The Weinerville Chanukah Special

<p>On a very unnecessarily loud episode of the increasingly inaccurately named Advent Calendar House, we noisily snowmobile back to 1995 to try and figure out what everyone’s yelling about in “The Weinerville Chanukah Special,” Nickelodeon’s first Hanukkah exclusive, created by Marc Weiner and his puppets who can’t stop screaming.</p><hr /><h4>On This Episode:</h4><ol><li><strong>Mike Westfall</strong> (<a href="https://twitter.com/fallwestmike">@fallwestmike</a>), cheap Stormtrooper ripoff who wouldn’t look out of place in a Devo video.</li><li><strong>April Ryley</strong> (<a href="https://twitter.com/AprilandPJ">@AprilandPJ</a>), city mayor by day and ski lodge manager by night for at least 8 of them.</li></ol><hr /><h4>Topics and Tangents:</h4><ol><li>We watched <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NepkzkXBTM">this videotaped original broadcast of “The Weinerville Chanukah Special,”</a> complete with commercials.</li><li><a href="http://weinerville.com">Weinerville.com</a> is alive and well in 2020.</li><li>Marc Weiner went on to be the voice of Swiper the Fox and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPBvMsT3prg">the Map in “Dora the Explorer.”</a></li><li>Two notes on Marc Summers, who opens the special with a take on the classic <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StorybookOpening">Disney storybook opening trope</a>:<ul><li>He wasn’t diagnosed with OCD until after “Double Dare” and has said it’s “<a href="https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/an-oral-history-of-nickelodeons-double-dare">been blown out of freakin’ proportion</a>.”</li><li>He <a href="https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/blogs/242072/television-host-producer-marc-summers-bar-mitzvah-changed-life/">dropped his given last name, Berkowitz</a>, after the arrest of the “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz.</li></ul></li><li>Sour cream vs. applesauce for latke dipping.</li><li>Michael Gunst (Sinrek) may or may not be <a href="http://www.gunstwork.com/aboutgunstwork.html">this puppeteer and mask maker</a>.</li><li