Budnick salute your shorts1/27/2024  Watching the new kid struggle to fit in was a familiar theme for any kid growing up.  Oh, and let's not forget spooky campfire stories, like the then-terrifying "Zeke the Plumber." How Could / Why Should It Be Adapted?The plots were simple and straightforward, easily accessible for the tween to teen audience, but that's what made them so great and memorable.  Trying to rein all these kids in was the lead counselor Kevin "Ug" Lee ( Kirk Bailey), who is the main antagonist and butt of all the kids' jokes.The show was filled with great tropes of summer camp: pranks between campers (including the one referenced in the title - stealing a camper's boxer shorts and running them up the flagpole - and the "awful waffle" - pinning a camper to the table, lifting his shirt to whack him on the belly with a tennis racket, which leaves a waffle pattern, and then pouring syrup over him), boys trying to sneak into the girls' cabins, burgeoning tween romances, a continuous cat-and-mouse game between campers and counselors and, of course, all the sports and physical activities that come with camp. ( Megan Berwick), token nerd Sponge ( Tim Eyster), all-around best athlete Telly ( Venus DeMilo), red-headed bully Budnick ( Danny Cooksey) and his overweight sidekick Donkeylips ( Michael Bower).  The characters were memorable, if initially one-dimensional: there was the new kid Michael ( Erik MacArthur) in the first season and Pinsky ( Blake Soper) in the second,  resident hottie Dina ( Heidi Lucas), camp hippie Z.Z.  Salute Your Shorts allowed me to get a little closer to the summer camp experience by sharing the stories of seven kids and the counselors who were responsible for them. A short run, but what a show! What It's About: For a city kid who never went to a summer camp, I had to live vicariously through my friends who disappeared each summer to return with bug bites, poison ivy scars and awesome stories about how they almost drowned.  Also news to me was the fact that  the series was was based off of a novel "Salute Your Shorts: Life at Summer Camp" by Steve Slavkin (who continued to write for the show and starred as the never-seen leader of the camp, Dr.  Spanning only 26 episodes, the summer camp series ran for just about a year from June of 1991 to June of 1992 (though its reruns continued until early 1999).  Hollywood! Adapt this: Salute Your Shorts! My fond memories of Salute Your Shorts tricked me into thinking the show was on the air a lot longer than it really was.  Hit the jump for awful waffles, "Ug" Lee and Camp Anawanna.  But today, we're going to step away from vintage animated properties and look at a great live-action series from the early 90s.  Perhaps we'll see Gargoyles, The Pirates of Dark Water, Jonny Quest or Centurions adapted before long.  This is further evidence that anything and everything could be targeted for a reboot some point in the future. Earlier this week, we announced that there were plans to adapt the Hasbro properties Monopoly, Action Man and Hungry Hungry Hippos into features.
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