🎄It’s 1992, and there’s no such thing as Buster Bunny.
The Advent Calendar House wraps up Christmas in July with the unofficial series finale of “Tiny Toon Adventures,” when Buster wishes he’d never been on the show, and the horrors within Montana Max’s Biff Tannen Pleasure Palace or whatever.
🎄It’s 1990… or 1962… and a quantum physicist forgot to powder his boss’s underwear.
This Scrooge Sunday edition of the Advent Calendar House involves time travel of a different sort as we follow Dr. Sam Beckett on a mission to save a mission, and the soul of the man trying to tear it down.
* CONTENT WARNING: This episode briefly discusses the death of actor Charles Rocket and the would-be death of his Scrooge-like character, Michael Blake.
🎄It’s 1979, and an evil king is having abandonment issues after his entire kingdom left, so he made an army of robots instead of going to therapy.
The Advent Calendar House has once again emerged from hibernation after declaring 4 more months of winter to pretend it’s still winter. Join us as we encounter what might be the least Christmassy Rankin/Bass Christmas special, featuring a friendlier version of Jack Frost, a groundhog dressed like a pro wrestling manager, and the wintry weather neighbors of those angels your grandmother told you were bowling whenever there was a thunderstorm.
1. This is specifically an adaptation of a 1956 production on The Alcoa Hour starring Basil Rathbone as Scrooge. Rankin/Bass uses most of the songs from that special.
🎄 Sail back to 1981 with us as we dig up Rankin/Bass’s penultimate and possibly most obscure stop-motion Christmas special ever, which may or may not only exist because they had the rights to use Christmas in Killarney and needed someplace to put it.
3. Blarney Kilakilarney and his wife are a poster Irish couple and the reason everyone’s advice at your wedding is: “Never go to bed angry.”
4. This special keeps adding new rules about how both banshees and rainbows work, like they’re Mogwai.
5. The Leprechauns’ “phantom island of Tralee” shares a name with an actual mainland town in Ireland, but is closer to , population (as of 2016): 4.
📼 Retro Commercial Break:
Super Mario Bros. Super Show: Koopa Klaus / Santa Claus is Coming to Flatbush
Season 4 · Episode 8
Wednesday, July 15, 2020 • Duration 52:23
🎄 Hey, paisanos! Join us as we warp back to 1989 for a double dose of Christmas segments from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show — 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.
3. 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 Christopher Collins, a.k.a. Chris Latta, the voice of Cobra Commander.
🎃 It’s the 13th of July, so it’s time for the Advent Calendar House to unearth one of our favorite Halloween haunts, 1979’s The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t, starring an exceptionally great Judd Hirsch as Count Dracula.
1. This was renamed for its VHS release as The Night Dracula Saved the World, except no, he doesn’t.
2. Lyndhurst Mansion plays the role of both Dracula’s castle and the Witch’s castle. It’s located in New York state, not far from Sleepy Hollow.
3. The opening music, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, was never in a Dracula movie. Its first uses in sound film were in 1931’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and 1934’s The Black Cat, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.
4. My association of the music to Dracula probably stems from its use on Castle Dracula, a haunted boat ride on the Wildwood, New Jersey boardwalk that burned down in 2002.
🎄 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. It’s 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.
6. The WallWalkers’ home planet looks like an M.C. Escher painting.
7. Darryl is voiced by Scott Menville, best known now as Robin on Teen Titans, in one of his earliest roles.
8. Darryl’s friend, Kenzo, is named after one of Dr. Fad’s sons. His other son married comedian Ali Wong.
📼 Retro Commercial Break:
The Tale of the Bunny Picnic
Season 4 · Episode 4
Tuesday, July 7, 2020 • Duration 51:47
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Hello, sunshine! Join us for a hop back to Easter 1986 to revisit the Jim Henson special, The Tale of the Bunny Picnic — which is about neither Easter, nor a bunny picnic — but it did introduce the world to Bean Bunny, the Muppets’ Nermal.
8. The eldest Cratchit sibling, Martha, is Debbie Clinger of the Clinger Sisters, a.k.a. Superchick from the Krofft Supershow host band Kaptain Kool and the Kongs.
9. Rankin/Bass should have made a south seas-themed special called Christmas Island. (Hi from the future! We ended up exploring this idea on AfterLUNCH.)
10. Scrooge’s grave morphing into a giant devil face is a reminder in hindsight that this special was animated in Japan by Topcraft, the predecessor to Studio Ghibli.
6. The only thing many remember about this special is its Nightmare Face reveal that a beautiful woman Dinty finds washed ashore is the banshee in disguise.
7. According to the Christmas Specials Wiki, Arthur Rankin said a promotion was planned involving prizes buried in random places around the United States for children to dig up, but was abandoned for safety concerns.
8. Jack O’Lantern, from Rankin/Bass’s Festival of Family Classics TV series, featuring a leprechaun disguised as a pumpkin.
9. 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.
10. Waxing nostalgic about popcorn garland on Christmas trees.
10. 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.
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