Super Question Machine

Super Question Machine
By Hiatt Werling

When I was in sixth grade, I discovered a cartoon on the internet called Homestar Runner. Sixth grade is the time when kids become aware of the fact that they’re growing up, and they become eager to find a clear way to identify themselves. Some kids become goths, or skaters, or jocks, or stoners. I chose Homestar Runner. Every Monday, I looked forward to seeing the newest three to five minute installment, featuring that cast of twelve brightly-colored, angular characters I would come to know so well. I bought Homestar Runner t-shirts online and wore them proudly, feeling like I was in on something of which the public was largely unaware, feeling like I was part of some subversive club.

Homestar Runner was made by a pair of brothers who were able to live off of the sale of t-shirts and DVDs and bumper stickers based on the cartoon. To the middle school version of myself, that seemed like the coolest thing in the world. For that brief window of time, that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to make something people would enjoy as much as I enjoyed Homestar Runner, and be able to live off of it, not having to answer to anyone, never having to get a real job. I used to daydream about winning some contest to visit the creators at their home in Atlanta, to hang out with them and see how they made cartoons.

Homestar Runner continued updating past my middle school years, through my high school career. I had several friends my age who started watching Homestar when I did, but they had all stopped watching it by that point, regarding the series as kids’ stuff. The only one who still watched it, every Monday, was me. Then, in November of 2009, the website started updating very infrequently, and by December of 2010 it had stopped updating altogether. The two brothers both had kids now, and the t-shirt money was no longer enough for them and their families to live on. That old reliable security blanket of mine, that piece of my adolescence, was gone.

I go through the occasional phase where I’ll rewatch the old Homestar Runner cartoons in a fit of nostalgia, trying to recapture that joy it instilled in me back when the cartoon was my life, back when making a cartoon on the internet for a living seemed possible. I’m in such a phase now. I’ve been rewatching the cartoons, both on the website and on my collection of Homestar Runner DVDs, featuring commentaries from the creators. One cartoon I watched featured Homestar Runner, the dumb but lovable titular character, walking in from off-screen, saying, “This is perfect! Just perfect! I couldn’t be happier with my new invention! I’ll call it ‘the Super Question Machine.’” The joke is that the supposed invention he’s holding is just a tennis ball. Last night, in one more fit of nostalgia, I pulled a tennis ball out of my bottom drawer and wrote “Super Question Machine” on it in Sharpie.

Tonight, I took out another tennis ball from the drawer, and on this one I wrote, “This Super Question Machine Kills Fascists.”