Mom’s Choice Awards is excited to announce another post in our interview series where we chat with the inventors, designers, publishers, and others behind some of our favorite family-friendly products.
Hello, Mom’s Choice readers! Thank you all for joining us today for another interview in our ongoing series. Today we have an extra merry treat for you all because we were able to speak with not one but two of our wonderful honorees, Matt & Kiwi Callahan! Matt & Kiwi Callahan are the husband and wife duo that created the Mom’s Choice Award-winning game, Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®! Bad Christmas Movie Bingo® is a board game designed to be played while watching any made-for-TV Christmas movie. Just turn on a movie, mark off your squares as the story unfolds, and get 5 in a row to win! This game is the perfect game to play with family and friends throughout this holiday season. Trust us, you won’t be able to put it down! To find out more about Matt & Kiwi and their fabulous award-winning game, read the full interview below.
MCA: Hi Matt & Kiwi, thank you so much for joining us, and a big congratulations to you both on your Mom’s Choice Award! Bad Christmas Movie Bingo is such a genius idea and an absolute riot to play with both friends and family. Can I first start the interview off by finding out a little bit about the people who created such a fun game?
Matt & Kiwi Callahan, creators of the MCA award-winning game, Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®!
Matt: I’m Matt Callahan, and along with my wife Kiwi Callahan, we are the co-creators of Bad Christmas Movie Bingo® — the hilarious holiday party game you play while watching made-for-TV Christmas movies. We come from varying backgrounds including dual musical theatre careers, food and beverage management, video production, branding, and website design, and too many other jobs to list — but somehow our passion for Christmas and connecting people through laughter led us to create the Ultimate Holiday Game Tradition.
MCA: Tell us about the origin story of Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®!
Matt & Kiwi: The story goes: One night while watching TV (and after more than a few glasses of wine), we happened upon one of those made-for-TV Christmas movies on… well, you know what channels they’re on. 😉 And then we watched another one… and another… and like a car accident, we couldn’t look away! They were all so hilariously cheesy, and so stunningly similar… in a “Eureka” moment we ran to the kitchen, grabbed a notepad and two pens, and scribbled down what ended up becoming the first Bad Christmas Movie Bingo board. What started as a private holiday tradition for the two of us soon spread like wildfire amongst family and friends, and has gone from a digital download and a dream to a full-fledged, sold-in-stores success story!
MCA: We are not surprised it spread like wildfire, it makes watching bad Christmas movies all the more fun! How has it been creating and running a company as husband and wife?
Matt & Kiwi: It’s funny: We have a square on the Bingo boards for Childhood Sweethearts because it’s such a stereotypical trope of Hallmark Christmas movies — and in real life, the two of us are actual childhood sweethearts! We met in high school and fell in love when we were just 17, and we’ve been together ever since… we basically grew up together, and it’s really shaped our sense of humor and outlook on life. So, as best friends and two people still madly in love, it’s truly been the highlight of our lives to be able to create Bad Christmas Movie Bingo® together. We complement each other’s skill sets really well, and it’s such a fun thing to be able to work on every day that it doesn’t feel like work at all. (Well, most of the time anyway — at this point we’ve watched over 500 made-for-TV Christmas movies, and it can sometimes be a bit taxing to make it all the way through them at this point 😂)
MCA: That is such a sweet story, thank you for sharing it with us. Also, with over 500 Christmas movies, it sounds like there is a very unique research and development when it comes to your company! Speaking of research and development, tell us more about the features of Bad Christmas Movie Bingo.
The Mom’s Choice Award-Winning game, Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®!
Matt & Kiwi: Bad Christmas Movie Bingo® is a board game that you can play while watching *any* made-for-TV Christmas movie. (Yup, it works with all of them — any channel, any year, any storyline — as long as it’s a made-for-TV Christmas movie, you’re all set!) We’ve written over 150 unique bingo squares that represent the events, character traits, and plot points that happen during these movies, all spread across 15 completely unique and different bingo boards. To play the game you just grab a board, turn on a made-for-TV Christmas movie, mark off your squares as the story unfolds, and get 5 in a row across, down, or diagonally to win! (You also may want to have plenty of your favorite adult beverages on hand…)
Whether you’re gathering with family around the TV, doing a watch party with friends, live-tweeting the Hallmark and Lifetime premieres (like we do), or just opening a bottle of wine and getting ready for some quality binge-watching with your loved one, Bad Christmas Movie Bingo® turns even the most boring holiday shlock-fest into a riotous good time. You can look forward to squares like:
⭐️ WOMAN WITH GREAT CAREER IS SAD INSIDE ⭐️
⭐️ OH LOOK… A SMALL TOWN ⭐️
⭐️ FLIRTY BAKING ⭐️
⭐️ A LARGE CORPORATION TRIES TO RUIN CHRISTMAS ⭐️
And of course… ⭐️ BAD ACTING ⭐️
(It’s the Free Space, naturally.)
MCA: Tell us more about how board games such as Bad Christmas Movie Bingo bring families together.
The bingo cards that can be found within Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®!
Matt & Kiwi: Folks have written to us and expressed how much fun it was for the whole family to play, with even a few telling us that it was fun for three generations to share. People have said it adds an engrossing, hilarious dimension to the watching experience, making it easier for those who don’t typically enjoy these types of movies to sit through them. It really makes us happy that others are starting to adopt the game as a holiday tradition – we absolutely love the holidays, so it feels really special that people like our creation enough to make it part of their holiday celebrations. We get lots of great feedback on the Bingo squares especially – they’re slightly sarcastic and we work hard to make them clever and clear, so it’s not just identifying common Christmas themes, but really commenting on the particulars of the made-for-TV genre of Christmas movies.
MCA: What games can we expect to see next from you two?
Matt & Kiwi: We’re currently in development on two more Bingo games that we think people are going to absolutely love — Bad Mystery Movie Bingo™, and Bad Reality Housewives Bingo™! These two additions will allow lovers (and haters) of those fantastically bad Lifetime and Hallmark thrillers and whodunits, along with everyone’s favorite Real Housewives series, to get in on the fun and play all year long. Look for updates on these releases next year!
MCA: As a lover of the Real Housewives series, I can say I am especially excited about that one! Please keep us posted when they come out!
You can learn more about Matt & Kiwi Callahan and their award-winning game, Bad Christmas Movie Bingo®, by visiting their MCA Shop pages.
