Salute Your Shorts Cast: Where Are They Now?
Although it only had two seasons, the Nickelodeon sitcom was Say hello to your shorts has remained a cult classic since its premiere 31 years ago.
The series follows a group of teenagers and their strict advisor Kevin “Ug” Lee (Kirk Baily) who spend their summers at Camp Anawana. The ensemble cast included camp bully Bobby Budnick (Danny Cooksey), young genius Sponge Harris (Tim Egger), tomboy Telly Radford (Venus DeMilo Thomas), nature lover ZZ Ziff (Megan Berwick), the snobby princess Dina Alexander (Heidi Lucas) and comic relief Eddie C. “Donkeylips” Gelfand (Michael Bower).
Steve Slavkinwho appears in the series as Dr. Kahn appeared, adapted that Say hello to your shorts Pilot from his 1986 book of the same name. In an interview with PopSugarSlavkin said the show was his big break.
“This is the first big project I’ve ever done. I was 26 when I sold the show to Nickelodeon. I had written a book called Say hello to your shorts with my boyfriend tom hill – he and I met at summer camp. So he and I wrote a humor book together and then sold it to Nickelodeon,” he explained.
The writer added that he knew he was taking a different approach than other sitcom makers at the time. “I tried to pack as much as possible into each episode. I had just graduated from film school; I wanted to make a mark, I wanted to do things differently, I wanted to place the camera in different places and I wanted to tell stories in a different way. Back then, kids TV was mostly sitcoms, so we wanted to do comedy in a different way. We wanted to do jump cuts, make little films, and without a laugh track,” he said.
Cooksey spoke up PopSugar along with Slavkin commenting on his relationship with his co-stars during filming. “Everyone got along really well. It was much fun. We were in this little bubble of our own existence. We were in LA and most of the Nickelodeon stuff was there [filmed] in Florida. We were in our own little cocoon,” he told the outlet.
After the end of the series some Say hello to your shorts Alums remained close friends. Baily and Bower were both groomsmen at Cooksey’s wedding in 1998. Most of the cast – including Slavkin, Baily and Bower – reunited in 2015 for the Everything is Fine festival in Portland. They even sang the show’s memorable theme song together during their panel discussion at the pop culture convention. Tragically, the crew lost one of their castmates in February 2022 when Baily died of lung cancer at the age of 59.
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Scroll through to see where the cast is Say hello to your shorts now does:
