All Episodes

🎄 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.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Nintendo Power’s preview of “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show.”  I didn’t realize till recently the music in the “Back to the Future” Nintendo game is just “The Power of Love” sped up.  “King Koopa’s Kool Kartoons,” a live-in-studio spinoff show local to Los Angeles and hosted by King Koopa, performed at one point by Chris Latta, a.k.a. Christopher Collins.  Captain Lou Albano’s Wrestling Hotline 1-900 number.  We map out where Mario and Luigi lived in Brooklyn.  “Stunt Dawgs,” an obscure 1992 cartoon featuring Harvey Atkin playing another character with the same King Koopa voice.  “Teeter-totter” vs. “see-saw.”  How tall is Mario? Captain Lou was 5-foot-10, though other sources range from 5-foot-1 to 3-foot-8.  Preview of Super Nintendo World, coming to Universal theme parks.  Finally, I get to talk at length about The Legend of Zelda!  Adam’s SequelQuest episode on the Super Mario Bros. movie, featuring a parody of the Super Show theme song.  ****  📼 Commercials:  Pepsi Nintendo Holiday Game (1989), preserved by Dinosaur Dracula.  Nintendo Power Commercial (1990), preserved by RobertDigitalGames.  Christmas Clatter.  ****  “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show,” “Koopa Klaus,” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Flatbush” © 1989 DiC Entertainment.  “Super Mario Bros.” © Nintendo Co. Ltd.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎃 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.  Lyndhurst Mansion.  Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” was never in a Dracula movie.  Wildwood, New Jersey’s Castle Dracula.  Jack Riley (Warren the Werewolf) in commercials for Country Crock spread.  ****  📼 Commercials:  McDonald’s Scared Silly (1986) starring Ronald McDonald and the Chicken McNuggets.  Weird Christmas.  ****  “The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t” © 1979 Concepts Unlimited.  Full show notes with links at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 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.  Inspector Gadget’s run on Nickelodeon got me into “Get Smart” on Nick at Nite.  The time Chad got a crew jacket from the set of the “Inspector Gadget” movie.  The action figure that revealed Dr. Claw’s goofy face.  The Inspector Gadget Super Nintendo game, featuring the same alternate theme song as this special.  Maurice LaMarche subbing for Don Adams for Gadget’s weird version of “The 12 Days of Christmas” is similar to Jim Cummings finishing “Be Prepared” for Jeremy Irons in “The Lion King.”  Where’s the camera Penny’s Not Apple Watch uses to see Brain?  Jerry “The King” Lawler entering the 1997 Royal Rumble Match in the middle of a sentence, then finishing it after being eliminated in 4 seconds.  “Disney’s Christmas All-Time Favorites.”  ****  📼 Commercials:  Cookie Crisp Cereal Christmas Commercial (1992)  Tinsel Tunes.  ****  “Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas” © 1992 DiC Entertainment.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 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 ’80s Xmas Specials You Might’ve Forgotten (Dinosaur Dracula, 2015)  X-Entertainment’s preserved 2003 tribute to the Wacky WallWalker.  This isn’t the right Apple Jacks commercial, but I can’t not mention young Julia Stiles scoffing that it doesn’t taste like apples.  Writer Mark Evanier’s blog.  The WallWalkers’ home planet looks like an M.C. Escher painting.  Darryl’s friend, Kenzo, is named after one of Dr. Fad’s sons. His other son married comedian Ali Wong.  The most expensive things we’ve asked for from our parents for Christmas, which pale in comparison to a $1,000 toy car — which, of course, we then look up its adjustment for inflation.  Waxing nostalgic about popcorn garland on Christmas trees.  ****  📼 Commercials:  Corn Pops Cereal with free Wacky WallWalker inside (1984)  ****  “Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls” © 1983 NBC Productions.  “The Dr. Fad Show” © 1988 Tradex Corp.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🐰 Hello, sunshine! Join us for a hop back to Easter 1986 to revisit the Jim Henson special, “The Tale of the Bunny Picnic.”  🎙 Emily Rowley hops into the guest chair for this special, which it turns out is about neither Easter, nor a bunny picnic… but it did introduce the world to Bean Bunny, the Muppets’ Nermal.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Jim Henson’s original intro to this special.  “The Jim Henson Hour.”  Bean Bunny in Muppet*Vision 3D at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.  Bean was also a late-series addition to “Muppet Babies,” and his picture is on the playroom wall in Disney’s new “Muppet Babies.”  “The Muppet Musicians of Bremen” and its grotesque, full-size Muppet bad guys.  Sweetums in “Tales from Muppetland: The Frog Prince.”  Bean trying to tell the other bunnies to quiet down or the dog will hear them is also the plot of the first act of “Trolls.”  Every Easter Bunny costume is terrifying.  Y’all remember Puffalumps? You do now.  The Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta is home to several Muppets from this special, including both Bean and his Dragon Bunny form from his dream sequence.  Carlin Trammel’s video tour of the Center for Puppetry Arts’ Jim Henson exhibit.  ****  📼 Commercials:  McDonald’s Muppet Babies Holiday Huggables (1988)  Christmas Creeps.  ****  “The Tale of the Bunny Picnic” © 1986 Henson Associates.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 It’s another Scrooge Sunday in the Advent Calendar House as we’re swept through a rip in the space-time continuum back to 1986 for a Christmas Carol-themed episode of “The Real Ghostbusters.”🎙 Tommy Coombs and Chad Young join the adventure after our heroes accidentally save Scrooge from the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Hey, grown-ups! Remember getting lost while driving when we didn’t all have maps of the entire planet in our pockets?  Scrooge pays the Ghostbusters a mint-condition shilling from 1837, so we looked up its actual value.  You can actually buy Christmas Carol View Master reels from the 1950s online.  Rick and Morty talking about Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music comes up and goes… somewhere.  Egon entering the ghost containment unit looks like the warp tunnel on Space Mountain.  The other ghosts in the containment unit are callbacks to previous episodes, including Sandman, who bears a passing resemblance to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  Santa should not laugh like Megatron.  ****  📼 Commercials:  The Real Ghostbusters Firehouse Playset, Tombstone Tackle, and X-Cop (1986)  Tis the Podcast.  ****  “The Real Ghostbusters” and “Xmas Marks the Spot” © 1986 Columbia Pictures Television.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Mr. Snowman, I don’t feel so good. Rankin/Bass’s Avengers assemble in the studio’s longest holiday special ever.  🎙️ Brandon Medley returns to marvel at “Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July.” Frosty’s a dad! And Rudolph’s a fake uncle whose nose stops shining at the beginning of this story… but what happens to Frosty and his whole family is even worse.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  King Winterbolt’s genie of the ice scepter, allegedly Thurl Ravenscroft, is the stuff of nightmares.  “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus” may be the most metal Christmas special, but this is a contender.  Rudolph’s entire story gets retconned into a long play to stop Winterbolt’s foggy Christmas Eve from grounding Santa.  Ethel Merman on “The Muppet Show.”  Scratcher is a great evil reindeer, but we’d like it better if he was Fireball.  A couple of songs were cut for time from TV, including “Chicken Today, Feathers Tomorrow” and “I See Rainbows When I Look at You.”  Walt Disney World’s Candlelight Processional.  ****  📼 Commercials:  Atari Christmas Commercial, aired during a 1981 ABC Movie Special airing, preserved by the Museum of Classic Chicago Television.  The Can’t Wait for Christmas Podcast.  ****  “Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July” © 1979 Rankin/Bass Productions.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Happy birthday! The Advent Calendar House kicks off a countdown to Christmas in July by setting the table for Rankin/Bass’s eventual epic crossover, starting with “Frosty’s Winter Wonderland,” the “Weird Science” of Christmas specials.  🎙️ Brandon Medley belly-whops in to salute this snowy sequel from 1976 starring a strange, tall goblin claiming to be Andy Griffith.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  A brief guide to finding obsure things on Disney+, like “Melody Time,” starring Dennis Day, (Parson Brown) as Johnny Appleseed.  Barbara Jo Ewing voiced one of the kids in her only known credit, but somehow IMDb knows her height.  We do the math to figure out how far the wind carried a newspaper from Frosty’s hometown to the North Pole.  Frosty beat “The Santa Clause 2” to the “gotta get a wife” plot point by more than 20 years.  Frosty’s “specifications” for his ideal woman are the same as Sir Mix-a-Lot’s.  At what point do snow people become self-aware?  Jack Frost’s “winter that almost didn’t end” foreshadowed the real-life Blizzard of 1977.  ****  📼 Commercials:  Freezy Freakies (1984)  Christmas Clatter.  ****  “Frosty’s Winter Wonderland” © 1976 Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

How do you do, fellow holiday special enthusiasts? The Advent Calendar House has emerged from its slumber in the Mariana Trench a few months early to celebrate Leap Day!  🎙️ Joey O. joins the celebration of  the “30 Rock” universe’s most important holiday. As such, nothing that happens in this episode counts, and we’re just your imaginary friends whom no one else can hear, because real life is for March.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Steve Buscemi, whose name I mispronounce right out of the gate, quotes himself at the 2020 Screen Actors’ Guild Awards.  Steve Buscemi as The Madder Hatter on “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.  Film School Rejects’ ranking of every 30 Rock episode.  Jane Krakowski as the Ghost of Christmas Past to Kelsey Grammer’s Scrooge in 2004’s “A Christmas Carol: The Musical.”  James Cameron is one of a very, very small group of people who have reached the deepest point in the ocean, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.  A very unscientific look into how many times it would take to order everything on the Benihana menu to use an entire $50,000 gift card.  Of course there’s a Getty Image of Tina Fey posing with the Ewok behind glass.  Thad Warmald, the poor man’s Artie Ziff.  Both human leads from the Sonic the Hedgehog movie are in this episode!  Kevin Brown’s Wikipedia entry calls him “Kevin ‘Dot Com’ Brown” right at the beginning.  Guest star Karolína Kurková was almost a Leap Day baby; she was born February 28, 1984.  Tracy’s word association game that gets to “soup kitcken,” but keeps going before looping back around again reminds us of a similar bit from the 1966 Batman movie.  A very, very quick look at the Irish Leap Day tradition of women proposing to men, as seen in the 2010 Amy Adams movie “Leap Year,” which couldn’t even be bothered coming out on a leap year.  As an extra bonus mini-episode at the end of this one, Joey quickly sums up the Leap Day episode of “Frasier” from 1996, “Look Before You Leap.”  ****  “30 Rock” and “Leap Day” ©2012 NBCUniversal Media, LLC.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎉 It’s a special, post-Christmas bonus episode for your oversized ears!  🎙 Joey O. and Brandon Medley help us turn back the years to 1976 and tip an oversized hat to “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year,” Rankin/Bass’s first sequel special, in which Rudolph has to save the Baby New Year from a big, angry bird.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Rudolph devolves into a younger-looking reindeer, because the original model may have been lost. But also he seems to forget he can fly.  According to our narrator, Father Time (Red Skelton), this story begins “on that very same foggy night.” As in Christmas Eve. When Santa’s kind of busy.  I learned who Red Skelton was from a joke in a Tex Avery cartoon.  “The Phantom Tollbooth.”  Tik-Tok from “Return to Oz.”  Creepier song about time: “The Moving Finger Writes” from this, or “Older” by They Might Be Giants?  Ralph Archibold, Philadelphia’s longtime Ben Franklin impersonator.  Billy Corgan rides a roller coaster.  ****  “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” © 1976 Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 It’s the 50th episode of the Advent Calendar House, so it’s time to address the spotted elephant in the room.  🎙 Joey O. and Brandon Medley fly in to tackle the 1964 Christmas special that put Rankin/Bass on the map and into our hearts.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Is Santa really this big of a jerk or just hangry?  The History Channel on the creation of Rudolph.  Mashable’s 12 ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ facts.  Burger King and Hallmark’s Rodney Reindeer plushes, which at one point doubled as stockings.  Rudolph almost had huge, glowing eyes instead of a red nose, and all I can think of is the terrifying original version of Mr. Snuffleupagus.  The rare and expensive Santa’s Castle play set, which includes Santa and Mr. Claus’s tiny bed.  A lot of voices in this cast were later part of the 1960s “Spider-Man” and “Marvel Super Heroes” animated series.  The first mention of Santa having a wife was in a short story by Philadelphia missionary James Rees in 1849.  The mystery of the head elf’s suddenly changing voice: Wikipedia claims it’s intentional, but we’re not buying it.  Carl Banas (Head Elf) was also the original voice of Sweetums in “Tales from Muppetland: The Frog Prince.”  “Fame and Fortune,” a song that replaced “We’re a Couple of Misfits” as Rudolph and Hermey’s duet from 1965 to 1997.  You can meet characters from this version of Rudolph at SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, and Sesame Place.  Arthur Rankin Jr. explains why Dolly’s on the Island of Misfit Toys on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.”  The original ending included Yukon Corneilius finding a peppermint mine.  “The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass: A Portfolio.”  Original figures of Rudolph and Santa were found in an attic and appraised on Antiques Roadshow in 2005. They were later sold and restored.  ****  “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” ©1964 Rankin/Bass Productions.  Closing music: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by the California Raisins, from “Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration.”  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🕎 Kick off Hanukkah with the objectively better son from “Growing Pains” spinning bad puns like he made them out of clay.  🎙️Sarah Shay stops by as we shine a light on a 1990 episode of “Shalom Sesame,” an on-again, off-again co-production of “Sesame Street” and its counterpart in Israel, “Rechov Sumsum.”  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  “Shalom Sesame” on Muppet Wiki.  Israel’s Big Bird stand-in, Kippi Ben Kippod, is mistranslated as a porcupine despite clearly being a hedgehog. A similar but unclothed costume was used in Spain’s Barrio Sésamo for Espinete, who’s identified as a hedgehog.  Jeremy Miller, as Linus, sings “The Vigil” in “Snoopy! The Musical.”  Yoav Tzafir’s other credits include the Hebrew-dubbed voices of Ninja Turtle Michaelangelo and Super Mario. Later he directed Israel’s version of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”  The real, actual, annual Hanukkah Torch Relay.  Moishe Oofnik, Israel’s counterpart to Oscar, looks less like a grouch and more like a standard Muppet monster. Probably because he has a nose.  Baby Bear teaches Telly Monster how to play dreidel.  A supposed folktale listed on the Wikipedia entry for sufganiyah may or may not be full of something that’s not jelly.  Sarah met the head puppeteer from “Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah.”  Nell Carter, a Jewish convert, appeared on other episodes of “Shalom Sesame” as herself.  ****  “Shalom Sesame” © 1990 Children’s Television Workshop.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Set your sentient clocks back to 1988 for a very wound-up and thrown out into a pile of junk in another dimension episode of the Advent Calendar House.  🎙 Chad Young joins us for a one-time-only trip to Tattertown, the holiday brain-child of Ralph Bakshi and Nickelodeon’s first-ever original animated TV program.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  “Christmas in Tattertown” sketches from Bakshi Productions.  Nick Knacks on “Christmas in Tattertown.”  Cameos by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Flip the Frog, and Popeye.  Today’s TV Trope: The Up the Real Rabbit Hole.  A shout-out to the dearly departed Hollywood Video for staying open on Christmas Day for idiots like me who forgot to ask for required accessories like the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak.  Wawa’s Holiday Gobbler hoagie.  Bosko and Honey on “Tiny Toon Adventures.”  A brief introduction to “snoap,” Florida’s fake snow.  ****  “Christmas in Tattertown” ©1988 Bakshi Productions, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Every unstoppable monster has a beginning.  🎙️ Erin Evans, Joey O., and Brandon Medley squeeze onto the couch to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “The Simpsons” and its series premiere, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” or, as it was introduced to us in 1989, “The Simpsons’ Christmas Special.”  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  The time I accidentally watched “The Tracey Ullman Show,” because I was too sick to get up and change the channel.  We can’t talk about early Simpsons without mentioning Burger King toys, The Simpsons arcade game, and of course, “Do the Bartman.”  Bart’s first Butterfinger commercial.  Al Jean’s 5 favorite Simpsons episodes (The Wall Street Journal, 2014)  Animator Eric Stefani had already founded some band with his sister while working on this episode.  The crowdsourced origins of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and the “like a light bulb!” interjections to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”  Real, intentionally unfinished “Moth” tattoos.  The tattoo artist was retroactively named Mervin Monroe, Dr. Marvin’s younger brother.  Early, strange in hindsight prototypes of Springfield citizens, including a more competent Ralph Wiggum, a cockier Milhouse, and a Ned Flanders who says, “Happy holidays.”  The time Brandon cut down his own Christmas tree.  My guest appearance on the Two Bad Neighbors podcast for “Marge Be Not Proud.”  ****  “The Simpsons” and “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” ©1989 20th Century Fox Television.  Closing Music: The Simpsons Theme, performed by Green Day, ©2007 Reprise Records.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Of all the animated Christmas specials we have covered and will cover, this is the nearsighted granddaddy of them all.  🎙 Anthony Caruso and Julia Colburn from Tis the Podcast visit the Advent Calendar House for a very special Scrooge Sunday episode as we nearly-blindly fumble back to 1962 to celebrate “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol,” TV’s first ever animated Christmas special.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  Jim Backus (Mister Magoo) based his portrayal of Thurston Howell III from “Gilligan’s Island” on another character he played on a radio show hosted by another famous future Scrooge, Alan Young.  Scrooge’s nephew is cut entirely to make room for a song about Broadway that sometimes also gets cut entirely.  The ghosts of Christmas Present and Past show up out of order for no clear reason, but an A.V. Club article from 2012 tried to find one.  Tiny Tim is an English-speaking Gerald McBoing-Boing.  This special invented a flavor! Razzleberry pie is now a thing that exists, made with raspberries and blackberries.  The Ghost of Christmas Past looks like Toon Link.  The last surviving member of the cast, Marie Matthews (Young Scrooge), was on a 2009 panel revisiting the special.  Is Belle’s hair supposed to look like an actual bell?  ****  “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol” © 1962 UPA Pictures, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Warning: If you usually let your children listen to your podcast feed with you, you may want to get the kids out of the pool for this one.  🎙 Zac Shipley dives in as we feast on a very festive, very inappropriate 2002 episode of the Adult Swim cartoon “Sealab 2021.”  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  “Sealab 2020,” the very different, very boring original 1972 cartoon that serves as the butt of Sealab 2021’s joke.  The usual Sealab theme song by Calamine is absent here to make room in the stable for the story of the birth of Alvis.  The Church of Alvis, a blog last updated in 2007 with a cliffhanger, but the faithful still await that day with patience.   Alvisism as explained by Sealab Wiki, which also exists.  A series of quotes from this episode made into animated gif icons and posted on LiveJournal. This show is a very specific sort of old.  ****  “Sealab 2021” and “Feast of Alvis” ©2002 Cartoon Network.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 It’s Glo! Join Hasbro’s hive of bioluminescent bugs, the Glo Friends, in their own Christmas special from 1985.  🎙️ Erin Evans and Joey O. join forces as we learn how to selectively melt only certain ice we’re radiating near to save Santa (Carroll O’Connor), who’s been locked in an icicle cage by Blanche, the Wicked Witch of the North Pole (Sally Struthers), who’s jealous of Santa’s publicity. Take notes, Great Pumpkin… or, perhaps, don’t.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  This was a pilot for an eventual series that aired alongside the original “My Little Pony & Friends.”  A helpful guide to identifying every Glo Friend.  Nancy Cartwright was the voice of Baby Glo Worm in the series, but in this pilot, it’s Laurie O’Brien doing her Baby Piggy voice.  Joey interviews Pat Fraley (Glo Worm) on his later performance as Krang.  Glo Worm’s purple outfit here, as opposed to the original toy’s green outfit, was apparently a “source of controversy,” according to Wikipedia.  Can all antlered mammals fly if you go far enough north?  Lorenzo Music doing a weird, nervous lisp instead of his usual Resting Garfield Voice™.  Santa sings the least bluesy blues song ever while his reindeer do Rockettes kicks.  More of Mike’s thoughts on The Glo Friends Save Christmas on the Can’t Wait for Christmas Podcast.  ****  “The Glo Friends Save Christmas” ©1985 Hasbro, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Everyone’s after the little guy for no reason.  🎙️ Chad Young joins us for a short-statured trip back to 1982 to explore “Ziggy’s Gift,” a one-off TV Christmas special starring no one’s favorite funny papers hero and featuring a beautifully animated puddle of dog pee.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  “Ziggy’s Gift” on Dinosaur Dracula After Dark.  “The Point,” a Harry Nilsson album turned into an animated movie.  Ziggy’s toothpaste looks like Beetlejuice sandworms.  Ziggy Theories: Is he adult Charlie Brown? A vegetarian? A guardian angel?  The time Chad met Billy West, who stood on a chair because he thought Chad was too tall.  The time I inquired about a job opportunity that wasn’t what I expected.  The terrifying robot Santa window display reminded me a little too much of the equally terrifying “Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure.”  Frank Welker voiced 25 characters in this special if you count each individual turkey.  Ziggy’s kettle has the Glow from “The Last Dragon.”  The “Linus moment” is out; the “Skeletor face turn” is in.  ****  “Ziggy’s Gift” ©1982 Universal Press Syndicate.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 For its first Christmas special after the success of “Rudolph,” Rankin/Bass presented us with a Dickens of a story, but not that one.  🎙️ Brian Earl from Christmas Past podcast visits the Advent Calendar House to experience 1967’s “Cricket on the Hearth,” as told by Danny Thomas, featuring a bizarre, burlesque performance of a song about Fish ’n’ Chips, and a clearly implied, off-camera murder.  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  The history of legends about crickets on hearths bringing good luck.  The full “Cricket on the Hearth” soundtrack is on YouTube.  Christmas Past on Golden Age Christmas TV Cartoons.  Christmas TV History’s Joanna Wilson on Rankin/Bass Voice Actors.  ****  “Cricket on the Hearth” ©1967 Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.

🎄 Opus the Penguin fails to take off in his own TV Christmas special from 1991.  🎙️ Erin Evans and Joey O. parachute in to rewatch “A Wish for Wings That Work,” starring Opus and Bill from the comic strip series “Bloom County” and “Outland.”  ****  💬 Topics & Tangents:  This is based on a book version you can watch someone read to you on YouTube, if you’d like.  “Bloom County” creator Berkeley Breathed was not happy with this special. He also confirmed the animators hid some naughty bits in the opening.  Bill the Cat’s 1988 presidential run, including the other candidates trying to translate the song “Louie Louie.”  Joey interviews Michael Bell (Opus).  “The Ant and the Aardvark” starring John Byner (Bill).  Surprise cameos by Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman, who may or may not have walked over from the set of “Hook.”  Larry Walters has a flying lawn chair and a BB gun.  “Lost Horizon.”  “A Frog Thing,” a children’s book with a very similar plot, but less Christmassy.  Opus plushes with Santa hats are pretty easy to find on eBay.  ****  “A Wish for Wings That Work” ©1991 Universal Cartoon Studios, Inc. / Amblin Entertainment, Inc.  Find us at adventcalendar.house.