After last week's almost nothing, I figured I needed a good hardy, stew of an article to follow that up, and remembered a good topic worth talking about.
Mellow Mushroom is a pizza chain out of my home state of Georgia, that is themed to psychedelics. And aside from the fun theming it's dang good pizza. There's not a mellow mushroom in the delivery distance to me, but I still find myself there semi frequently.
I remember visiting the restaurant's website as a kid, and thinking it didn't look like other restaurant websites. I didn't learn why it was so different until I was working on a school play after school one day David told me I shared a Surname name with a popcorn machine in this flash internet cartoon series. I understood why he was telling me this as I had previously explained to him why I always half flinched when I heard his last name because I was hard hyperfixated on Marble Hornets at the time, "brainworms'' as some call it informally now. I asked him to clarify what the cartoon was, that one of the characters is a popcorn machine. He clarified the popcorn machine wasn't a real charter and was just an inanimate popcorn machine that died in a fake war and then I made him show me what on earth he was talking about when we were supposed to be painting wooden trees.
Anyway that's how I got into Homestar Runner, and I did likewise show him Marble Hornets and now I'm obsessed with They Might Be Giants and he's obsessed with bad horror movies so everyone wins. The point of this antidote is that the Homestar Runner guys, The Brothers Chaps, made the old mellow mushroom website that confused me, and I learned this on the famously detailed Homestar Runner wiki.
The site itself was set up like the Homestar Runner site proper, but with a small cast of mellow mushroom characters. There was only one toon about sun dried tomatoes that, spoiler alert for a decade old web cartoon for a restaurant you might have never heard of before, has two mushroom guys sun drying tomatoes in a tanning bed.
The mellow mushroom cast of characters, well, I'm not going to pretend they were particularly good, especially compared to mainline Homestar Runner characters. I don't know if The Brothers Chaps created any of these characters or not. I believe at least Mel existed beforehand, but I can't find any credits for the creators of any of these characters.
Mel O. Mushroom is the main mushroom guy. For some reason he only wears shoes and a hat but all the other characters are fully dressed. Make of this what you will. His sidekick is Dude Shroomington, who despite his great name, is just some mushroom guy in the most basic outfit I can think of. There's Melody, who's not Marzipan. There was also a wizard because of course.
They did have regular restaurant stuff on this site. They did have a menu and store locator, but all in all, that webpage had more going on than you'd expect. It still wasn't all that much,all things considered, but it wasn't nothing. And that's worth something.
The old Chapman designed site is still available as an easter egg on the current website, where the restaurant chain also sells aesthetically pleasing shirts. As for the other characters, they have all received redesigns, and Melody no longer scares me. And that's what really matters.
I feel like there's really something about Homestar runner where the biggest advertising stuff their guys ever did was for a pizza chain they were probably already eating at