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Original Air Date: November 4, 1984 Review completed December 11, 2005 "Go to Sleep" Henry tries like mad to get Punky to sleep, on the one night where Punky isn't sleepy. She eventually figures out that Henry wants to watch Die Fledermaus on his own, but Henry is forced to relent and tries to teach Punky the ins and outs of opera. Eventually, the opera proves a bit lackluster, so Punky's "Revenge of the Slime People" ends up being the movie of the night. "A Visit to the Doctor" Punky and Cherie are caught in the act of forging notes to the school nurse. Punky eventually admits to Henry that she's trying to avoid a booster shot because she's scared of the needle. Henry's solution is to produce the magic quarter, a charm to help make kids brave...which Punky ends up losing in the water fountain. She manages to be brave without it, although Henry takes its loss pretty hard. In general, I have a hard time picking one particular favourite. Both offer Punky and Henry being the main characters (In "Go to Sleep", they're the only characters). Both have Punky being at the top of her game, even pulling out her mischevious side to avoid various nemeses. Punky ends up winning in the end of both, with Henry's best-laid plans derailed for the best. In a lot of ways, there's some similarities in both of them, but it's not like watching the same episode twice. Let's hit the breakdowns. GO TO SLEEP: Ah, Punky versus bedtime, a classic battle of the ages. Henry tries like every trick in the book here, fails miserably, and we come out singing Punky's point-of-view. Man, if any other kid tried that... OK, seriously, I think the sequence where Henry tries everything in his arsenal to get Punky to sleep is a good one, possibly one of the best quick sequences thus far. Part of it is that it's all so familiar; who hasn't been on the receiving end of all of this, or possibly even given it? The other part has to be the sheer glee with which Punky snaps off answers and takes Henry's plans apart. In particular, I had a laughing fit at "Sheep #9 crashed into the fence!" And, hey, they even pay the bills at the beginning by name-dropping a couple of other NBC shows. Going on from here, we get Punky trying to sneak back out, as well as Henry's ridiculous attempts to keep alone. Really, you have to wonder what he's doing, especially with locking the door, and it still doesn't make that much sense even when you do find out what the heck is going on. I like my privacy more than the next guy, but putting the phone off the hook to watch a show? It's kind of cheap. That having been said, I'll admit to laughing at Punky's "must be cable" reference. Tell me how many kids in the audience were meant to get that one. However, I must now get out of the way the big clunky moment of the whole half-hour, and that's Punky's "Can I have that empty seat?" monologue. Soleil Moon Frye shows some excellent restraint in her acting, and that helps a lot, but the whole thing sticks out like a smashed thumb in this joke-filled story. Even worse, it makes Punky look really manipulative, since it's quite easy to look at the whole thing as another excuse to stay up. I realize there's quite a bit of argument both ways, but I'm looking at how it affects the flow of the story, and it looks like a speed bump from that angle. From there, it's the rest of the episode, with everything you needed to know about light opera, but didn't really care about. It's solid the whole way, buoyed by the simple fact that none of the writers felt the need to go cheap and have Punky turn into an opera fan at the end. You could argue that her falling asleep might be a cheap gag, but I feel that it works well, especially with the build that it got. And hey, haven't we all gotten psyched for something and found out it was a giant letdown (poor, poor Henry)? Yeah, we all know it. Uh, that was the full episode right there. It's like a Coffee Crisp; a nice, light snack of Punky between meals of Santa and Parent's Night. I called it one of my favourites up top, and it is, but there's just not that much to say about it. You have to see it, really. One thing I can note about the full story, before speeding out of one of the quickest reviews in the site's history, is the reactions. Looking back, quite a few of my complaints involve unnatural or exaggerated reactions to jokes and situations, and it's not hard to note that this is a big thing that gets under my skin. Not here. This episode is a model of the perfect reaction take; in particular, I liked Henry's forced chuckle at the "operetta" pun. If this were "Parent's Night", he probably would have laughed like he just watched a coyote fall off of a cliff, and looked like a tool doing it. Here, he groans through it without making the whole bit look bad, and lets the good jokes get you going. So, there's all sorts of little things to see you through this story, and the whole is a nice diversion. The time flies, and not just because we're only at fifteen minutes either. A VISIT TO THE DOCTOR: Bloody heck, this plot is probably one of four or five that's made it into EVERY kid's show ever made: Kid Gets Scared Of Doctor Visit. Occasionally, substitute "Dentist". So this show freshens things slightly by adding in a lucky charm and a man's attachment to it. Now that I've made the whole thing sound bad, let's go into how it's good. First, it's good because it uses the familiarity of the situation. Every kid hated the doctor at one point, and a lot of people still hate needles. [*raises hand*] So it's not a tough trick to feel for Punky in this one, and even understand a bit about why she'd try forging notes. It doesn't help you understand why she'd do it in the middle of the living room, as opposed to somewhere more private, but that's what we call a grey area. Second, it's good because the show's positive overtones are all over this thing. Punky has a joke in the face of an impending needle, Henry gives a sarcastic epitaph to a kid's crossword puzzle as he nervously waits, and even Cherie gets in on a little of the fun. It seems perhaps much to call Punky's positive spin on things particularly brave, considering that we're talking about a girl with such heavy issues on her plate, but we do see that this is a big deal to her. Thus, all the better when she just powers through it. See what happens when the writers build things up? Third...well, what have I been saying all along? Small timeslot, simple story...they're two great tastes that go well together. This probably would have been a disastrous episode if stretched to full length, so this is the perfect spot to use the idea. This is the kind of time management that the first split block could have really used, but oh well. Fourth, we don't need every character under the sun. Cherie and Betty are around at the beginning, and we get a receptionist with more than a few speaking lines, but...there's no Eddie, no nuns, no conmen doing walk-on parts, no social workers. Let Punky and Henry handle this one, and leave everyone else at home. It works, it works. There we go, four easy steps to an fifteen-minute episode that I liked watching. Not in my top five, surely, but one I can pop in and just watch. - Jimmy Vibes Do the first click Do the second click
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