Super-duper
What's the meaning of the phrase 'Super-duper'?
'Super-duper' means especially large, powerful or impressive; exceptional, marvellous.
It is used for emphasis - 'super' plus a bit more, and is often followed by an exclamation mark.
What's the origin of the phrase 'Super-duper'?
It will come as no surprise that 'super-duper' was coined in the USA.
The first use of it in print that I've found is in a 1969 informational magazine for teachers in (where else?) Texas, called The Texas Outlook:
Your play has to be a good one, and it has to be a super-duper production to gain and hold the attention of squirming, wriggling youngsters.
Super-duper follows the familiar reduplicated phrase recipe by taking a word with a meaning and adding a rhyming or alliterative second word. As is also common, the second word 'duper' has no meaning in itself, it's just there for emphasis. (Yes, I know 'duper' is a word, but the meaning 'one who dupes' isn't what's meant by this expression.)
The phrase appears a few times in print over the next ten years or so but didn't have a wide usage. What propelled it into the English language was the song that Irving Berlin wrote in May 1927 - Puttin' On the Ritz:
Dressed up like a million-dollar trooper
Trying hard to look like Gary Cooper (super-duper)
Come, let's mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks or umbrellas in their mitts
Puttin' on the ritz
Fred Astaire's recording of the song, and the dance routine he performed with it, were a big hits in the late 1920s.
BTW. If you haven't seen the Puttin' on the ritz dance routine from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein I can recommend it.