Western Animation / Summer Memories

"I remember weeks ago like it was yesterday..."

-Jason, series intro

Summer Memories is a Canadian-Israeli animated series created by Israeli animator Adam Yaniv. Produced between Israel's Aircraft Pictures and A&N Productions (Yaniv's own studio) and Canada's Yeti Farm (with international distribution handled by Canadian kids TV juggernaut WildBrain), it is based on the short of the same name originally created for the Nickelodeon Animated Shorts Program in 2014.

The series retells the memories of an anxious, insecure, and unconfident 11-year-old boy named Jason as he reminisces on the most important summer of his life. In these formative weeks, Jason goes on adventures with his laidback, confident, and dependable best friend Ronnie (voiced by Adam Yaniv himself). Together, these two best friends have fun with the other kids in the neighborhood, learn life lessons, and occasionally deal with the schemes of Jason's unpleasant yet precocious younger brother Tim. However, Jason's romanticized recollections of his own bygone experiences are not entirely perfect, with the gaps often being filled in or mixed with his own imagination. As a result things can get rather trippy. And from the unusual appearances and personalities of the people around him to the surreal shenanigans that can occur in Jason's stories, the lines between reality and fantasy are often blurred in the way Jason recounts the unforgettable summer when he came of age and everything around him changed forever.

Inspired by his Adam Yaniv's childhood experiences and crewed by writers and actors from acclaimed Primetime Canadian comedies like The Kids in the Hall, Schitt's Creek, and This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Summer Memories is a Coming of Age Story that is part episodic Slice of Life, part story-driven dramedy. Every episode leads into the next in a certain way, and this becomes especially evident as the series goes on. And through the experiences of its central characters, the show touches on themes of memory, friendship, childhood, and growing up, with some additional social commentary on consumerism, urban development, environmentalism, and corporate growth sprinkled into the backdrop of the show's setting. The Unreliable Narrator in effect with every episode in particular often reframes parts of the story with entirely new perspectives that clue into the bigger picture - a story of how friendship transcends time and space through our memories.

The series debuted on August 12th, 2022, airing on Family Channel in Canada. In the United States, the series was picked up by The Roku Channel.

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Summer Memories contains examples of:

• The Ace:
  • Ronnie. He seems to succeed at just about everything and very popular but is totally humble about it. While it does help him with giving Jason the encouragement he needs often, Jason is shown to be a little jealous of his best friend and sometimes fears their friendship is at risk due to how much better Ronnie is than him at everything.
  • Tall Girl's Spear Counterpart Tall Boy is to Tim as Ronnie is to Jason, being the charismatic and confident friend he needs to help him in his endeavors.
• Alternate Reality Episode: "Bummer Memories" take a break from the show's storyline to have Tim and Snake looking over alternate realities where Jason and Ronnie never became friends and the outcomes of each universe.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: The characters have a wide variety of skin colours, ranging from grey, to light green, to light blue, to yellow.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Fitting with the show's generally surreal nature, inanimate objects will frequently adopt sapience for the sake of a quick joke.
• Arc Villain: Snake takes on this role in Memories 26-30 as he encourages Tim's Face–Heel Turn and tries to drive Jason and Ronnie apart, though he continues to antagonize Jason and Tim afterwards.
• Author Avatar: "Summer Forgettory" reveals Jason and Ronnie are meant to be this for Adam Yaniv and his own best friend, only it is left ambiguous which one is which ("Listen, I could be either one of you!").
• Babies Ever After: The Distant Finale shows Ronnie now as the father of twins. Likewise, Tall Girl (now Tall Woman) is now the mother of three kids, whom she carries under her coat, making her seem like she's pregnant when we first see her.
• Babysitting Episode: "Babysitting", naturally. Jason and Ronnie take on a babysitting gig so the former can get out of piano lessons, but the baby they're assigned to take care of proves very difficult to control.
• Bad Hair Day: The episode "Splitting Hairs" has Jason try to give himself a new haircut, only to make himself look like he's going bald. He rectifies this in the end by shaving his whole head, which everyone else also does (Ronnie included) because it was lice season at the time.
• Being Evil Sucks: Tim realizes this at the end of "Splitting Pairs", leading him to help Ronnie and Jason get back together at the end of "Bummer Memories".
• Birthday Episode:
  • The episode "Surprise! We Ruined Your Birthday!" has Jason organizing a surprise birthday party for Tim, even though Tim doesn't want one.
  • In "Wild Ronnie Blues", Jason and Ronnie make a movie as a birthday gift for their friend Joanna, but things are quickly derailed by everyone else wanting a part in it.
  • "That Ain't the Way I See It" is set during the week before summer break, with Jason's birthday playing a major role in the plot.
• Black Dot Pupils: Most of the cast have their eyes drawn this way.
• Breather Episode: "Bummer Memories". As the episode set immediately after the Downer Ending of "Splitting Pairs", the show takes a break from its storyline having reached its low point to have the villains explore alternate universes where Jason and Ronnie never became friends.
• Burning with Anger: Blue flames erupt around Tim whenever he's sufficiently irritated. A few episodes show that Jason and Linda also share this quality.
• Call-Forward: Due to being set a week before the show's events, "That Ain't the Way I See It" contains many references to the first few episodes.
• Character Development:
  • While the show initially shows Tim to be little more than a jerkass, the story that unfolds from Jason's memories (and his own in the case of "That Ain't the Way I See It") develop him into a much more three-dimensional figure complete with his own storyline that shows him to be far from a self-centered social-climber and rather a environmentally conscious boy who simply finds beauty in different things from Jason and suffers from many of the same insecurities (although that doesn't stop him from still being very sharp-tongued). This especially escalates with his Heel–Face Turn in "Old Stamping Grounds", which sees him work towards shedding the last elements of his jerkass traits.
  • Jason becomes a lot more confident in himself as the show progresses as he slowly begins to find his groove and discover what he's good at and what matters to him, in part thanks to his friendship with Ronnie, but more significantly due to his own life path beginning to diverge in its own direction. He's much less prone to outbursts as the show goes on.
• Coming of Age Story: The show is essentially about Jason's growth over a single summer (or at least as how he remembers it) as the world and the people he knows develop and change.
• Cool Big Sis:
  • Ronnie's sister is a warrior who spends her time in space fighting aliens. But in a twist, she is the one who looks up to Ronnie.
  • Tim considers Joanna to be like this for him. However, Joanna mostly finds his admiration of her to be annoying and creepy.
• Cool Teacher:
  • They don't call Best Teacher that for nothing! And while she does stray over into Stern Teacher territory on occasion, she's still very much beloved by the kids for her supportiveness.
  • Parodied with Tough Love Coach, the coach of Ronnie's soccer team and a walking parody of the incredibly strict but nonetheless genuinely caring football coaches seen in many sports movies and specials.
  • Ronnie becomes one in the series' Distant Finale.
• Continuity Nod: Episodes frequently acknowledge and reference previous ones, with certain elements even carrying over between episodes (for instance, Jason getting into guitar after "Just Like Old Times" or "A Summer's Hike" being immediately set after "A Foot in Both Camps"). This starts getting heavier during the second half of the series, transforming into a full blown story arc.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Snake is shown to be the head of several of the MegaCorps featured in the show, at times serving as the evil opposite of Mother Nature.
• Cranky Neighbor: Parodied with Yelling Lady, a neighbour of Jason who frequently pops her head out of her window to shout at the kids for random things that irritate her (particularly if they involve her garden).
• Creator Cameo: Adam Yaniv himself appears in "Summer Forgettory" when Jason and Ronnie go to him to ask about who is remembering the memory correctly, although he depicts himself here as a talking monkey.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "That Ain't the Way I See It" changes gears for the series by instead going into one of Tim's memories, and rather than being set during the summer, it's set the week before summer. It ultimately serves as The Reveal to why Tim's been behaving the way he has for all the previous episodes, completely changing the viewers' understanding of the show.
  • "Bummer Memories" has Tim and Snake as the focus of the episode, as they go over different possible timelines and stories in which Jason and Ronnie were never friends. In particular, the third alternate universe featured instead has Tall Girl's parents as the protagonists of the show instead.
• Deuteragonist: Tim slowly takes on this role over the course of the series as he is fleshed out by the show and his efforts to prevent Skytown from destroying the habitat of an endangered flower gains increasing focus.
• Disappeared Dad: Jason and Tim's father is completely unmentioned and never appears at least until "Smile Like It's the End of Summer", which reveals he died a few weeks before the events of the series.
• Distaff Counterpart: "Jason Finds His Groove" introduces Ronnie's returning girlfriend Winter, who like him is an attractive, popular, and charismatic athlete (a dancer rather than a soccer player, but still a physical activity). However, Winter similarities to Ronnie only further the growing rift between Jason and him, especially with Jason further pursuing his interest in music.
• Distant Finale: The final two episodes, "Summer Breaks" and "Till the Winter, My Friend", are set 20 years after the titular summer, with the cast now successful adults raising children of their own... and Soda With a Marble having taken over the town. Both episodes also serve to complete the show's overarching story and themes, with no hints of potential stories for a second season and all the characters receiving conclusions in some way.
• Downer Ending: Several episodes end this way, both helping to push forth the overarching storyline and playing into the series' themes of memory, particularly the necessity of taking the good memories with the bad ones.
  • "Truth or Dare" ends with Jason being forced to give up his pursuit of a major breakthrough in his aspiring music career when he admits to Ronnie that he would be unhappy to transfer to a new school to follow this path and thus lose his friends, despite the fact none of his friends share his interest in music and he does not share their interest in soccer. The final scene of the episode is the two sitting silently at the back of Linda's car, clearly unconfident about their futures.
  • "A Summer's Hike" does not see Jason and Tim successfully reconcile, worsening the rift between them and leading into the episodes "That Ain't the Way I See It" and "Purple Rock Flower", which explore Tim's Start of Darkness.
  • "Soccer is Life" ends with Jason and Ronnie having their first major fight, and the two do not reconcile until the end of the following episode, "Jason Finds his Groove".
  • "Splitting Pairs" sees Jason and Ronnie get separated again, and this time seemingly for good, as a result of their parents becoming concerned that they are regressing to their destructive childhood phases (caused by Ronnie's frustrations with Winter leaving). And while Snake is ecstatic to see his plan come to fruition, Tim finds himself dissatisfied with their success and realizing Being Evil Sucks.
  • "Heat Wave" ends with Jason alienating everybody on the last day of summer with his song about how much everybody irritates him (and not getting to finish the song to unveil its full context). Tellingly, this is the first episode not to end with the Every Episode Ending, instead showing Jason standing forlornly in front of the fridge, unready for the new school year.
• Dramatic Wind:
  • Ronnie's hair is always blowing in the wind, whether he's indoors or outdoors. The rare times it doesn't can be chalked up to things like Ronnie's hair being wet.
  • Ronnie's father seems to have this as well. His hair isn't as long as Ronnie's, but it does move like Ronnie's does. Ronnie's sister is in a similar boat.
  • It's apparently a genetic trait, because in the Distant Finale, Ronnie's kids have this too.
• Every Episode Ending: Every episode ends with a photograph taken of the episode's events that then zooms out to reveal the refrigerator all the photos are pinned on, with the show's title then appearing over it.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Many of the show's characters are referred to by nicknames - Tall Girl, Yelling Lady, Pregnant Mom, Tough Love Coach, Best Teacher, etc. This seems to indicate that Jason's memories of them do not recollect their real names.
• Face–Heel Turn: While "That Ain't the Way I See It" explores Tim's Start of Darkness, "Purple Rock Flower" sees him fully cross over the event horizon when his jealousy towards Jason's successful campaign to save the purple rock flower (after his proved fruitless for weeks) leads to him giving up his ideals and teaming up with Snake.
• The Faceless:
  • Linda's face is never seen in full. Sometimes we see her eyes or her mouth very briefly, but we never get a complete shot of her visage. "Smile Like It's the End of Summer" hints that this is related to the death of Jason and Tim's father, and in the Distant Finale, her face is finally revealed.
  • Tall Girl is initially introduced this way, but at the end of her first episode, she has her face revealed and all her other appearances feature at least once instance of her face being exposed.
• First-Name Basis: Ronnie refers to Jason and Tim's mother by her first name, Linda.
• Fish People: In "Present Tense", Tim befriends a man who inexplicably resembles an anthropomorphic fish.
• Foil: Jason and Ronnie's contrasting friendship is a fundamental element of the series. Jason is unathletic, insecure, short-tempered, and constantly uncertain about his life and future, while Ronnie is a confident and laidback jock who has everything already figured out. As a result, Ronnie is able to give Jason the necessary wisdom and encouragement to help him discover himself, despite Jason's anxieties of living in Ronnie's shadow.
• Future Me Scares Me: In "Just Like Old Times", when the kids are visiting a retirement home, Jason meets one of the tenants, who looks like him as an old man. Jason tries everything in his power to try and not end up like his older doppelganger, only for him to bring up things he himself did at Jason's age that coincide with what Jason's doing at the time.
• Granola Guy: Although initially presented as a straightforward jerkass, Tim is shown to be very environmentally conscious, and his fight to save the endangered purple rock flower from Skytown's urban development become an increasingly important plot for the show.
• Green Aesop: Urban development and corporate expansion, as well as its consequences on both society and the environment, are a major theme of the series, with the growth of two major MegaCorps forming a background to the character's adventures. Tim's fight to prevent Skytown from developing over the habitat of an endangered flower is a regular recurring plot in the show, and one episode even has the characters exploring a forest that Tim explains as having once been a desert until giant tech moguls replaced it with greenery for sake of making everything more scenic for their pleasure.
• Green Thumb: Tim is very fond of plants and gardening.
  Tim: Good old flora. The only living thing that loves me just the way I am.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Ronnie has luscious blond hair and is a reliable friend to Jason who often provides him with the advice he needs to hear and is always willing to lend a helping hand.
• Heel–Face Turn: Tim undergoes this during Memories 31-34 after rejecting Snake's ways and striving to be a less cynical and more supportive person, complete with a brief vacation to his uncle's farm to rediscover himself.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Jason and Ronnie's friendship is a key part of the series, and the two are practically inseparable. However, there are hints of a growing rift between them as the series progresses, on account of their differences and Jason's own insecurities, especially once Tim and Snake begin working together.
• Hidden Depths: Tim is initially presented as little more than a smug jerkass who enjoys making his brother miserable and seems way too obsessed with trying to seem older than he really is, but he's revealed over time to be quite the nature lover and extremely knowledgeable about plants and animals.
• High School AU: One of the alternate worlds in "Bummer Memories" is set in a high school where Jason and Ronnie haven't met.
• Huge Schoolgirl: Tall Girl is more than twice the height of her friends, with her head always literally being in the clouds. She sees herself as more mature than the other kids as a result, and often hangs around teenagers.
• Identical Stranger: In the episode "Just Like Old Times", Jason and Ronnie befriend an old man who bears a strong resemblance to the former. He even shows them photos from his childhood summer in situations like those experienced by the two with his childhood friend "Johnnie".
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All episodes are titled "Memory # (number): ____".
• Instrumental Theme Tune: The show's theme, aside from Jason's statement before the music starts, it's pure synth music.
• Jerkass: Tim is Jason's scheming, arrogant, and cynical brother who goes out of his way to make Jason's life miserable (although Character Development helps him improve). Interestingly, this gets flipped in "That Ain't the Way I See It", which shows Tim perceives Jason as this, showing him as a bad-tempered Spoiled Brat and indicating that Tim's characterization is likely a part of Jason's Unreliable Narrator status. Additionally, it's heavily implied that Tim suffers similarly enormous insecurities to Jason, hence the unpleasant personality we see from Jason's viewpoint. Ultimately though, "Summer Forgettory" reveals the real Tim who exists outside of Jason's memories is nothing like this.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Jason is generally characterized as this, particularly from his own memories. While his insecure and anxious nature makes him prone to rudeness and outbursts, he means well overall and does his best to be friendly or make up for his mistakes.
  • Tim develops into this over the course of the show, even with his brief lapse into villainy. This is perhaps best represented in "Endless Bummer" when he realizes Being Evil Sucks and helps Jason and Ronnie get back together as friends, even admitting he prefers them much more that way.
• Longest Pregnancy Ever: Parodied with two characters that are literally called Pregnant Mom and Pregnant Dad, who frequently give birth to babies. As such, Jason and Ronnie wind up having to babysit their latest newborn in one episode.
• Lovable Jock: Ronnie is a star player on his soccer team and a big sports enthusiast in general, but also a friendly, relaxed, and charismatic individual who always does his best to help his friends when he can.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: Tall Girl has about half a dozen baby siblings constantly crawling around their parents. Similarly, Pregnant Mom and Dad are accompanied by a small army worth of babies.
• MegaCorp:
  • Soda With a Marble (or SWM), the company that produces Jason and Ronnie's favorite soft drink, are a ruthless satire of big business. Their business is pretty much entirely about squeezing as much money as possible out of people, and they produces hundreds of different products that they constantly push on their customer base at ridiculous prices, while also forcing upon them pervasive apps full of shameless advertising. In the Distant Finale, they have completely taken over the city and now own pretty much everything. Oh, and Cool Louis is now an executive officer for them.
  • Urban development company Skytown also shows up very regularly in the series. Their work on the city is a recurring backdrop in the show, and many episodes involve or mention the threat they pose to the few natural sites left in the area.
• Mellow Fellow: Ronnie. In contrast to the ever-anxious and deeply insecure Jason, Ronnie is fully confident in himself and has no worries.
• Mister Seahorse: The recurring pregnant couple of the show are called Pregnant Mom and Pregnant Dad.
• Mother Nature: Makes random appearances throughout the show, where she interacts with Jason and Tim. She's represented by a woman who's entire outfit is made out of things like grass and trees. The show also uses characters leaving off for other places with her as a metaphor for death, as seen in "Spaghetti Daze" and "Smile Like It's the End of Summer".
• Mr. Imagination: Jason's memories and imagination frequently blur together, resulting in many of the show's more surreal moments, although owing to the nature of the series, it's often hard to tell where memory ends and imagination begins.
• My Beloved Smother: Parodied with Tall Girl's parents, the Tightknits. They're so smothering to their children that they never let any of Tall Girl's six younger siblings escape from the massive sweater the two of them wear together. Tall Girl's the way she is mainly because she's the only one of their kids to have successfully escaped it.
• Narrator: Jason normally acts as this for the show via a voiceover at the start and end of every episode, usually reminiscing on the episode's theme. Tim however does take over in episodes centered on his memories.
• Nice Guy: Ronnie is the dependable, easygoing, and sagely friend Jason needs, always looking out for him and giving him the necessary push to do what he has to.
• Ocular Gushers: After being scolded for failing to get Tall Girl's journal back, Jason runs off and cries at a cliffside, with his tears running out of his eyes and down his body in rivers.
• Odd Friendship: Insecure musician Jason and confident athlete Ronnie are like chalk and cheese, but the strength of their friendship is a core element of the series. However, as the show progresses, fears of a growing rift between them become a major part of their story, as the two increasingly realize they might be too different for each other.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Tall Girl's real name is never revealed, hinting that Jason's own memories do not recollect her actual name.
• Only Sane Woman: Deconstructed with Linda. While she appears to be a standard strict mother to Jason and Tim, she also tends to be the voice of reason in their household. Over the course of the series, it's made abundantly clear that putting up with her sons' respective flaws and insecurities have left her near the end of her rope.
• Passionate Sports Girl: Joanna is a competitive and athletic tomboy, as well as one of Jason's friends.
• The Power of Friendship: As Tim and Snake discover in "Bummer Memories", Jason and Ronnie's friendship is so powerful that no matter what universe they are in, they'll inevitably become best friends - even in the reality where they are intergalactic warriors on opposing sides of a billion-years-long extraterrestrial conflict.
• The Quiet One: One of Jason's friends, Mack. A Running Gag is that his friends always refer to him as if he's extremely talkative despite the fact he's never once seen speaking.
• Scout-Out: Tim is part of a Scouts-like organization called the Nature Preservation Society, which has a particular focus on environmentalism. In Jason's memories, it's shown they dislike him, but his own memories portray them as self-centered and caring more about material luxuries than taking care of nature.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Jason and Ronnie's friendship fits this to a tee. Jason is an unconfident but friendly musician, while Ronnie is a soccer player both bold and laidback in attitude.
• Serious Business: Soccer is extremely important to the people of Jason and Ronnie's town, much to the chagrin of the former, who has no interest in the sport and is unable to play it on account of his bad hip.
• Shout-Out: Jason is a big fan of a book called Story of a Young Lady, which appears to be a parody of Heidi.
• Sibling Rivalry: Jason and Tim's antagonistic relationship is a major element of the show. While we are initially led to believe Jason's the good guy and Tim's the bad guy in this dynamic for the first 20 or so memories, "That Ain't the Way I See It" completely changes everything with Tim's perspective showing Jason as the bad sibling and him as the good sibling at least until Tim's Start of Darkness begins, after which Tim increasingly falls prey to his more sinister desires, especially after "Purple Rock Flower" as Snake becomes an influence on him.
• Slice of Life: Surrealist elements aside, the show is very much grounded in the everyday life of Jason and the people around him as Jason himself remembers it. While there is an overarching storyline of sorts, it is told not through a tight narrative, but rather the ordinary events and developments in Jason's life that occur over a single summer.
• Snake People: One of the recurring characters in the show is Snake, a red-skinned businessman with the lower body of a snake who looks a lot like Tim and seeks to bring out his worst qualities.
• Spear Counterpart: Tall Boy, Tall Girl's on-and-off boyfriend who also befriends Tim over their shared interest in the environment.
• Start of Darkness: "That Ain't the Way I See It" reveals the events that led to Tim becoming so antagonistic to Jason in the series, which was because he wanted to use Jason's birthday party to spread awareness of his campaign to save the endangered purple rock flower, but Jason's outbursts resulted in this plan falling apart, embittering Tim to his brother.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Snake encourages Tim's worst qualities, further embittering him to Jason.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • A major theme of the series, as per the creator's own admission. As the whole show is based around Jason's own memories of his childhood summer, the show's reality is rather tenuous and those parts of Jason's memories that gotten fuzzy are often filled in with trippy stuff. This especially applies to episodes with Tim as the narrator, which portray much of the world in reverse of what Jason sees (Ronnie isn't The Ace, Tim is a nature-loving Nice Guy loved by all, Jason is a bratty jerkass who nobody likes, etc.).
  • "Summer Forgettory" goes deeper into this concept when Jason and Ronnie begin debating over how a particular memory went. This climaxes when he and Ronnie end up meeting series creator Adam Yaniv, who can be heard chatting with a co-worker about how Jason is intentionally written as a narcissistic character ("This schmuck thinks he's the hero here."), which is hinted to be the case, when we see the "real" Tim outside of Jason's memories is in fact be a normal, sweet-natured little boy.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
  • Implied to be the case with Tim, if "That Ain't the Way I See It" is anything to go by.
  • Inverted with Ronnie, who used to be a destructive and rambunctious brat until he befriended Jason.
• Vocal Dissonance: Despite being a 7-year-old boy, Tim has the voice of an adult man. It does however reflect his desire to appear as a mature individual and "Summer Forgettory" ultimately reveals this is merely how Jason envisions Tim's voice in his memories; the real Tim sounds more like a regular kid.
• Walking Shirtless Scene:
  • Ronnie. As Jason notes in one episode, Ronnie putting a shirt on is a sign that something is seriously off.
  • Similarly, one of Jason and Ronnie's friends, Cool Louis, always walks around with his shirt unbuttoned, exposing his chest.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Tim behaves and speaks very similarly to an adult. He enjoys rubbing shoulders with mature people and his idea of fun usually involves doing boring adult things. This doesn't change the fact he's generally a smug, self-centered Jerkass though.

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