Salute Your Shorts/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: The show is based on the 1986 book Salute Your Shorts: Life at Summer Camp by Steve Slavkin.
    • Incidentally the main writer on the show and the voice of Dr. Kahn.
  • Ear Worm: The theme song.
    • Also, a commercial for the show using the tune of the "Colonel Bogey March":

"Ug! one time his face turned blue!
Ug! he likes to punish you!
Ug, he is a slug,
so be a bug and bug ug today!"

  • Genius Bonus: In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the title character observes that "a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm" and therefore "a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar."

Pinsky: Think about it. When you die they stick you in the ground and it's the worms that eat you up!
Z.Z.: Then somebody digs up the worms that ate you and use to catch fish which somebody else eats.
Donkeylips: So wait a second guys, when we had fish sticks the other night, I could have eaten a fish, that ate a worm, that ate Elvis?
Z.Z.: You could be burping up the King as we speak!

  • Hollywood Homely: Kevin "Ug" Lee.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Zeke the Plumber. Just... Zeke the Plumber.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Pinsky to some, probably exacerbated by many of the campers receiving him as "Michael, but cooler" despite having little in common, personality-wise, with the guy he displaced (ironically, "Budnick, but less of a jerk" would probably have been closer to the mark). On the other hand some liked him better than Michael, whose main gimmick was to be The Straight Man in a zany ensemble cast.
    • The really interesting thing, though is that Pinsky's actor, Blake Soper, would become Blake Sennett and co-found Rilo Kiley....
  • Tear Jerker: Ug gets a letter from his girlfriend saying she's coming to visit, but nobody has the heart to tell him that another letter came explaining that the first was sent to him by mistake and was meant for her new boyfriend. Ug spends all day waiting excitedly at the camp entrance with a big wooden heart for her only to have his broken when she doesn't show.
    • When Michael is about to leave camp and sees his friends waving goodbye. But he tells Ug to stop the car and decides to stay.
  • Too Good to Last: Lasted only two seasons on old-school Nickelodeon.
  • The Woobie: Ug usually, after dealing with those kids it's no wonder he's so high-strung.