For a holiday with eight days and more than 16 different ways to spell it, Hanukkah once featured extremely limited television programming.
Today everything from Spider-Man to Mickey Mouse, “The Nanny” to “New Girl,” and “Arthur” to “Phineas and Ferb” have had Chanukah and/or Hanukkah episodes, but for decades there was not much beyond Ed Asner’s 1973 Hanukkah PBS documentary and David Grover’s sing-along special. While 1996’s “A Rugrats Chanukah” is often pointed to as the half-hour that popularized Hanukkah kids television specials in America, Nickelodeon the year before had its first half-hour surrounding the Feast of Dedication, and it arrived from a special place called Weinerville.
Yes, there is a “Weinerville Chanukah Special.”
During Nickelodeon’s experimental early ’90s, the children’s channel greenlighted a show starring puppet-centric comedian Marc Weiner at the helm. It was the result of an earlier game show pilot titled “That’s Not Fair” for the Ha! Network (which later merged with the Comedy Channel to become Comedy Central), based on a bit from Weiner’s segment on comedy show “Random Acts of Variety,” and the test audience skewed younger than the channel’s desired demographic. This timing, however, happened to coincide with Nickelodeon reportedly looking for “the Soupy Sales of the ’90s.”
The pilot was brought to Nickelodeon, which picked it up. “Weinerville” premiered in 1993. Continuing Weiner’s signature look of his human head on different puppet bodies (“Weinerettes”), the show was an episodic story of a city of puppets filmed in front of a live audience, which also featured a chance for audience members to compete in games (after being “Weinerized”) and segments wrapped around classic older cartoons. Nothing about the show was conventional in the world of children’s programming, even the time slot. Whereas most new kids shows would premiere weekday afternoons or Saturday mornings, “Weinerville” was given two hours on Sunday afternoons to air four back-to-back new episodes.
“Weinerville’s” second season saw the show move to weekday afternoons, but by then the Nickelodeon demographics began skewing older and “Weinerville” was moved to weekday mornings before school. Weiner recalls always wanting to do something for Hanukkah, originally pitching the idea of a Hanukkah PSA. “I went into a meeting with one of the executives, and he gave me a book about a Hanukkah story and it was just bizarre. [He said] ‘You should do a special, but your spin on this story.’ I asked if I could do one in a ‘Weinerville’ style and he said ‘OK.’” From there writer Scott Fellows, who was the voice of Zip on the show, became the driving force behind the special.
What resulted was one of the most uniquely chaotic half-hours of children’s television in the ’90s. Instead of being in front of a live crowd, the special was filmed at a cabin in Killington, Vt., in October, roughly two months before it was to air. While the snow may have been mostly fake, “The Weinerville Chanukah Special” — featuring space aliens and musical numbers — stayed grounded on a unique foundation of reality with the inclusion of then-popular hits from the B-52’s, Elastica and Gloria Estefan (which, according to Weiner, was achieved thanks to Nickelodeon parent company Viacom’s agreement with MTV over the networks’ use of licensed music) as well as counterculture celebrities across comedy, music and even wrestling (WWF’s Diesel a.k.a. Kevin Nash).
The plot follows two potato-pancake-esqe aliens — named Sektals “Latkes” spelled (mostly) backward, one played by actor Michael Gunst who recalls it being a “fun gig” shot in order over mere days with a crew of about a dozen — who are escaping their people’s evil overlord, Antidorkus (a riff on Antiochus), who’s been using his Keerg (“Greek”) ray to make their people abandon their traditions and behave exactly like him. So they escape to the ski lodge that the “Weinerville” gang has rented out as they attempt to find enough oil to fly back into space. Though it looks like they may not have enough oil, Hanukkah magic happens, Antidorkus is toppled and the day is saved. It ends with a big Halloween party and a fast punk rock song about all the different ways to make a menorah that channels Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
Along the way we get a song about the actual Hanukkah story performed by proto-punk pioneer David Johansen (credited as Buster Poindexter) who plays wise elder Gonsah K’nocker and sings an inspired original song, “The Hammer Came Down.” Weiner remembers working with Johansen: “I’m not sure who orchestrated getting him, but he was brilliant in that.”
Also appearing were Denny Dillon, making a cameo as her character Toby from HBO’s “Dream On.” Looking back at the special, Dillon appreciates its “wonderful silliness,” adding “I think that’s why the program works because you can stick with it, you don’t know where you’re going and there’s a commitment to the silliness.” Also appearing was Laura Kightlinger, who was familiar with how Weiner “was a comic’s comic and everybody liked him” and remembers filming her scene where she’s holding real applesauce being fun and today appreciates how fast-paced it was, making it “perfect for right now.”
Opening the special was Nickelodeon icon and “Double Dare” host Marc Summers, reading the traditional Hanukkah story and sharing the screen with “Weinerville’s” most famous character, Boney, a skeletal dinosaur who was the angry ornery B-side to the then-famous purple dinosaur Barney.
“Boney could do absolutely anything and it would crack me up,” Summers recalls. He describes Weiner as “a very religious person, and wants to spread the word about Judaism and its traditions. It was kind of revolutionary when you think about it.”
Back in the day, Summers says, Hanukkah would pop up every now and then as a brief segment, but nobody would spend much time explaining what it was. But Weiner would do it with a point of view and sense of humor. “People tend to stereotype all things Jewish and what they don’t know about certain holidays with what they think they do,” Summers says. “So, you got it right from the horse’s mouth with the guy who understood what he was doing.”
Along with the music and aesthetic insanity, what makes “The Weinerville Chanukah Special” stand out among the three decades of Hanukkah specials since is how Hanukkah is celebrated without having to be analogous to another holiday. Christmas isn’t in any way mentioned, everyone knows what latkes are and Hanukkah takes full center stage. In an interesting coincidence, the same week “Weinerville’s” special premiered, Shari Lewis’ “Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah” premiered over on PBS. Two puppet-filled musical Hanukkah specials in the same week after decades of drought is a miracle in itself. Just as surprising is the overwhelming critical praise “Weinerville” received.
The New York Times raved it was “Wacky, no doubt. And absolutely charming.” Reviewing it for The Times, NF Mendoza called it “Fun and Vivid.” The Jewish Week, while not quite on the same level of enthusiasm, did give the accurate and inadvertently enticing description “this pow! bam! sock! pie-in-the-face, ‘kick butt’ spaceage version of Chanukah is loud. Very loud.” Weiner’s manager Lee Kernis remembers, “Nickelodeon were very supportive… I don’t recall there being any notes… Marc and people used to joke that the show was put together by superglue and Scotch tape. It was not a high-tech show. I think that was the charm, it filtered back to Nickelodeon what Marc had to do to make that show.”
While “The Weinerville Chanukah Special” aired a handful of times in 1995, the next year’s “A Rugrats Chanukah” (airing a month after the final Nickelodeon “Weinerville” production “The Weinerville Election Special from Washington BC”) became the channel’s go-to holiday tradition for generations to come. While absent from the airwaves, in December 2000 and 2002, “The Weinerville Chanukah Special” was screened at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, and thanks to the advent of file sharing and video streaming sites, the special gained a cult following through the 2010s, often the go-to choice for a Hanukkah episode of Christmas podcasts. It’s a favorite of children’s television podcasts as well, the Nickelodeon-themed “Splat Attack Podcast’s” Manny Oramas lovingly reflects “when the special came out, I knew nothing about Hanukkah, but this helped in subtle ways. I consider it timeless.”
Weiner has stayed active in the children’s media world, voicing Map and Swiper across several “Dora the Explorer” incarnations. He’s also been making tote bags from old sails used on the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater (which he was on for three years in the ’70s) to promote the Clearwater’s environmental work. His family’s also continued to spread innovative Hanukkah cheer: His eldest daughter, Rebecca, a chef and artist living in Israel with her husband, challah artist Idan Chabasov a.k.a Instagram’s @ChallahPrince, this year have collaborated on an illustrated recipe for making a challah menorah — a full-circle moment as Rebecca is seen in “The Weinerville Chanukah Special’s” closing montage showing her own environmentally-conscious “Recyclorah.” Weiner is planning to stream the episode in some form this Hanukkah on his YouTube channel WeinervilleTV. Revisiting the special 30 years later, it’s still impressive to see a fast-paced, puppet-centric explosively creative take on Hanukkah — no strings attached.
