Advent Calendar House

🎄 It’s 2014, but this special about a forgotten holiday mascot feels like it’s from the 1990s. Unfortunately, so do some of the jokes.  🎙 Michael DiGiovanni and Donnie Storms join us on a sleigh ride back through “How Murray Saved Christmas,” which follows Murray Weiner (rhymes with diner ) from the hidden hometown of every holiday mascot… but mostly the American ones.  ****  💬 Topics & Tang...

🐰 Who is Easter Bunny? OMG, Bear is Easter Bunny! How can that be? 🎙 Emily Rowley and Alan Johnson join us as we hop, hop, hop back to 1981 for our first trip to Bear Country, which it turns out was built on top of the Easter Bunny’s industrial nightmare factory.  📺 You can watch “The Berenstain Bears’ Easter Surprise” for free on YouTube .  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Yes, we all collecti...

🎄 Tune in as we mysteriously float back to 1983 for an unseasonably warm Christmas adventure through Mexico with our cool grandma and a talking Rubik’s Cube with more powers than Superman.  🎙️ Gerry Davila from Totally Rad Christmas join us for a puzzling revisit to “Rubik, the Amazing Cube,” a Saturday morning cartoon that lasted an even shorter amount of time than the fad it tried to cash in on...

🎄 We’re teaching aliens about Christmas again, but this time, George Lucas is watching.  🎙 Jeff Fox from Name That Christmas Special is our special guest as we go on a domesticated goose chase back to 1977 through “A Cosmic Christmas,” the first fully animated feature by Canadian studio Nelvana.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Jeff’s collection of “A Cosmic Christmas” music and scanned promoti...

🎄 It’s time for toys and time for cheer as the Advent Calendar House begins another 12-episode countdown to Christmas in July.  🎙 Sean Sotka and Steven join us as we rewind at twice the normal speed back to 1981 to revisit the Christmas special that helped kick off the revival of Alvin and the Chipmunks.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Steven’s story of accidentally erasing his VHS recording o...

🎄 It’s Christmas Eve in the Advent Calendar House as we walk through a ring of fire back to 1982 to dance with the Smurfs and watch goodness make the badness go away.  🎙 Thom Crowe from Tis the Podcast and Gerry Davila from Totally Rad Christmas join us for a heaping help of Greedy Smurf’s cauldron of pink pudding.  📺 You can watch “The Smurfs’ Christmas Special” for free on YouTube .  ****  💬...

🎄 10 years after “The Simpsons” debuted, Matt Groening presented another Christmas special about another Santa’s little helper.  🎙 Erin Evans and Joey O. joins us on a 2-dimensional flight back to 1999 to revisit “Olive, the Other Reindeer,” a misheard but not forgotten doggie treat.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   The Making of “Olive, the Other Reindeer.”   “ PaRappa the Rapper .”  “ Mr. Lun...

🎄 Take a hop, a skip, and a jump scare through the uncanny valley on a trip back to 2009 to rewatch Disney’s feature-length version of “A Christmas Carol.”  🎙 Matt Weiland joins us for Robert Zemeckis’s motion capture nightmare starring 4 Jim Carreys, 3 Gary Oldmans, 2 Robin Wrights, and a Cary Elwes in a pear shape.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Respect to a Disney movie that jumps from a s...

🎄 Doug uses weaponized cupcakes to break Porkchop out of doggie death row.  🎙 Gregiffer Stevens from the Pop Arena and Nick Knacks joins us as we skate on thin ice back to 1993 for a very educational trip to Bluffington that I forgot was a Christmas episode while I was watching it.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Disney’s “Doug” was fine, y’all.  “Doug” creator Jim Jinkins worked on Nickelodeo...

🎄 Young Conan the Barbarian meets baby Jesus on this episode of the official holiday podcast for people who hate all humans — which, in 2020, is most of us.  🎙️ Brandon Medley and Michael May join the dance to the beat of our own drum back to 1968 and back into the Rankin/Bass universe for their stop-motion follow-up to “Rudolph.”  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   This was Romeo Muller’s favorit...

🎄 Wrapping, unwrapping, and rewrapping a bow on a comedy classic.  🎙 Guy Hutchinson joins us as we second-, third-, and fourth-guess ourselves back to 1960 to go Christmas shopping with Jack Benny, the last televised version of a longtime radio favorite.  🚨 Warning: In one scene, a character shoots himself offscreen.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   The Television Academy Foundation on Jack Be...

🎄 We may all exist in the dreams of 2 kids and their dog.  🎙 Michael DiGiovanni and Christian Nielsen help us responsibly deforest our way back to 1980 to dig up the first appearance of early Disney Channel imports The Raccoons and the greedy Cyril Sneer.  📺 You can watch “The Christmas Raccoons” on YouTube .  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   This special and an accompanying story album were na...

🕎 Marc Weiner and his puppets won’t stop screaming in Nickelodeon’s first Hanukkah special.  🎙 April Ryley joins us as we noisily snowmobile back to 1995 to try and figure out what everyone’s yelling about. Unexpectedly, it all started in outer space.  📺 You can watch “The Weinerville Chanukah Special” on YouTube .  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Weinerville.com is alive and well in 2020.  Ma...

🎄 A well-deserved punch in the face that’s a little bit rock ’n’ roll.  🎙 James Riley joins us on a last-minute flight to the North Pole to catch up with 2001’s “A Johnny Bravo Christmas,” a special that first aired less than 3 months after 9/11, on Pearl Harbor Day, and opens with Johnny unnecessarily calling the fire department to tell them he’s “the bomb.”    ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  ...

🎄 Filmation’s space western gets a dickens of a backstory.  🎙 Joey O. and Sammy Hain saddle up for a Scrooge Sunday edition of the Advent Calendar House looking back at a 1987 Christmas episode of “BraveStarr.”  📺 You can watch “Tex’s Terrible Night” on YouTube .  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   The Fisher-Price Western Town I used as a backdrop for the much larger Bravestarr action figure.  J...

🎄 Join us on a stroll down Jim Henson’s dark hall of nightmares to 1986 to rewatch “The Christmas Toy,” an idea no one has repeated since.  🎙 Beth Cieslik , Adam Jurotich , and Donnie Storms are the newest friends in the playroom who have to learn the horrors of getting caught out of place.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Kermit was cut from the DVD release, but he’s back in the version on Ama...

🎄 Santa’s sleigh is grounded in the original video game crash.  The Advent Calendar House kicks off another Christmas countdown by rewinding back to 1982, when Santa found himself stranded in Pac-Man’s neighborhood.  🎙 Lindy and Alicia join us for a stroll through “Christmas Comes to Pacland,” where no one knows about Christmas, but somehow the Ghost Monsters know the words to “Jingle Bells.”  🚨...

🦃 The Gaslighting of Dr. Liz Wilson.  Join us as badly dancing back to 1989 to celebrate the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season.  🎙️ Jeff Somogyi joins us to dig into “Garfield’s Thanksgiving,” the clear bronze medalist of Garfield’s holiday trilogy, thanks to Jon Arbuckle going from goofy pet owner to hopelessly inept creep.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Orson the Pig from “U.S...

🎄 S-s-season’s greetings-s-s! You better watch out, because today we’re kindly rewinding back to a 1985 Christmas episode of “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” 🎙️ Joey O. parachutes in for “Cobra CLAWs Are Coming to Town,” featuring the incredible shrinking Cobra troops and a giant parrot.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   We don’t even get 4 minutes into this before bringing up the U.S.S. Flagg...

🎄 On another Scrooge Sunday edition of the Advent Calendar House, we fly back in time to 1978 to revisit Rankin/Bass’s turn at “A Christmas Carol.”  🎙️ Michael DiGiovanni and Michael May return to talk “The Stingiest Man in Town,” an animated remake of a made-for-TV musical, featuring the voices of Walter Matthau as Scrooge and Tom Bosley as our narrator, a literal talking Humbug.  ****  💬 Topic...

🎄 Sail back to 1981 as we dig up Rankin/Bass’s penultimate and possibly most obscure stop-motion Christmas special.  🎙️ Michael DiGiovanni and Michael May stumble in to imbibe “The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold,” which may or may not only exist because Rankin/Bass had the rights to use the song “Christmas in Killarney” and needed someplace to put it.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Ken Jennings...

🎄 Hey, paisanos! Join us as we warp back to 1989 for a double dose of Christmas segments from “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show.”  🎙 Adam Pope joins us to watch Mario and Luigi save Santa in 2 different dimensions: The live-action “Santa Claus is Coming to Flatbush,” featuring Santa losing his “transportation” in Brooklyn; and the animated “Koopa Klaus,” featuring a plot to… freeze the North Pole...

🎃 It’s the 13th of July, so it’s time for the Advent Calendar House to unearth one of our favorite Halloween haunts.  🎙️ Tommy Coombs flies in to talk 1979’s “The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t,” starring an exceptionally great Judd Hirsch as Count Dracula.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   This was renamed for its VHS release as “The Night Dracula Saved the World,” except no, he doesn’t.  Lyndhur...

🎄 Go-go Gadget podcast! It’s time to spring back to 1992 to take “Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas” in for questioning.  🎙 Chad Young accepts our assignment to investigate the time Dr. Claw took over Santa’s workshop for some reason.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   Nick Knacks , a show-by-show video history of Nickelodeon.  Halloween 1992 was the year of white kids dressing like Steve Urkel. ...

🎄 Join us as we slowly slink sideways back to 1983 to celebrate the time someone literally threw an idea at the wall to see if it would stick.  🎙️ Joey O. returns to talk “Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls,” an animated Christmas special about Wacky WallWalkers. But first, we need to talk about the man behind the WallWalkers, Dr. Fad!  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:   “ The Dr. Fad Show .”  Eight...