Kyle Mooney's Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is a nostalgia rush for a specific kind of viewer

Polygon

The SNL star's Netflix hybrid live-action and adult-animated comedy, paying tribute to the Saturday morning cartoon experience of the late 1980s and early 1990s, is "not simply adult, animated, or comedy: It’s using live action segments to frame cartoons, which are very clearly parodies of old shows, but with more serious adult themes," says Petrana Radulovic, adding: "Each episode of Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (or SMASH as it’s called in-universe) is framed with twin live-action hosts Skip (Kyle Mooney) and Treybor (also Kyle Mooney) riffing a bit, before segueing into the next cartoon segment. Within the episodes, the cartoon segments serve as micro-episodes of in-universe series, each one seemingly reflecting a real world show. And in between the cartoons and Skip and Treybor’s segments, SMASH also includes fake commercials for in-universe movies, sitcoms, and celebrity gossip. It is very detailed — probably more so to a very particular audience, that was just before my time. Unlike WandaVision, which both drew on a broader palette of inspiration and rooted possibly unfamiliar pop culture touchstones in established characters, Saturday Morning All-Star Hits! homes in on a very specific time frame of television. Because the humor comes from seeing something familiar in an unexpected and more mature storyline, if you don’t know what that familiarity is, it just feels lacking. I can objectively see how this would be funny to someone about 10 years older than me — someone who grew up with the original Thundercats and Care Bears, and Denver the Last Dinosaur. But because it is not an era of TV I feel particular nostalgia for (even if I am vaguely familiar with the specific genre of programming block it references) I don’t feel compelled by it." ALSO: Saturday Morning All Star Hits! is an expertly constructed puzzle, which sometimes sacrifices easy laughs for strange detours and dark plot twists.