What happens when you mix irreverent adult comedy with whimsical Saturday morning cartoons? You get something like Saturday Morning All-Star Hits (S.M.A.S.H.), hosted by two radical dudes, Skip and Treybor. They're plugged into all the totally tubular things the kids love these days: RoGo Jeans, Slingers and especially Strongimals. It's full of, as Skip might say, “zazz.” 

Okay, speaking in plain English for a moment, S.M.A.S.H. is a multi-hued fever dream for anyone with an appreciation for Saturday morning cartoons. You’ve probably heard of some of those old favorites: Defenders of the Universe, The Smurfs, Jem and the Holograms, Care Bears… the list goes on. The golden age of Saturday morning cartoons lasted from the mid-1960s to the late '80s. S.M.A.S.H. is an homage to those days in tone (well, mostly) and in content, with its lineup of cartoon heroes and villains, monsters and oddballs we follow with each installment. 

But if you weren't soaking up your TV's comforting glow every weekend growing up and you aren't a ravenous classic cartoon fanatic today, you might miss the slew of clever, tongue-in-cheek in-jokes that S.M.A.S.H. serves up with every episode. Luckily, we've compiled  a short-list of the show’s pop-culture references so you’ll be up to speed on all the toys, jokes, and action sendups as they come flying at you. Seriously, they’re full of za-zaaaazzz.

Randy

This depressed dinosaur who lives in the Museum of Natural History and hangs out with the neighborhood kids isn't a reference to just one cartoon but a larger genre. Many classic cartoons that kids and adults watched throughout the '60s, '70s and '80s tended to feature a "squad" of kids and an animal or otherworldly mascot: think Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang, or the 1963 toon Speed Buggy, a show where a bunch of kids befriended a talking car. The weirder, the better, it seemed, and that trend has even carried on to some of today's parodic cartoons like Mike Tyson's Mysteries on Adult Swim. The same can be said of Randy, a dinosaur pulled from his own time to live in ours. 

Create-A-Crittles

These colorful bears with a reluctant caretaker are parodies of Care Bears, down to each one's cutesy name, except they're dealing with a lot more problems and are much more dangerous than Good Luck Bear or Grumpy Bear. These "crittles" are party animals, and they love to get creative with art supplies, even if the situation doesn't exactly call for it. It's an on-the-nose reference, but it turns the Care Bears into something more chaotic than feel-good. 

Strongimals

Strongimals is an interesting mix of hero cartoons like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe as well as ThunderCats and other shows featuring powerful anthropomorphic monsters, all made with one purpose in mind: to sell toys. The Strongimals are a riff on all of those seemingly random shows featuring transforming birds, sharks who live in the sewers, and even alien biker mice that have existed over the years — all in the name of moving product from the shelves and  into the hands of kids watching every weekend. Strongimals is a particularly popular property in the world of S.M.A.S.H. too, just like ThunderCats in the real world. 

Pro Bros

There are seemingly hundreds of burly action heroes when it comes to classic cartoons: You're likely familiar with G.I. Joe and all the many copycats that followed over the years. Pro Bros is a duo that can do it all, like an animated Swiss Army knife. The two professional sports players team up to take on the world, and bad guys, too, in some of the cheesiest ways possible. 

Meeps

The Meeps don't get much screen time, but they're a sendup of those jolly little blue Smurfs many know and love. Unlike the Smurfs, though, the Meeps are much more colorful and probably a little more annoying, too. 

Slingers

This extremely silly craze, with an even sillier catchphrase ("Only you can have found all of them"), is a reference to the advertisements for the hottest toys that peppered the weekend’s blocks of cartoons.