Nirvanna the Band the Show stars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have revealed that creating their iconic Wii Shop Update Day song wasn't even a full day's work from start to finish.
"That entire video was written, edited, and put on the internet within about five hours," Johnson told IGN.
The sketch was part of the pair's web series, which was released online between 2007 and 2010. In this particular episode, Jay improvises a whole song set to the music on the Wii Shopping Channel – to Matt's irritation.
"We were sitting there trying to figure out… We saw the title, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, it had just been released because at this time Nintendo was dropping, like, Sega Genesis, it was the Wild West," Johnson continued.
"Like, to be a Wii owner, it was unbelievable. And so we're looking at all of these titles of games that we never played because I was literally region locked out of Sega. I was not allowed to play Sega Genesis games because I think my parents saw, like, two seconds of Altered Beast and were like, 'That's enough!'... We saw that ToeJam & Earl had dropped and we were like, okay, we must put this in this song and trying to figure out what the hell rhymes with Funkotron."
"This is why, when I'm singing it, you can see that I'm barely able to even get around it," McCarrol added. "And they're holding up the words that we've scribbled down right off screen."
The webseries eventually got a TV adaptation in 2017, also titled Nirvanna the Band the Show, which aired for two seasons on Viceland. A movie premiered last year and was given a limited release in February.
If you're looking for other Nintendo and entertainment industry crossovers, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrives in theaters on April 1. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the other upcoming video game movies to add to your watchlist in 2026.
