I don’t know about the rest of you, but my “on this day” for Facebook lately has been swarming with anniversaries of new friends. Which means it’s also the anniversaries of the beginning and end of our late lamented Dissolve. Which is, of course, time for paying tribute by sharing movie gifts. It turns out the really gift was the friends we made along the way.

I was gifted Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, a cartoon released back in the days when summer vacation meant more than having to deal with my kids all day. (I love my kids. I do not love the bickering.) It was released a few short months before the end of my freshman year in high school, which was also the last lingering summer I would spend with my older sister, who graduated that year and moved to another state. I would end up moving to the same state, but it would never be the same.

The assorted Tiny Toon characters are counting seconds as the clock inches toward 3:00 on The Last Day Of School. (I always had a half-day that day, and so do my kids; does anyone have a full day on the last day of school?) We then have two main stories and three minor ones. Babs (Tress MacNeille) and Buster (Charlie Adler) Bunny, No Relation, end up following what is clearly the Mississippi, encountering all sorts of animals who want to eat them. Plucky Duck (Joe Alaskey) goes with Hamton J. Pig (Don Messick) and his family to HappyWorldLand. Fifi La Fume (Kath La Soucie) ends up as the assistant to Johnny Pew (Rob Paulsen), Skunk Heartthrob. Shirley Loon (Gail Matthius) goes to the movies with Fowlmouth (also Rob Paulsen). And, sigh, Elmyra Duff (Cree Summer) pursues animals.

I’ll be honest—I was never a huge Tiny Toons fan. I watched a ton of Animaniacs. I adored Freakazoid! Something about Tiny Toons always left me cold; it was a gimmick, I think. What if your beloved Looney Tunes Characters But Children. With the characters you actually care about putting in duty as teachers. This was not going to win me over. I watched it with my kids. Zane, who turns eleven today, left partway through, telling me he found it insufferable. Sandy, who is seven, said it was the weirdest thing she’d ever seen in her entire life. This is probably not true, but she has the memory of a seven-year-old. I finished it, but I rolled my eyes a lot.

Part of it is, ironically, what critics at the time seem to have praised the most at the time. Many of the pop culture references have aged like milk. This is always a concern. What do you do? It’s a risk, and it’s part of the problem with Babs; her whole bit tends toward pop culture parody, and that usually-but-not-always relies on remembering the thing being parodied. My kids have no context for references to Arsenio Hall, Hee-Haw, or Roseanne Barr’s national anthem performance. I mean, they don’t get the Deliverance references, either, but at least that can be chalked up to being too young for that movie as opposed to not remembering the specific two-year period leading up to the one we’re watching.

Mostly it was that the movie appears to be nudging you in the ribs for its entire 79-minute runtime. There is no joke too broad here. There’s comedy to be gotten from the strange disconnect that comes from spending a lot of time around someone else’s family, but Hamton’s family is too ridiculous to take seriously. Babs spends her time trying to woo Buster, but why? Okay, so people at that age have no chill when it comes to crushes; we’ll draw a curtain over my own romantic misadventures from 1992. But part of the problem comes from my uncertainty about what age the characters are supposed to be; Buster’s obsession with spraying Babs with a water pistol reads as less mature than they seem to be intended to be. And Elmyra makes little sense at the best of times.

So yeah. Sorry; I wish I’d liked this better. I think I’ve been too old for it since it came out. It’s the second-ever direct-to-video animated feature, if only barely a feature, and it got a Laserdisc release. This is fascinating to me, much more interesting than the movie itself. It’s definitely got the feel of “this will be four episodes someday,” and indeed it was. About the only thing I will say it got right was the contradictory relief you could feel sometimes when school started again and a summer that had been miserable was finally over. At least school wasn’t supposed to be fun.

So, uh, did other people like theirs better?