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Original Air Date: December 4, 1987 Review completed December 31, 2007 "Remember When" After a long day of collecting snowballs for storage and storing them behind green chicken, Punky and her friends are ready to wind down. The worst blizzard in years strikes Chicago, however, and a series of mishaps leaves the group without power or heat with conditions too bad to travel in. With little else to do, the group reminisces about their past adventures, drawing inspiration from the various troubles they've gotten out of until power is restored. Still, it does leave me with the problem of trying to review something that has 90% recycled content, all of which I have written pieces on before. At first, I even thought of doing a clip review, cutting and pasting paragraphs from previous reviews and writing a footer to tie it together. Then I realized that the idea was retarded and walked off to find a 2-by-4 with which to punish whichever sector of my brain was responsible for that stroke of genius. I also thought about writing, "It's a clip show. Goodnight!" But it's not fair to do so when I've already written full pieces for such classics as "Just Say No" and "Punky's Big Story", episodes which much more deserved one-line write-offs. So even the clip show will have its day in the sun, even though all I really have to write about is the connecting sequences. Such as the opening one, which starts nicely with storing snowballs and some good back-and-forth about Henry's car (1955 Desota?!). And then the furnace blows, which having just gotten through the Christmas season, reminded me so much of A Christmas Story that I was waiting for Henry to start a Yosemite Sam-styled tirade of foul language complete with Punky dropping in an "Oh, fudge!" Seriously. I swear it looked EXACTLY like that. The writing quality is about the same level too so far... no leg-lamp, though. And then... well, that's the end of the commentary. It's almost solid clips from here on in. I can direct you to laugh at the green chicken (that is a disguisting prop), but that's about it considering that I can't review the clips again. The transitions get a lot less smooth from here, though, becoming absolutely hilarious at some points when you'll get pointed set-up question from a character as the third line of dialogue in the scene. One thing I can note, though, is that the clips are evenly taken from all three seasons thusfar aired, and that actually surprised me a bit. Who thought we'd see a good chunk of Season One come back now? I admit it's a little funny to see little pig-tailed Punky at this stage in the game, but you get used to it again surprisingly quickly. For whatever reason, there's a LOT of footage from "Changes", but you get used to that too. The clip selection looks like good choices to me, mostly reliving the good things and the funnier parts of the iffy episodes. Oops, I did forget one cool thing in the connecting sequences. About three-quarters of the way through, there's a very nice scene where Henry and Punky have one of those increasingly rare warm moments between them, which took me totally by surprise going by both the last few episodes and the clip-show format. [DEEP BREATH.] Of course, it preceeds the very first meeting between them, and I think it's appropriate that I'm reviewing this during the winter holidays. That's some warm, fuzzy, family moments right there. I've missed them. I love the comedy and all, but you can't beat those moments. Were you expecting more? I said I'd write about the episode, but I can only get what there is. As a highlight reel, I suppose this makes a pretty good mark for Punky, though the connecting sequences are generally pretty cheesy. Really, though, what do you expect? In the end, it's just a clip show. Those shows escape critical analysis pretty easily. "Just Say No" wishes it could be all clips. - Jimmy Vibes EXTRA-CREDIT QUESTION: What episodes do all of these clips come from? Answers will be linked to this page next week. |