After These Messages: Punky Brewster and She Ra with Kayleigh Shoen

Flash fiction writer Kayleigh Shoen (or as we like to call her: Princess of Soup) joined us again to talk about all things Punky Brewster related after we watched The Perils of Punky!

We started by watching this commercial for a Punky doll.

This commercial is super freaky because it starts with a doll and then shows an entire family of Punky clones. WHAT IS HAPPENING???

Anyway, they say at the end that Brandon and Glomer are sold separately so all of us were like, “Wait, who’s Glomer?” And that is how we ended up watching this interminable segment of the Punky Brewster cartoon, Glomer’s Story.

There’s a part two, but none of us could bear to spend another several minutes on this one. Glomer was voiced by Frank Welker, a prolific voice actor we have seen before in such things as The Chipmunk Adventure, where he voiced the villain’s two yappy dogs. Fun fact: he was also voice of the anaconda in Anaconda.

From here we moved on to some commercials for things Kayleigh remembered from her childhood. We started with Get in Shape, Girl.

This was a whole toy enterprise that revolved around telling little girls they really needed to workout more… cool.

Kayleigh had the Get in Shape, Girl barre.

Kayleigh was so into this leotard and tights aesthetic that she wore it under her regular clothes. Ahhh, the 80s!

This led us to discuss LA Gear and British Knights shoes and the terribleness of women’s fashion and its lack of pockets.

From there we went to a non-gendered exercise toy: Pogoball!

We heard this as telling us we could become a Pogoballmancer. Please, someone make us this fan art.

We looked into whether adult sized Pogoballs exist and found these terrifying Kangaroo Sky Runner shoes.

Then we moved to She Ra.

We watched a sequence of these and at first weren’t into the song, but then it took over our brains…

From She Ra to Frosta and Catra… who meows

Finally the Crystal Castle

Kayleigh and Julia both had some of these dolls, but Geoffrey had some awesome He Man action figures. We then talked about the various He Man cartoons and movies. Which… is maybe a little bit of a sneak peek at what you can expect to hear from us next…

Meanwhile, Kayleigh introduced us to the concept of the collectible Masters of the Universe sticker book, where you had a book, but in order to see the pictures, you had to buy a tone of sticker packs that were sold in mixed lots like baseball cards.

Also mentioned: This oral history of the Disney Afternoon.

Worms of Gummi! (If you know, you know)