🎄 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.  

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🎙 Guest:  

Adam Pope (Retro-Daze, Retro Detention, The Retro Network, @hojukoolander).  

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💬 Topics & Tangents:  

1. Nintendo Power’s Preview of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, as tweeted by Adam, and preserved on the Internet Archive (for now) (it’s on page 93).  

2. I didn’t realize till recently the music in the Back to the Future Nintendo game is a sped up version of The Power of Love.  

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.  

4. Captain Lou Albano’s Wrestling Hotline 1-900 number.  

5. We map out where Mario and Luigi lived in Brooklyn.  

6. Stunt Dawgs, an obscure 1992 cartoon featuring Harvey Atkin playing another character with the same King Koopa voice.  

7. A brief discussion on the term “teeter-totter,” used by Mario here, versus “see-saw.”  

8. How tall is Mario? Captain Lou was 5-foot-10, though other sources range from 5-foot-1 to 3-foot-8.  

9. Preview of Super Nintendo World, coming to Universal theme parks.  

10. Finally, I get to talk at length about The Legend of Zelda!  

11. Adam’s SequelQuest episode on the Super Mario Bros. movie, featuring a parody of the Super Show theme song.  

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📼 Retro Commercial Break:  

Pepsi Nintendo Holiday Game, 1989, preserved by Dinosaur Dracula.  

Nintendo Power Commercial, 1990, preserved by RobertDigitalGames.  

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“The Super Mario Bros. Super Show,” “Koopa Klaus,” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Flatbush” © 1989 DiC Entertainment.  
“Super Mario Bros.” © Nintendo Co. Ltd.  

Full show notes with links at adventcalendar.house.  
Say hi on Twitter @adventcalhouse.

Theme song by Bronwen’s Ghost.  
Full show notes and social links at adventcalendar.house.