Joe you’re shattering my hopes and dreams! 😉 Just kidding, I have no reason to believe my theory is actually true. I just want it to be true because it would be funny.

I would 100% trust anything Rikter said about Holiday Special releases back then. He even mentions that WMAR DVD was a compilation.

However, I don’t know that I’d put much stock in that review article casually mentioning the crawl was added in 1997. The article publish date is December 2017 and the author is pretty clear that they didn’t know anything about the special and they were just seeing it for the first time. The 1997 claim could be true, but there’s no explanation of where that information came from.