For the last 14 years, They Might Be Giants has been a beacon of quirky, American alt. rock. After knowing each other as school kids back in Lincoln, Massachusetts, John Flansburgh and John Linnell moved to Brooklyn in 1984 and formed TMBG. After founding the group, the two Johns have been the proverbial Lennon and McCartney of weird pop, dating back to their first college radio hit, "Don't Let's Start," from the Giant's 1986 self-titled debut, and their first promotional stunt -- the Dial-A-Song phone service.

Since then, the Giants have become the thinking-man's critical darlings, mustering odes to a thrice-fallen city on "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," some backward-forward wordplay on "I Palindrome I," and the literal end-all be-all road song, "The End of the Tour." With six albums to their credit, the Giants have managed to successfully carve out a little intellectual oasis for the band and its followers in the ever-shifting sands of alternative rock.

More recently, the band's hard-core fans have propelled both Johns into the forefront of two online polls: Last year, John Linnell was voted the ninth "Most Beautiful Person in the World on an online poll conducted by "People" magazine. This year, it's Flansburgh who is being feted by online fans who have currently voted him fourth in "Time" magazine's "Person of the Century" poll.

They Might Be Giants have just completed a tour in support of its new greatest-hits package, "Severe Tire Damage," and in between Flansburgh's side gig of directing videos for the likes of Harvey Danger, Ben Folds Five and Frank Black, the duo plans to head into a studio soon to start work on an album of children's songs.

So, to catch up with America's reigning paragons of the peculiar (and to find out exactly what they really think about WCW wrestler Ric Flair) check out this week's MTV News Online Feature...

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MTV: Is "Dr. Worm" the first video you directed for They Might Be Giants?

JOHN FLANSBURGH: Actually, my video debut was for "The Guitar," which is a song off the "Apollo 18" album. They Might Be Giants videos...like the first half dozen that we did...we worked with a man named Adam Bernstein who did the B-52's "Love Shack" video and a couple of Public Enemy videos. But he got a start with us and it was basically for a couple of years there [that] it was just me and Adam and some guy that we'd never meet again standing in a field with a boom box.

JOHN LINNELL: And a borrowed camera.

FLANSBURGH: And a borrowed camera and a bunch of film stolen from [producer/director] Jonathan Demme's crew and we would just make our videos that way. The first couple of ones we did were actually done on the tails of "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," which is you know for people who are not familiar with what tails are, it's actually that stuff at the end of film stock that they cut off and sort of put in a can and there's big splices in it and it's sort of considered junk for people who have professional standards. But you know, beggars can't be choosers.

LINNELL: I think our total budget was probably the processing on the film because nobody got paid and it was similar to the budget of the first album we made you know, we really weren't spending any money at all.

FLANSBURGH: Yeah. But for me as a video director, working with Adam I did a lot of the art department stuff and we took a lot of stuff that we had done, a lot of these props, crazy props that we had built for the show and kind of shoved them into the videos. And it was really sort of an apprenticeship on how to do it all different ways. I mean, with a budget, without a budget, like what's easy, what's even easier and it was a really fun time and a real learning curve for everybody. There were definitely a couple of videos that we did completely wrong, completely backwards and the few people that were actually on the set were going, "I really don't like these guys, they don't know what they're doing." And then from there, I've directed a bunch of other videos. I did some videos for my friend Frank Black, and then I did an Edwin Collins video that got a lot of play on MTV and I just did this Ben Folds Five thing a few months ago. Now I've got this Harvey Danger thing done, which I just did yesterday.