Punky's Treehouse - A Punky Brewster Fansite

Nostalgic? Soleil Moon Frye fan? Looking for information on Punky Brewster? This is an unofficial source of information and opinion on the cult classic TV show, for those who've never grown up, or who are looking to see how adult eyes view it.

Site updates are guaranteed alternate Mondays, plus any other miscellaneous updates that happen during the week.

May 12, 2008: Back to Season Four we go, as the kids go to camp and I go to rant. After that, check out why my FTP uploader is crying for mercy with a very jam-packed gallery for Yes, Punky, There Is A Santa Claus. And if you go through the review to get them, you'll notice the MP3 bonus.
Yes, I know I'm missing an episode of screencaps. They're coming with next week's, lest my DVD drive grow arms and attempt to throttle me for the constant access.

May 5, 2008: My head hates me just as much as it did last night, so I'll quickly inform you of "Dog Dough Afternoon" and "Bye Bye My" having screenshot galleries in their various Reviews (or go direct through Galleries). Then I shall hide from the light, moreso than usual.

April 28, 2008: Motion blur becomes my arch-nemesis as everyone is jumping around enough to make capping "Miss Adorable" sort of like trying to shoot a jumping bean with a pop gun. Nonetheless, it and "Go To Sleep/A Visit To The Doctor" produced a ton of usuable shots.
Speaking of usuable shots, a new and quite usuable digital copy brings us back in the schedule to look at "Beer and Buffalos Don't Mix". Still a yucky taint of "rent a slot against substance abuse", so there's a bit of gristle to chew on. At least this time has more of George Gaynes dancing. You ~~heard~~ read me.

April 21, 2008: Nearly late, but never gone, the updates continue to trickle in like a particular persistent stream of... water. Next week is a catch-up review of "Beer and Buffalos Don't Mix" thanks to some intervention/mad DVD ripping skills by forum member DanOrDanny. This week throws it back to the classics with galleries for Take Me Out To The Ballgame and Parent's Night. You too can see Henry fight with a mop and Punky crack whip on the whole family.

April 14, 2008: Whoa, too many pictures. Between the different title sequences, a photo montage, and the fact that this week's screencap episodes are split blocks of two episodes each, this update came up to somewhere around 300 pictures. I am beginning to worry just a bit whether my server will even have the room to finish this project. That would be cool, actually.
Crushed actually crushed me a bit this week, leaving not much to write home about, but making you glad you watched anyway. Sounds a little like a grade-school crush actually. Hey, wait...

April 7, 2008: In the process of putting together the infrastructure for the screenshot galleries, the whole site has been at least touched up. The Links have been cleaned up, the Gallery now points to a master page for all of the screenshot galleries as well as a rebuilt version of the Soleil Moon Frye gallery, the various picture and music off-topic has been... well, that's been kept, it's community stuff.
One thing I have been figuring out while doing this... twenty-year-old video viewed on a fairly old TV is one thing, but twenty-year-old video being mined for individual frames on a modern computer is quite another. I've done what I can to fix the screenshots up a bit, but the fact remain that there was no way to get really good shots of some scenes due to the original material not being very good. So some of these don't look all that good, but I don't want to delete the shots I've decided on because every scene I've snapped is as close to a pictorial retelling of the episode as is possible. I'd rather not screw up continuity quite yet.
With all of the annoucements out of the way, all three parts of "Punky Finds a Home" have been shot, coming in at lots of pics each. (High 50s for 1 and 3, nearly 40 for the 2nd part.) That'll be about the norm, so go ahead and have a look. Go into the Gallery and look for the episode, or look up its review which will now have a direct gallery link at the bottom. It's all part of getting the Treehouse close to the resource it was originally envisioned as before technical limitations took hold.

Why are you still reading this?

March 31, 2008: Season Four is starting up here, so there's one last roll of reviews before this project... hangs up? Starts looking at cartoons? I don't know, I wasn't even sure it would last this long. Still, with only one episode of the season in the can, I guess it's a little early to bring that up.
Also, thanks to large, large technical upgrades on my end, there is going to be screencaps creeping into these pages of every single episode. Not this week, but soon. Why aren't they here yet? Well, for one, I have to figure out how to display them on a server that doesn't allow direct picture links. Then I have to take pictures of what is now 64 episodes, and all after my test run with "Punky Finds A Home, Part 1" yields 59 snaps. Even taking into account the first episode will have a few more than the usual, this is going to be a lot of pictures.
So here's how that schedule is going to work: The episode reviews will remain bi-weekly, because I phone them in worse than usual on a weekly schedule. The weeklies will be two episodes worth of screenshots, at minimum. The gallery for each episode will be linked through its review, via a fancied-up link at the bottom below the sign-off. For those keeping count, that means "Punky Finds a Home" will be up (at minimum) on April 7, while the review for "Crushed" will still be up April 14. Assuming everything goes right, that gets both the Season Four reviews and the screencaps finished on January 17, 2009.

March 31, 2008: The episode of the day needs its own blurb after all that. The Nun's Story is more Aunt Mabel's story, or possibly Punky's story, but you will agree that there is nuns. No flying ones, sadly, although there is blue ones! (?)

[Older updates here]