Season Review: Saturday Morning All Star Hits! Season One

Overview:

Saturday Morning All Star Hits! transports its audience back to the simpler times of the 1980s and ‘90s where a child could find everything that they need confined to a compact programming black of animation. A cavalcade of animated content is available for the audience to experience, with twin brothers Skip and Treybor (Kyle Mooney and Kyle Mooney) acting as the masters of ceremonies that guide the masses through this weekend ritual. Skip and Treybor love cartoons more than anyone, but their appreciation for the medium–and each other–is put to the test as the various cartoons that make up Saturday Morning All Star Hits! change with the times and reflect a new age that may not have room for both Skip and Treybor. 

 

Our Take: 

Nostalgia and genre are two elements that everyone loves to indulge in, but they’re actually extremely difficult to properly tap into in a way that feels genuine and doesn’t reek of hollow, commercial manipulation. It’s never been more in vogue to turn to the past with the hindsight and technology of the future. In this sense, there’s a tremendous amount of warmth towards the lost decades of the 1980s, and ‘90s where children could escape into the freedom of Saturday morning cartoons. It’s literally the perfect time for a mixed media genre experiment like Saturday Morning All Star Hits! to exist, but it’s almost too good at what it does. Every joke in Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is “perfect” when filtered through this nostalgic lens, but the difficulty then lies in what qualifies as a “joke.”

It’s even more difficult to successfully nail a nostalgia and genre pastiche when it doesn’t telegraph its comedy and often the commitment to the bit and these antiquated customs is the joke. It’s a niche style of comedy that usually fully clicks in with someone or completely passes over them. This makes Saturday Morning All Star Hits! a series that is destined to be extremely polarizing. For some, the show’s perfect replication of a bygone era of children’s entertainment and animation will cause little effect, while others won’t be able to stop laughing at the minutiae behind every tiny stereotype that’s beautifully recreated and embraced. 

Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is the perfect genre riff that would feel right at home airing at the wee hours of the night on Adult Swim and it’s actually a little surprising that it’s on as mainstream of a platform as Netflix. Saturday Morning All Star Hits! might even get lost among all of Netflix’s many The Shows That Made Us-type programs where people don’t even realize that this is original content and not some talking head nostalgia burst. It’d be easy to reduce this show to just extended “TV Funhouse” segments from Saturday Night Live, but Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is doing something so much more complex and ambitious with its pitch perfect parodies of multiple genres of animation and decades of content. It’s like if Documentary Now! tackled Saturday morning cartoons and it’s one of the most creative comedies to ever hit Netflix.

Kyle Mooney is very obviously the heart and soul of Saturday Morning All Star Hits! He doesn’t only play a gaggle of personalities in the series, but he’s also the co-creator and someone who clearly has endless love for this era of Saturday morning television (even Mooney’s debut feature film, Brigsby Bear, is evocative of a comparable nostalgic energy). Saturday Morning All Star Hits! provides Mooney with the ideal environment to indulge in these animated obsessions with zero restraint, like he’d need to on something like Saturday Night Live. One of the most crucial aspects of an experiment of this nature if the animation actually feels like it’s from the 1980s and ’90s. Co-creator Ben Jones (Stone Quackers), along with executive producers like Scott Gairdner (Moonbeam City), are able to seamlessly pool together years of experience in irreverent animation to make sure that each of the contrasting segments in Saturday Morning All Star Hits! doesn’t just look exactly how it should, but also feels distinct enough from the rest of the series’ programming. 

Jones and Gairdner are masters of parody, style, and satire, which makes them sublime fits with Kyle Mooney and the right people for a project of this nature where the attention to detail is painfully intricate, but deeply rewarding for those that are aware of all of these cultural reference points. And even for those that aren’t, the way in which the series mixes these gleeful and happy children’s programming with morose storylines and lessons is still incredibly effective. It’s a triumph in atypical storytelling and a genuinely impressive narrative is told across the course of the season, yet each episode is ostensibly disconnected and is able to stand on its own.

Like a big bowl of marshmallow-filled breakfast cereal, there’s a lot to digest in Saturday Morning All Star Hits!, but its major strength is its pitch perfect recreations of Saturday morning content from the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Randy the Dinosaur,” “Create-A-Crittles,” “Pro Bros,” and “Lil’ Bruce” all feel like lost episodes of long-running retro TV shows, but there’s still a sense of their history that’s provided in which the audience feels like they’ve viewed hundreds of episodes of these parodies, even though they’re being seen for the first time. Carefully, the series forms growing narratives that play out through the season’s various installments and culminate in some surprisingly deep ways. The growing animosity that forms between Skip and Treybor is palpable and becomes the guiding force for the entire series.

Saturday Morning All Star Hits! ricochets between live-action framing segments, the animated content that makes up the bulk of the episodes, but also fake commercials, nightly news programs, public advisory board PSAs, and other stylistic elements of the era. They’re all immaculately recreated, but are able to also tell a story across various episodes, all of which jump between stretches of time and the audience is left to fill in the blanks regarding what’s happened to Skip and Treybor. Saturday Morning All Star Hit’s content also continues to evolve in such a heightened manner that’s reflective of the changing sensibilities of children from different decades as the show slowly moves from the 1980s into the ’90s. There’s brilliant commentary on the way in which cartoons and TV shows experience dilution and change through network notes, audience interaction, and other forms of pandering. Each of the cartoons contained within Saturday Morning All Star Hits! gradually mutates. 

Each of the half-dozen animated series that get featured in Saturday Morning All Star Hits! are winners and none come across as weak links that drag the rest of the series down. “Create-A-Crittles” is a highlight, but “Strongimals” is perhaps the most polished of the show’s parodies as it centers on warriors who fight for peace and convert rage into hope. It’s the perfect example of that action cartoon mentality where as long as targets bleed green blood then children’s animation can be as violent as it wants. Bento Box rises to the occasion when it comes to each of these segments’ animation styles, but “Strongimals” reflects the most obvious network interference. Furthermore, the direction for the voice acting captures the exact energy that’s necessary. Everyone sounds so campy and provides the right variety of exaggerated performance that’s necessary for the different shows and their various character stereotypes. 

Saturday Morning All Star Hits! represents an incredibly niche brand of comedy that may only break through to a small percentage of people, but for them it will resonate as one of the best and weirdest series of the year. Audiences may find more laughs elsewhere and objectively Saturday Morning All Star Hits! might not be the funniest program, but the gags and details in the show are so meticulous that it elevates everything into a pristine package that truly feels like it came from several decades ago and not 2021.

It’s both zuzzy zazz and bonko.

 

This review is based on all eight episodes of ‘Saturday Morning All Star Hits!’

Season one of ‘Saturday Morning All Star Hits!’ is now available to stream, only on Netflix