.
    • This is lampshaded in the April Fools' Marzipan's Answering Machine when a perturbed King of Town leaves a message asking her to verify this
  • Pretty much the DVD-exclusive cartoon "Why Come Only One Girl?", which shows ideas for other female Homestar Runner characters, such as Champeen and The Hurricane. ^note  The former only showed up in the Dancing Bubs game in one of the backgrounds, and the latter actually made it into Flash and was ready to be animated, but The Brothers Chap forgot about her since they were distracted with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
    • According to the same cartoon, there was going to be a cartoon "Those Darn Cousins", featuring Homestar's two cousins, Rafferty and Preshy. The two cousins would torture their "Uncle Homestar" ^note  Rafferty and Preshy are voiced by the Chaps' nephew and niece respectively. and Homestar would try to convince his friends that his cousins were trying to kill him.
  • "Bubslegum Comics", another feature from one of the DVDs, is based on an idea for a reoccurring segment featuring Bubs showing off So Unfunny, It's Funny parodies of Bazooka Joe comics, based on a scene in "The House That Gave Sucky Treats" where you can give Bubs a knock-off of Bazooka gum.
  • Sega of America wanted to make a Homestar Runner game, but the Brothers Chaps turned it down due to the fact that they wouldn't have creative control over it. Sega eventually made a game with another popular internet cartoon, Happy Tree Friends, with the game Happy Tree Friends False Alarm; while The Brothers Chaps eventually made a videogame with Telltale Games.
  • Alternate costumes for Halloween toons. At least twelve were sketched, five of which made it to Flash.
  • The Brothers Chaps were going to have Strong Sad became a happy guy with longer humanoid legs and be renamed Strong Glad.
• Write Who You Know:
  • Bubs is based on a concession stand owner the Brothers Chaps grew up seeing who had a similar voice.
  • Matt once said in an interview, Strong Bad and Strong Sad's relationship is based on his relationship with Mike when they were younger, albeit exaggerated.

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