Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Saturday Morning All-Star Hits!’ On Netflix, Kyle Mooney’s Twisted Tribute To Kids Show Lineups Of The ‘80s And ‘90s

The ’80s and early ’90s were the golden age of cheesy cartoons. Sure there was the ’70s, where it seemed that every Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a photocopy of Scooby-Doo. But in the ’80s and ’90s, the animation got clunkier, the stories got thinner, and the toy tie-ins got more obvious. SNL’s Kyle Mooney and veteran animation producer Ben Jones have satirized that time period in a new, very weird Netflix series.

SATURDAY MORNING ALL-STAR HITS!: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A grainy VCR recording of a commercial for a video game controller called the Mega Mitten.

The Gist: Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! is a tribute of sorts to the kids’ cartoon lineups of the ’80s and ’90s, with both live action and animated sequences.

We start with the Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! hosts, Skip and Treybor (Kyle Mooney), twin brothers who both have long hair, acid-washed denim shorts and say “Dude” a lot. But it seems like Treybor is the more thoughtful of the two, and Skip just likes to make fun of his brother.

They introduce a cartoon called Randy, about a dinosaur of the same name (Mooney), zapped into today’s world. The overly-explanatory intro tells us he hangs out with a group of kids, can’t control his tail and is in love. But in the episode we see, her firefighter girlfriend (Emma Stone) breaks up with him, essentially because he’s a drunk fuck-up that bashes everything with his tail. He’s so depressed he whispers that “I wish I was extinct”.

Then we see a cartoon called The Create-A-Crittles, where Care Bear-style “creative crittles” try to help a graphic artist named David (Paul Rudd) see his creative side. But he has to hide them from everyone, including his family. One has glue hands, one has brush hands, one has palate hands, and one has scissor hands. They hate how corporate he is, and then the paste bear creates a robot for a show, and is very hurt when David would rather have sex with his wife than come to his show.

As the twins’ rivalry gets worse, they show a trailer for a new movie from teen star Johnny Rad (Mooney). He plays a guy dressed like a king, and he goes to point out what’s different about him but never mentions that he’s dressed like a king.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? In a way, Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! has the same tone as other throwback sketch shows like Sherman’s Showcase, or on a macro level, Documentary Now!.

Our Take: Mooney and Ben Jones are the creative forces behind Saturday Morning All-Star Hits!, and we have to admit that they’ve captured the feeling of a low-budget cable cartoon lineup from the late ’80s or early ’90s, from the live-action interstitials to the low-quality animation from shows that largely came from overseas. That’s half the battle on high-concept shows like this, because the satire doesn’t work if the actual structure and style of what’s being satirized isn’t firmly in place.

What we also appreciated is that they’ve decided to take the satire in a direction that’s more sinister and/or depressing than try to comment on the absurdity of the concepts or the characters themselves. In fact, the cartoons actually deal with more real life issues, even as people make lame jokes that leads all the characters to hold their stomachs and laugh. Randy is depressed, David struggles with corporate normalcy, the Create-a-Crittles have unresolved anger issues. These are things the surface-level cartoons of the era wouldn’t even come close to touching, so hanging these characteristics onto these characters is a smart way to satirize them.

We just wish things were a little funnier. With everyone playing the silly stuff straight, you’d think some of the situations would hit our funny sensors a little harder. But most of it misses. Maybe as the show goes along, the storylines of the cartoons continue, or we get introduced to other shows like The Strongimals, the laughs will come. But for now, Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! is a worthy experiment that doesn’t come together.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Treybor can’t hide his disappointment when Skip reveals he has a voice role in the upcoming episode of The Strongimals.

Sleeper Star: We managed to identify some of the guest voices, like Rudd and Stone, but there are others that might be harder. We think Pamela Adlon plays all of the Create-A-Crittles, but aren’t 100% sure (we looked at some photo metadata and found that Cree Summer plays one of the Crittles, Adlon plays one, and Mooney plays one). The credits give us the names but not the characters. Sure makes for a fun game, though.

Most Pilot-y Line: Every so often, real-looking footage from ’80s and ’90s VHS tapes pops on the screen. We’re thinking that’s supposed to mimic what sometimes happens when you recorded over something else and the VCR had a hiccup during the recording. But it also makes things a bit confusing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re recommending Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! mainly because Kyle Mooney and Ben Jones do a good job of recreating the cheesy cartoons and teen-oriented shows we used to watch in the ’80s and ’90s, and we appreciate that the satire goes super dark at times. But we so wanted it to be a whole lot funnier than it turned out to be.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! On Netflix