YMMV / Salute Your Shorts

• Adaptation Displacement: The show is based on the 1986 book Salute Your Shorts: Life at Summer Camp by Steve Slavkin (who is incidentally the creator and executive producer of the show and the voice of Dr. Kahn).
• Fridge Brilliance: In "They Call Me Ms. Tibbs", Telly was worried upon finding a hockey mask and machete. Not only is she afraid of who the owner might be, but also that she'll be the first on the hit list.
• Genius Bonus: In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the title character observes that "a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm" and therefore "a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar."
  Pinsky: Think about it. When you die they stick you in the ground and it's the worms that eat you up!
  Z.Z.: Then somebody digs up the worms that ate you and use to catch fish which somebody else eats.
  Donkeylips: So wait a second guys, when we had fish sticks the other night, I could have eaten a fish, that ate a worm, that ate Elvis?
  Z.Z.: You could be burping up the King as we speak!
• Hollywood Homely: Kevin "Ug" Lee.
  • In a bit of Fridge Brilliance, only the kids refer to him as "Ug" Lee. Women his own age find him quite attractive, if a little goofy.
• Jerkass Woobie: Ug, usually. While the kids often make fun of him and he can't catch a break, he often he brings his Butt-Monkey status on himself, as he can be quite the Jerkass to said kids at times and often uses his "authority" unfairly.
• Nightmare Fuel: Zeke the Plumber.
• Replacement Scrappy: Pinsky to some, probably exacerbated by many of the campers receiving him as "Michael, but cooler" despite having little in common, personality-wise, with the guy he displaced. (Ironically, "Budnick, but less of a jerk" would probably have been closer to the mark.) On the other hand, some liked him better than Michael, whose main gimmick was to be The Straight Man in a zany ensemble cast.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Pinsky's actor, Blake Soper, would become Blake Sennett and co-found Rilo Kiley.
  • Erik Macarthur who played Michael Stein would go on to create the 2006 film "Bottom's Up".
  • Venus Demilo Thomas who played Telly would go on to play among other roles, Alexandra in The Bold and the Beautiful.
  • Among Kirk Baily's other roles he would go onto voice work in anime such as Trigun and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Ug gets a letter from his girlfriend saying she's coming to visit, but nobody has the heart to tell him that another letter came explaining that the first was sent to him by mistake and was meant for her new boyfriend. Ug spends all day waiting excitedly at the camp entrance with a big wooden heart for her, only to have his broken when she doesn't show.
  • When Michael is about to leave camp and sees his friends waving goodbye. But he tells Ug to stop the car and decides to stay.
  • Ug and Mona are both miserable and heartbroken after their fight in "They Call Me Ms. Tibbs".
• Values Dissonance: A good majority of the humor revolving around Donkeylips are fat jokes. From the perspective of creator Steve Slavkin this was supposed to come from a point of authenticity, since it's almost certain some kids could relate to the torment. The problem being this was not a show meant to be taken seriously, and most of the humor early on came FROM Donkeylips, rather than being aimed AT him. This was made all the worse because Michael Bower's acting was a major source of income for his family, and he had grown so accustomed to the Donkeylips role that he was too afraid to lose weight because of the typecasting. Heidi Lucas, the actress who played Dina went into detail about this sort of cruelty:
  In the episode where Donkeylips had a crush on Dina… there's this scene where the girls are in the cabin and Telly and Z.Z. are basically telling my character that I have to go do this thing even though I really don't want to. And I said something mean about his hair or his breath or what he was wearing… and in real life it hit me; I don't know this person. That’s not what I would have done in real life. You don't make judgement calls like that. I wasn't certain my opinion was the right one, though, and I was thinking it at the time that we were getting paid to perform the script that people were getting paid to write… I could have said something to make [Bower] feel better, but I didn't have the mental capacities to, because I was twelve.
  — Heidi Lucas, Dina. "Slimed! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age" 2013