Salute Your Shorts - Season 1 (1991)

It's amazing how vividly you can remember episodes of a short lived television series that you haven't seen for almost twenty years when you sit down and watch them again.  If you were apart of the Nickelodeon fad in it's veritable heyday of the early 90's, when they aired more than Sponge Bob, you probably remember a two season series called Salute Your Shorts.  It's amazing that a kids show that 26 episodes could to this day still be so widely loved by those who grew up watching, it currently ranks #3 on Tvshowsondvd.com's list of most requested unreleased shows, right below The Wonder Years and Batman, now that says something!

The show took place at Camp Anawanna, a summer camp for young teens, with your typical cast of stereotypical characters: the dufus camp counselor Kevin "Ug" Lee, the tree huger Z.Z. Zip, the athletic African American Telly Radford, the skinny runt of a nerd Sponge Harris, the stuck up hottie Dina Alexander, the white trash mullet sporting camp bully Bobby Budnick, the overweight stooge Eddie "Donkeylips" Gelfen, and the "average Joe" Michael Stein.  The series kicks off with Michael's first day at camp, it's at this point he gets the Anawanna welcome with a hazing from Budnick and Gelfen, the other main characters seem to be already acquainted with one another so Michael must find his place within the group, eventually he fits into the madness.  Ironically for a show with such a cult following none of the actors went on to do much of anything else in terms of live acting, in fact their careers seemingly died with the show.  The only one who had much of a career before hand was camp bully Bobby Budnick (Danny Cooksey) with a recurring role on Diff'rent Strokes and a small part in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, now he's doing a lot of voice acting for cartoons.

First airing in 1991 almost twenty years later the show is a breath of fresh air amidst an era where kids television is now so politically correct and starchy, it's a show that probably wouldn't be given a shot in today's market and was probably ahead of time when it aired back in the early 90's. It's hard to explain the draw of the show, whether it's simply a glimpse back into the past of my own childhood, or the fact that it's a mindless entertaining diversion out of an era of television where kids shows weren't afraid to be real.  Whatever it maybe Salute Your Shorts has a place in the hearts of thousands of us who probably sat in front of the TV and watched reruns of the handful of episodes over and over till eventually it was gone forever, savoring every food fight, camp ground prank or campy one-liner.

8/10