Salute Your Shorts
Nickelodeon's summer-camp sitcom set at Camp Anawanna, where the campers ran circles around counselor Ug and bully Bobby Budnick ruled the bunk. The theme song — "Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts" — is permanently lodged in every '90s kid's memory.
Salute Your Shorts aired on Nickelodeon from July 1991 to September 1992, adapted by Steve Slavkin from the 1986 book he co-wrote with Thomas Hill, Salute Your Shorts: Life at Summer Camp. Set at the fictional Camp Anawanna — a name that's a sly pun on "I don't want to" — it followed an ensemble of campers and their dim, put-upon counselor, Kevin "Ug" Lee.
The show's ensemble was its engine: bully-with-a-heart Bobby Budnick (played by Danny Cooksey, already known from Diff'rent Strokes and Terminator 2), Donkey Lips, Sponge, and the rest, forever pulling pranks and scheming against authority — pure summer-camp wish fulfillment. Its signature was the theme song, a mock alma mater the young cast sang live over a pre-recorded piano track; "Camp Anawanna, we hold you in our hearts" is the part everyone still remembers.
Despite running just 26 episodes, it was consistently one of the highest-rated programs on cable with kids. Long kept off home video, it survives mostly in memory — which has only deepened its cult status.
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