Homestar Runner Live

The brothers Chapman (Matt and Mike) seem relatively at home on stage at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin. At first Mike forgoes his provided chair for the relative comfort of the bare stage, chatting with audience members and occasionally with the puppet version (voiced by Matt) of their beloved creation: Homestar Runner.

I’m no Homestar aficionado, but I’ve seen a good number of the cartoons (which play solely on the Homestar Runner web site ) over the last five years and I once played the stupid Trogdor video game until my fingers cramped up. (Fortunately it was a really slow day at work.) The people who fork over ten bucks each for the Homestar Runner Live show, however, are hard core. They can belt out the lyrics to “Everybody to the Limit” and reference obscure characters like Thnikkaman without hesitation. On Friday night as we stood in line (before realizing that our tickets were for Saturday night) we even spotted a guy dressed as Homestar. In other words, they are as frighteningly obsessive as any other rabid fan community, so the show is energetic, silly, and fun.

The show opens with a DV-cam sketch of Homestar Runner enjoying the sights of Austin, complete with a stop by the Frost Building—or rather, a view of the Frost Building from far enough away that Homestar is able to use it (in forced perspective) as a nosehair trimmer. Matt and Mike greet the crowd with friend & collaborator Ryan Sterritt in tow and, after a couple of quick introductory live-action bits (including a bit of Strongbad Karaoke), the house settles down for an evening of communal cartoon viewing on a big screen instead of the usual computer monitors. No matter that we’ve seen nearly all of the episodes before (though there are a few unreleased goodies). It is the experience of sharing the Homestar obsession with each other and with the creators that matters. Everyone there speaks the same twisted language—and if you aren’t drinking the HR Kool-Aid when you walked in (like my wife Christina, who’d never seen a Homestar cartoon), well at least you know who Trogdor is when you walk out.

Homestar Runner is one of the first motion picture success stories purely of the Internet. Amazingly but perhaps understandably, the Chapmans see no reason to change that. It’s likely that they could parlay their animation success into a TV series or even a feature film, but they claim to prefer the more spontaneous feel of the web. So long as there’s a new Strongbad cartoon every week or so, who’s going to argue?