The Obsessive Brilliance of Saturday Morning All Star Hits!
As an emotionally fragile man-child unhealthily obsessed with kid shows like Sesame Street, The Muppet Babies and Yo Gabba Gabba!, I was understandably intrigued to discover back in 2017 that Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney had made a film about an emotionally fragile man-child unhealthily obsessed with a kid show called Brigsby Bear.
Looking at the premise of Mooney’s starring and screenwriting debut, it felt like he had made a movie specifically for me and my warped, weird, defiantly stunted sensibility. Brigsby Bear more than lived up to expectations. It was funny and weird and deeply personal but also oddly beautiful and achingly sad.
In the ensuing years I have periodically wondered what Mooney was up to. Brigsby Bear was an auspicious and unique debut. I couldn’t wait to see what was next.
So you can only imagine how excited I was to discover that Mooney was co-writing and starring in Saturday Morning All Star Hits!, a Netflix live-action/animated hybrid that once again feels like it was created specifically for me.
If a highly developed computer had created a show for me to watch while baked out of my gourd, it couldn’t have concocted a more perfect piece of entertainment than Saturday Morning All Star Hits! Watching Mooney’s pitch-perfect evisceration/celebration of terrible kid shows from the 1980s and 1990s made me feel seen and understood.
Like many projects from funny people who rose to fame on Saturday Night Live, Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is Executive Produced by Lorne Michaels. Michaels may be synonymous with safe, mainstream comedy but his resume positively overflows with hip, subversive cult comedy created by people infinitely younger, funnier and more original than himself, people like The Lonely Island, Tina Fey, John Mulaney and Mooney.
It similarly makes sense for Michaels to be involved with Saturday Morning All Star Hits! because its juxtaposition of hokey, hacky childhood innocence and adult naughtiness recalls Robert Smigel’s work on the “Saturday TV Funhouse” shorts and its short-lived but much loved Comedy Central spin-off TV Funhouse. The show’s specificity and obscurity, meanwhile, couldn’t help but remind me of The Lonely Island, who produced Brigsby Bear.
Yes, Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! is a wildly original delight that’s also a more or less an exact cross between five or six of my favorite television shows of all time, including Mr. Show.
In a weirdly challenging dual role, Mooney stars as twin brothers Skip and Treybor, overly caffeinated doofuses I assumed were an inspired riff on daffy duos like Bill and Ted and The Deedle Brothers from the motion picture Meet the Deedles.
I learned on Wikipedia, however, that Skip and Treybor are instead very overt parodies of Chip and Pepper, long-haired identical twin surfer types who ran a denim and tie dye-intensive clothing line in Canada and were given their own network cartoon show by Brandon Tartikoff, who was understandably gob-smacked by their ebullient idiocy.
Saturday Morning All Star Hits! miraculously mines a shocking amount of genuine emotion and pathos from the unexpectedly complicated and fraught relationship between two dumbass Pauly Shore types.
Skip and Treybor begin the series as equals but when Skip is inexplicably cast in a bit role in a Thundercats-like show called Strongimals as a fictionalized version of himself he rockets instantly to super-stardom on the basis of his borderline incomprehensible slang and “uh, subs?” catchphrase, leaving Treybor seething with jealousy and resentment.
Skip and the Strongimals
The more successful Skip becomes, the more Treybor dies inside. Skip’s extraordinary success becomes his brother’s equally volcanic failure and Mooney is such a skilled thespian that he does not need dialogue to express Treybor’s inner anguish because it’s apparent in his body language and every mortified facial expression.
As the less prominent brother, Treybor is defined by his deep-seated insecurities. He’s not alone in that respect. In Saturday Morning All Star Hits, damn near everyone wrestles with the feeling that they’re hopelessly inferior.
In the show’s melancholy, bittersweet universe, this sense of not being good enough isn’t relegated to human beings. In Randy, a parody of Denver, The Last Dinosaur, a talking, anthropomorphic dinosaur must confront his deep-seated self-loathing and depression as well as the difficulty of being a dinosaur in a human world.
Randy may be a spoof of Denver, the Last Dinosaur but the funny talking animal who is actually suicidally depressed he calls to mind is Bojack Horseman. This speaks to the show’s depth and pathos.
Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! is less interested in exploiting the cheap shock of adorable cartoon characters fucking and doing drugs than in exploring, with sensitivity and understated artistry, the haunting gulf between the tacky childhood innocence of kid’s cartoons and the darkness, despair and hopelessness of adult life.
This potent strain of pitch-black humor is reflected most purely in a show called Li’l Bruce. It’s a cartoon/live-action vehicle for comedian Bruce Chandler (Kyle Mooney) that’s swiftly canceled for being soul-crushingly depressing, even by Saturday Morning All Star Hits! standards.
Bruce and Li’l Bruce
There’s an unmistakable element of truth in Li’l Bruce. It’s not unlike Life With Louie, a light-hearted cartoon about creator and star Louie Anderson’s childhood that understandably glossed over the abuse Anderson suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father.
Treybor’s jealousy towards his more prominent brother echoes the central dynamic in Pro Bros, an ultra-violent spoof of ProStars about a pair of athletes cursed to live in the outsized shadows of their more successful siblings.
Pro Bros is the excessively personal brainchild of Ethan Rash, a less prominent brother who cannot begin to compete with his teen idol movie star/pop star brother Johnny (Mooney). I honestly thought I was the only person in the world who even remembered Pro Stars but Mooney and his gifted collaborators don’t just remember all of this glorious trash; they care enough to get things exactly right.
The show’s perverse dedication to getting every last detail right extends to animation that is all the more effective and funny for being authentically bad. The cheap, schlocky animation and character design adds to the verisimilitude of the project, the sense that this is a genuine lost artifact of the George H.W Bush era rather than a canny contemporary simulation.
In the second to last episode of the first season Johnny goes on the run after murdering a popular television star in a brilliant extended riff on O.J Simpson’s legendary low-speed freeway chase that interrupts a hilarious parody of Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, which I write about in my new book The Joy of Trash.
There’s voluminous darkness in Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! but as with Brigsby Bear there’s light and joy and humor as well. It’s a remarkable piece of entertainment that calls to mind Wonder Showzen as well as Bojack Horseman, “Saturday TV Funhouse”, Mr. Show and The Lonely Island’s films, albums and shorts without feeling overly derivative.
I hungrily devoured all eight episodes of Saturday Morning All Star Hits! twice in less than a week. I very much hope that it gets picked up for a second season but I am SO obsessed with the show that if, god forbid, it’s cancelled I will pull a Brigsby Bear and create my own version of Saturday Morning All Star Hits! for my own benefit. THAT’s how deeply I have connected with the show. It’s gotten under my skin and penetrated my psyche in the best possible way.
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