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Episode 737: Holiday Special 2025 - Video Power (Patreon)

Published:
2025-12-15 08:01:07
Imported:
2026-08
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It's that time of the year again, so hang your stockings, haul home a coniferous tree, and pack the required survival gear for another harrowing trip to the Retronauts Holiday Cabin in Parts Unknown. And for this 15th outing, we'll be taking a long, mostly confused look at Video Power: the Captain N also-ran that assembled a team of C-list protagonists for some poorly animated, Acclaim-promoting fun. (Before being completely retooled into a game show the following year.) So listen in as Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Drew Mackie as the crew assembles and attempts to learn the true meaning of brand integration.

Cover art by Nick Daniel.

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Comments

littleterr0r

I think the reason no one talks about this is because nobody knows it exists. You know those low effort Reddit posts that are like, "Anybody remember this?!" and they're just things everyone remembers, like POGS? This is the opposite of that.

littleterr0r

I'm glad Drew is on the podcast, because only he has the guts to question Bob's unfounded love of Polka.

Diamond Feit

"how am I telling these gay guys new facts about Madonna??" - an exasperated Bob Mackey

littleterr0r

I'd put Kid Niki on the C-tier list because he's just too radical of a dude to not be on it. Maybe also Joe & Mac? That, or the car from City Connection. Why not all four?

Patrick McClafferty

I knew the game show version existed as a kid. It used to be on around 7AM before school. I know i sent in a game help request (on TMNT and the damn dam level) but I'm sure the show was canceled by that point. I really wanted to go through the maze sticking games to my body with velcro. As for the first season of the show, in recent years, me and a bunch of my queer buddies tried to watch it for camp value. I think we got through 6 episodes before giving up out of boredom and hatred for Qwirk.

Shrunken Shrine

Thank you for your service, Bob. I love these every year and the production value is always apparent. They can't be fun to research, let alone make!

Sebastiano Gerace

I thought I was the only person with the Video Power rap stuck in my head the past 30 years. The true GOAT of these shows needs to be next: Video & Arcade Top 10!

About to Happy

I stumbled on a YouTube playlist of episodes a while back (after having found not much the last time I went searching) and stumbled on the same accordion/concertina repair ad in an episode and had the same reaction. As a kid it was just super cool to have another video game show on TV, and that morning slot before school was perfect, though I probably mostly watched on break (had a year-round school schedule growing up, month break every two months!) I remember seeing the Minus World trick featured in the tips section, but as a kid missing some of the context and for YEARS being unable to replicate it until finally seeing it described again in Nintendo Power volume 100. The game show version was an unbelievable dream for kid me. I distinctly remember one episode where the writers/producers totally had the wrong answer to a music question, where the music played came from DuckTales, and when neither team got it they gave the answer as... some other game. Mario 3? I need to go searching for it now, update if and when I find it. I was so mad as a kid! I was shouting the answer at the TV. Love how the gang gives props to Stivi Paskoski's energy/work ethic as Johnny, for all the problems elsewhere in the show. Even with the Saban cheapness you can tell at least some of the people working on this thing cared about it. It could have been better, but it also could have been way worse! A bit outside the scope of the discussion on the pod proper, but since a big theme was the relative lack of documentation/material for research, I wanted to bring up a recent addition: one of the items made available on the Video Game History Foundation Digital Archive when it launched this year was the contestant material pack, saved by a contestant on episode 72 https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/89f006d2-d904-487f-b15c-d7f6aa4bc9b4?sortField=title&sortDir=asc&showUncatalogedFiles=true . <s>One other thing: circa 1999 The Power Team cartoon had at least one second life as a standalone program on the FOX Family cable channel (soon to be ABC Family Channel and today Freeform) at or near its launch/rebrand from The Family Channel, repackaged with the Video Power segments excised. Perfect companion to reruns of Camp Candy and, uh, whatever else they had going on that I forget at the moment. It was one of the first times I saw a cable channel launch with old, cheap content that was from MY youth instead of my parents, and honestly a thrill seeing that stuff again and confirming I hadn't dreamed it, regardless of quality.</s> EDIT: I can find no evidence that it aired on FOX Family, or ABC Family. Wikipedia confirms it did get repackaged and the 26 episodes did continue to air (but doesn't say where). I know I saw it somewhere around that time...

Jason J

None of this rang a bell until Bob mentioned the part in the second season where the winner runs through the Velcro maze grabbing games. Omg that memory has sat untouched in the back of my brain for over 30 years! Thanks Bob and crew!

Tall Rob

Thank you for disentangling this show from Captain N in my memory. When I re-watched Captain N as an adult, I was wondering when they would get to the segment where Captain N comes back *out* of the TV to tell us about new games. Apparently, I merged the live-action previews and reviews of Video Power with the cartoon parts of Captain N into a single show in my young mind. There is a lot to consider in Henry's comment about the disappearance of bartending and accordion / concertina repair commercials and what that means for directionless young men these days. It's hard to imagine a similar "learn a trade" ad campaign today that's focused on something socially reproductive as bartending or instrument repair. It's more common to see recruiting ads for ICE or the military instead, which says a lot about what is meant to appeal to that demographic.

Sayewonn Wisseh

I remember waking up at 6 in the morning to watch this show. I didn't really care about the Power Team but I loved the game show part of the show.