Though it solely had two seasons, the Nickelodeon sitcom Salute Your Shorts has remained a cult traditional because it premiered 31 years in the past.
The present follows a gaggle of youngsters, in addition to their strict counselor Kevin “Ug” Lee (Kirk Baily), who’re spending their summers at Camp Anawana. The ensemble forged featured characters together with camp bully Bobby Budnick (Danny Cooksey), boy genius Sponge Harris (Tim Eyster), tomboy Telly Radford (Venus DeMilo Thomas), nature lover Z.Z. Ziff (Megan Berwick), snobby princess Dina Alexander (Heidi Lucas) and comedian aid Eddie C. “Donkeylips” Gelfand (Michael Bower).
Steve Slavkin, who appeared on the present as Dr. Kahn, tailored the Salute Your Shorts pilot from his 1986 ebook of the identical title. In a 2017 interview with PopSugar, Slavkin mentioned that the present was his large break.
“That is the primary large challenge I ever did. I used to be 26 years outdated once I bought the present to Nickelodeon. I’d written a ebook known as Salute Your Shorts with my buddy Tom Hill — he and I had met at summer season camp collectively. So he and I wrote a humor ebook collectively, after which we bought it to Nickelodeon,” he defined.
The author added that he knew he was taking a unique method than different sitcom creators on the time. “I attempted to jam-pack as a lot as I presumably may into every episode. I had simply come out of movie faculty; I wished to make a mark, I wished to do issues totally different, I wished to place the digicam somewhere else, and I wished to inform tales a unique manner. Children’ tv on the time was largely sitcoms, so we had been going to do comedy a unique manner. We had been going to do leap cuts, make little films, and do it with out a chortle observe,” he mentioned.
Cooksey spoke to PopSugar together with Slavkin, commenting on his relationship together with his costars throughout filming. “Everyone obtained alongside rather well. It was numerous enjoyable. We had been on this little bubble of our personal existence. We had been in L.A., and most of Nickelodeon’s stuff was [filmed] in Florida. We had been in our personal little cocoon,” he instructed the outlet.
After the collection ended, some Salute Your Shorts alums remained shut associates. Baily and Bower had been each groomsmen in Cooksey’s 1998 marriage ceremony. Nearly all of the forged — together with Slavkin, Baily and Bower — reunited in 2015 for Portland’s Every thing is Fantastic pageant. They even sang the present’s memorable theme music collectively throughout their panel on the popular culture conference. Tragically, the crew misplaced one in all their very own in February 2022 when Baily died from lung most cancers on the age of 59.
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