'SMASH!' takes '90s kids on twisted flashback

You can tell a lot about someone by who their favorite "Saturday Night Live" performers are.

Folks who still swear by the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" are staunchly loyal traditionalists. Those who favor Phil Hartman (RIP), Bill Hader or Kenan Thompson appreciate performers who are solidly dependable, if not as showy. If you love Adam Sandler, you either just turned 13 or have remained 13 for too many years. And the Joe Piscopo fan club consists solely of Joe Piscopo.

If you enjoy Kyle Mooney's frequently cut-for-time oddball sketches on "SNL," odds are you similarly embraced Norm Macdonald's (also RIP) more out-there "Weekend Update" bits, and likewise consumed more than a few shows on Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" programming block. Maybe you even watched MTV2's deeply depraved "Wonder Showzen" from 2005-06.

What sets Mooney apart as a comedian is his instinctive empathy for lesser lights of talent, and for those who crave acceptance so desperately that they'd be willing to sacrifice what few scraps they have to value, just to receive relatively minor measures of validation.

Mooney also has a knack for turning a darkly knowing eye onto the junk pop culture of the 1990s, for which he harbors just as much of a demonstrably unhealthy obsession as I do for the junk pop culture of the 1980s, often transcending the mere anti-comedy of Tom Green to turn what starts out as MAD Magazine-style parodies into harrowingly absurdist tragedies.

Netflix's "Saturday Morning All Star Hits!" (or "SMASH!" for short) is an eight-episode microcosm of Mooney's twisted oeuvre, flawlessly capturing the zeitgeist behind the shamelessly pandering Saturday morning cartoon programming blocks of the late '80s and early '90s, with Mooney playing at least half a dozen live-action characters, and voicing more cartoon characters than I could keep track of.

Mooney is joined by an impressive mix of his "SNL" costars (frequent creative partner Beck Bennett, Fred Armisen and Chris Redd), veteran voice actors from many of the same cartoons "SMASH!" is satirizing (Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche and Cree Summer) and even some celebrities in roles that render them unrecognizable (Emma Stone and Paul Rudd).

Mooney is aided in bestowing verisimilitude upon this neon-saturated, Southern California-flavored portrait of a hyper-specific era of TV programming by one of his executive producers and cast members, Scott Gairdner, who created the animated "Moonbeam City" for Comedy Central in 2015.

Parodying "The Smurfs," "Care Bears," "Muppet Babies," "Alvin and the Chipmunks" and even "ThunderCats" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" is relatively low-hanging fruit for a show like this, but taking aim at how sidekicks like Slimer ruined shows like "The Real Ghostbusters" by being promoted to those series' stars indicates some genuine insights into the animation of the '80s and '90s.

"SMASH!" goes even further, creating romans-à-clef of "Denver the Last Dinosaur" and Howie Mandel's "Bobby's World" that are openly suffering from traumatic depression, before swinging for the fences with a pitch-perfect parody of 1990's cringe-worthy "Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue" public service announcement.

Perhaps the most obscure gag involves what's obviously a satire of "Basic Instinct" being adapted into a kid-friendly cartoon, since the '80s saw R-rated live-action movies ranging from "Rambo" to "Robocop" turned into cartoon shows designed to sell toy lines to kids.

And that's before the series throws in satirical recreations of kid-targeted commercials for junk food and consumer goods, plus tabloid TV "news" magazines, teen sitcoms and young adult actor-slash-singer heartthrobs from the midpoint between two decades, that brought together the 1980s' ruthlessly focus group-driven marketing and the 1990s' painfully earnest yet ham-handed attempts at manufactured sincerity.

By showing not only the content of the cartoons, but also media-filtered glimpses into the lives of the "real people" who produce those shows, we see how aspiring storytellers can wind up working out too many of their personal issues in entertainment ostensibly intended for children.

If you're the right age (did you own the Turtles' "Party Wagon" toy?) I strongly suspect you will recognize your own childhood in this collection of initially scattershot clips, as they build to a larger (and even more unsettling) overall narrative.

I won't lie, "SMASH!" is not for everyone, and even if it might be for you, it's best to be in the right mind for it, and perhaps to pace yourself, so you're not marathoning all eight of its half-hour episodes at once.

But if you're enough of a nerd, "Saturday Morning All Star Hits!" could prove an amusingly familiar flashback to a ridiculously self-serious window of pop culture history.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
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