Back when animation studio DIC held the rights to produce cartoons based on Nintendo's popular Super Mario Bros. line of video games, children were captivated by such productions as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and Super Mario World.  Unfortunately, those cartoons just weren't all that great.  What can I say?  We were kids excited to see our digital heroes appearing on weekday syndicated and Saturday morning network cartoons.  The actual quality of the show wasn't that important.  Both incarnations of these Mario cartoons celebrated Christmas in their own way with the episodes "Koopa Klaus" and "The Night Before Cave Christmas", neither which have gone down in history as essential holiday viewing, but it's slow this time of year and you're not doing much, so why not revisit some mid-quality, occasionally off-model animation?  For more on this stuff (or maybe even instead of it), check out our salute to 1990s cartoons based on video games in Episode 137 of the Power Button podcast.

In the interest of equal time, here's DIC's idea of Christmas with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Christmas Blast.  We've come a long way, folks.  If these episodes were produced today, the whole thing would be done with computers.