This deeply odd video tribute to Philly Christmas kitsch may move you to tears

It begins with a burst of snowy static, like from an old TV set, then cuts to a cable listings guide, scrolling holiday movies from the 1990s. “Home for Christmas,” reads one fuzzy title.

Then, the five-minute piece of holiday digital art from Johnny Zito and Tony Trov, founders of the successful and irreverent Philly lifestyle brand, South Fellini, becomes like a dream.

Hypnotic lo-fi holiday beats play over a supercut of found footage of Philly’s Christmas past. Fleeting snippets of classic Philly Christmas kitsch and seasonal schmaltz that you may not even realize you remember, kindles a longing for the holidays of yesteryear.

Like that instantly recognizable Pennsylvania Lottery holiday commercial, where an old man delivers gifts of lotto tickets to half the city in the snow, and carolers sing — “Five Cash Fives!” — in the lottery’s remix of “12 Days of Christmas.”

And grainy footage from a long-ago Gimbels Thanksgiving Parade, when cowgirl Sally Starr led Mummers down Broad Street on horseback. Holiday promos of Charles Barkley singing with Big Shot, the short-lived Sixers mascot, and news segments on everything from the Christmas crush at Kiddie City for Cabbage Patch Dolls to Dilworth Plaza tree-lighting ceremonies with crowds to rival Live Aid.

The captivating, and sometimes oddly haunting, mixed-media montage is the latest digital artwork produced by Zito and Trov — lifelong South Philadelphians and best friends, who are also filmmakers and writers — and part of an aesthetic they’ve branded “Hoagiewave,” a Philly take on the ‘80s-inspired Vaporwave music genre. (The new video is called “Holiday Hoagiewave.”)

“Vaporwave is an exploration of a past that never actually existed,” said Zito, who dug up the footage from online archives and social media. “We’re taking that same lens and focusing it on Philadelphia with Hoagiewave. We’re exploring a Philadelphia that maybe didn’t exist anywhere other than our minds.”

Of course, this imagined Philadelphia is full of the in-jokes and loving mockery that’s become the hallmark of the South Fellini brand. For the music, Trov built a beat around the iconic line from that lottery commercial: “What a great gift!”

And for every heartwarming vintage news segment of a South Philly family’s seven fishes dinner, there’s a cheesy clip from a Saturday-morning television relic like the Al Alberts Showcase.

“It ran from the 60s up until like, 1994. He’d let these kids on and they’d do these corny acts. And it was like, excruciating. Terrible production values,” Trov said, laughing. “It was like Krusty the Clown.”

It’s all meant to elicit a longing for ephemera that wasn’t meant to get lodged in your brain ― but did.

“A lot of this content is things we’ve seen a million times, but people don’t reminisce about ads,” Trov said. “But you might have seen that more than the show you actually like.”

People commented on Instagram and YouTube that they cried upon seeing the video — that it took them back to their childhood and a simpler time. That’s how powerful a remix of a lottery commercial song can be.

“These are the things that are being pumped into people’s brains that they do remember from those times and that’s where these feelings and memories come from,” Zito said. “I guess there’s a comfort in those thoughts that return you back to your childhood. And then there’s something missing from that. And that part that’s missing is left up to you to fill in now.”