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Original Air Date: October 20, 1985 Review completed July 9, 2006 "The Perils of Punky" On a camping trip, Punky, Allan, Cherie, and Margaux get lost and decide to seek shelter in an Indian cave. It proves to be not quite abandoned, and the inhabitants divine that Punky is the successor to Princess Moon, who has been foretold to defeat the evil Owa Tagoo Siam. After the somewhat reluctant Punky is sent off, the evil spirit begins to conduct a campaign of fear through giant spiders, holes into hell, and disappearing friends. Soon, only Punky is left, all of the others having vanished. The spirit attacks, but Princess Moon puts in an appearance to reveal the weak point of his attack; it only affects those who fear it. Punky forces him to feel the positive emotions of the world, and the spirit dies, bringing everyone back from vanishment. As Punky winds up her story, Henry and Betty finds the kids, and they head back to camp (before one last goodbye from Princess Moon...) Now that the very long disclaimer is out of the way, let's talk content. It may seem odd, after the sanitized take on school violence that was "The KO Kid", that Punky is going to present an episode based around horror images. Ho-ho, it gets better than that. Not only is it outside of the norm for Punky, but there's scenes in this puppy that still give kids nightmares. The freaky eye to hell thing is something that gets cited a bit, and I'll be willing to admit that skeleton-Brandon probably made hearts skip beats. But, look no farther that the cliffhanger for something truly memorable; something that still gets discussed in nostalgia circles, something that's made "scariest things of the 80s" lists far and wide. Read on if you dare... Actually, the first big moment of horror for me was when I found out that they changed the title sequence again. The clips are pretty good, ditching the animation at the end for a shot of Punky and Henry's hug from "Henry Falls In Love Part 2", and featuring a funny clip of Mike nearly falling off of the treehouse's ladder. But a minor heresy was also committed: The trademark multi-coloured squiggle text that used to form the credits has been replaced by a plain yellow font. Eeyuck. Why did they do that? And why does it stay that way for the rest of the season?! After that, though, things start pretty normally. Things always start normally in horror. Except for the fact that the background music is really far off of the beat of the kids' singing, which is horrifying to my sense of rhythm. But then we go almost immediately into a montage sequence. If you don't think that that's standard-issue, you haven't watched Punky very much. Other than that, there's not much of note until we get to the cave, besides Punky's subtle hints about dead trees. Going for an environmental message much, guys? A quick technical note before we go on (that I'll only note once): Virtually every scene in the cave looks to have been put onto DVD with little or no retouching, with the result that everything looks sort of fuzzy sometimes. It's not the worst transfer of the series (the full video drop-out in "Punky Finds a Home Part 3" and the odd white glow in "My Aged Valentine" take those honours), but it looks a little odd when everything else looks so sharp. And here we have Indians. No, not Native Americans; full-out Indians, the kind that you could only get away with in the 80s; the kind that would have protest groups forming at rapid rates if you tried to play that kind of scene out today. It's a pretty cheesy scene, hokey as they come and thick with exposition lumps, but it has a certain old-school charm that has you liking it even as you laugh like heck at what they're trying to push on you. It's a charming kind of bad... I can't even really call it bad, though, if I'm enjoying it. It's long, though. Virtually the entire first episode passes within this conversation. It passes quickly enough, so they've done something very right, but be warned that if you decide to split the episode up, you'll miss all of the good stuff. And there's good stuff ahead, I'll say. The closing of the cave door establishes another unwritten episode theme; cheesy visuals. Obviously, a show revolving around family issues and spunky kids doesn't have the proper budget for true effects work, so everything that happens in here is pretty much all on the cheap. It's all at various degrees of success; the collapse of the opening is a decent effect even if not much actually happens. But in my mind, the corny effects help the episode. It's a kid's series, after all, and those expecting true horror and gore effects are missing the point. Besides, it's a gold mine for both people who love to point out cheesy effects (me!), and those who want to see TV the way it used to be. And we're watching Punky Brewster here, so you'd better be at least the latter of the two. And because I can't note it down in the Quotes; someone on the writing team was having a bit of fun when a shout of "Punky Power!" causes that evil spirit to shake the cave. Someone making fun of the echo effects, methinks. One of the things that really helps with the episode (that also starts coming up around this time) is the reactions. The kids don't spend a lot of time looking bored, or react much like, "Hey look, a set piece!" No, they all manage a decent horrified reaction to the things happening around them, and it can't be easy when they can't hear the dubbed-in-afterwards music or when they're all too aware that their adversary is composed of, say, Christmas tree lights and dry ice. And coming right here, the Part One cliffhanger, by far the most enduring image of the episode and something that caused an entire generation of kids to wet themselves in unison. And even now, it's easy to see why. I may or may not have seen this thing in its original run (c'mon, I was two years old, how am I supposed to remember?), but that spider popping up out of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE to do a nice, amplified screech at the audience even startled me upon first seeing the DVDs. Really, if you have been specifically told about it before, you're guaranteed to jump about a foot. That's beautiful timing, and I've got to give a hand to all involved for having the guts to do it on a show aimed primarily for the 2-12 demographic. (Or whatever it was back then.) In fact, I resisted the urge to just use the Play All feature just to have the effect of it all. It's nice. Coming into Part 2, there's a small oddity; once we see the spider, the kids run, and then the "And now, Part 2...." narration comes up. We never did see the kids run last time, did we? Now, let's meet Mr. Pieces. The arms and legs are an interesting effect; I'm not sure what it is exactly, but my guess is that there's one real arm behind a set wall (for the interaction with Punky) and the rest of the time, it's prop limbs puppeted with strings. The rest of him isn't quite as seamless; the directors make the mistake that they've been conciously avoiding for the rest of the episode and show too much at too good of a lighting level. As a result, you can see the hole in the "rock" where the actor is sticking his head through, and there's even a few times where you can see the tip of a rock-coloured bodysuit sticking out! Low-budget is fine, just keep it less obvious, o propmen. Especially, y'know, when you built the top of the rock in a bowl shape to hide the seams in long shots... The story impact of the segment is much better than the head effect, though. Throughout the story, there have been many subtle shows of power by the spirit that come together to paint the image of a frighteningly powerful creature. Look at what we've seen so far: He can cause trees to die and ground to wither. He can reshape natural rock (or at least push it from long distances). He can command creatures, and possibly create illusions of creatures (depending on how you interpret the eyes from the last episode). And now, we see that humans coming within range can be completely reshaped and sectioned, and not even necessarily to kill. Would you want to tangle with something like that? Would you think that a bunch of kids would? The next scene is interesting for a few reasons. For one, I can't help but shake the feeling that the floating hell eye is a Lord of the Rings reference. Remember, the books have been around for approximately sixty years; you don't need to wait until the movie's release time to see alluisions to it in popular media. Secondly, it's a pretty nice effects shot, especially considering that this would have been done with traditional editing tools; remember, this is too early for Photoshop and CGI. Third, I've heard from a few people (most of them on IMdb) that this scene was cut from the reruns. You could write that off as a syndication cut, but even though it was, the other reported cut from this episode shows that maybe there was another criterion involved in choosing what scenes would hit the cutting room floor in other stations. A less successful effect is the flying tomahawk. I'm not one to pause and go frame-by-frame just to chainsaw something, so believe me when I say that the terrible blue-screen work really stands out. It's obviously not part of the same scene. And the tomahawk itself doesn't look sturdy at all; it looks like a slightly above-average art project. Most of the effects are really bad by conventional standards; it's just that this one stands out so, so much. Coming up next, a big spider web (made of thick twine). Guess what's about to make a re-appearance? I award you no points if you get it right, but at least it's time for COMBAT! Oh wow, is this part cheesy or what? I love it, I mock it, I love to mock it. First of all, the flashes of green energy that come up (completely unexplained, I might add) are some kind of effect that affects anything with a decent dark level, so we see Punky's hair light up an awful lot. Which makes me chuckle. Secondly, random scenes out of the fight are framed with a silt-scan effect (sections of swirly effects coming towards the camera... see the old title sequence to Doctor Who), again for no reason. Third of all, there's two versions of the spider; a large puppet with limited mobility, and one that's basically a large doll. To create the illusion of fighting with it, Soleil Moon Frye is using her legs to move the doll, while pulling the fangs towards herself, while acting like she's struggling to keep the fangs away and pretend she's kicking the thing. So why do I love it? It's cheesy in the right way. It's cheesy like a showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". It's cheesy like seeing toy commercials from the 80s where kids are talking in something akin to an alien language compared to anyone today. It's cheesy like an old monster movie where Dracula has to keep adjusting his cape every three seconds. In other words, it's so cheesy you laugh, and you enjoy yourself. And that, by far, is the best way to work with effects with no budget. It isn't this new trend of "so bad it's good" because that's absolute bull. It it was really bad, you wouldn't like it. It's actually charming in its way. And for the killing blow that forces the spider to die in a Roman candle explosion... let's just say I didn't expect the showing of the axe blow, let alone the goopy after-effects, in a series that went to ridiculous lengths to not show someone throwing a punch. But it's a good thing. Generally, it's messy when you stick the sharp end of something into something's behind. (And I'd be ashamed of myself if I let the effect of the web burning away... which, naturally, is white Christmas lights on a background of sparks... go without mention.) Okay, enough about the effects. (Heh-heh! Okay, I'm done.) Margaux's little breakdown and subsequent disappearance is well done, not that it hurts that they pull off a full fade-out. And, as we'll see during the climax, it makes a lot of sense given the rules of how the evil spirit's powers work. Same thing with Allan, and having Punky and Cherie rattled enough to keep oral contact right up until Cherie's inevitable disappearance is a nice touch. It gets knocked down a notch when the reformed friends are used to taunt Punky, though; the effect on Margaux is really bad with the cut between Ami Foster in green makeup and a plastic skeleton with a doll's head. C'mon, just choose one and at least cut the losses. It makes up with a cool skeletal Brandon, though. A giant, skeletal Brandon. In between the kids and the dog disappearing, though, is another apparently cut scene, where the evil spirit uses a illusionary scene of Henry and Betty giving up the search, which Punky figures out to be a trick. I have no idea why this would have been cut for syndication, what with the cliffhanger and goopy axe wound being left in. Finally, though, we meet the source behind all of this trouble, which is... someone (rumoured to be series creator David Duclon) wearing a sparkly blue-screen tarp like a kid's ghost costume. Like a Ringwraith, but way harder to take seriously despite all of the Roman candle explosions he's attacking with. More successful is Princess Moon's visuals, which is an overexposed Soleil Moon Frye in a white Indian costume. One more general thing I'd like to note before we start wrapping up; the language used is actually good. Unlike most kiddy fare, people "die", people "will kill", people lose hope and show obvious deep despair. After seeing countless sanitized kid's shows in the last ten years, kudos to this episode for leaving the language natural, despite the fact that kids might find out that living things, shockingly, can die. The final scenes go off... well, decently, anyway, despite the fact that Soleil is visibly chewing gum during part of the fight. So, who was supposed to be stage directing that day? Anyways, I reworded the ideas in the scene a fair bit up in the summary, mostly because it's actually a decent concept. But lordy, is it worded awkwardly, with gems like, "let love be your sword" being the way that the idea is brought across in the script. It almost seems like a cop-out compared to the grand adventure that's been going on for the last forty-five minutes. And, of course, one more Roman candle explosion for the road as the spirit dies. And then, the equivalent of "and it was all a dream". Oh well, that just means that there was an appropriately sneaky transition way back in Part One, and Punky did say she was telling a ghost story way back when. (My guess for the transition point; just before the actual story started.) Of course, then we have Princess Moon pop back in at the end just to piss off anyone who's seriously going to go on about continuity and stuff. I'll be willing to say that someone, somewhere, has made an elaborate argument about the ramifications of that scene. It sure as heck won't be me, because even I'm not that much of a geek. So, how do you describe this episode? Well, besides the Part One cliffhanger, it's not "scary". "Cheesy"? Sure, in today's eyes. "Adventurous"? Well, it does somewhat remind me of a really young Dungeons and Dragons story. "Entertaining"? You bet. Actually, let's leave it at that. It covers everything quite nicely. - Jimmy Vibes PUNKY: Look, a duck! [The duck dives.] ALLAN: What happened? PUNKY: He ducked. MARGAUX: I'm not setting one foot in that woods. There's things in there that sting for a living. MARGAUX: We go in that cave over my dead body. ALLAN: That's another good reason. EXPOSITION INDIAN: ...someone full of goodness. PUNKY: [shaking her head] That can't be me; just last week, I dropped a water balloon on our mailman. MARGAUX: [blankly] I can't take anymore of this. I'm a delicate person. I have bird wings... tweet, tweet, tweet. PUNKY: Is that the evil spirit? OWA TAGOO SIAM: [sarcastically] No, it's Mr. Rogers. Welcome to my neighbourhood! OWA TAGOO SIAM: And now you must die. The only question is; how? PUNKY: Old age? |