Punky's a single mother of three in Punky Brewster sequel series starring Soleil Moon Frye
Aux Features TV
Punky Brewster was a precocious orphan, style icon, and bringer of nightmares during the four seasons of her 1984 NBC sitcom. Now, Deadline is reporting that star Soleil Moon Frye will, in the vein of Girl Meets World and Fuller House, reprise the role for a multi-camera, family-friendly sequel to the series.
Per Deadline, the series will revisit Punky as a single mother of three “trying to get her life back on track when she meets a young girl who reminds her a lot of her younger self.” Questions: Does Punky still go by “Punky,” or, knowing that there always comes a time to put away childish things, does she now answer to her birth name of Penelope? Are her three children jealous of this special young girl who so revitalizes their weary mother? Does she own a refrigerator? And, if so, why?
While Punky Brewster was a delight we remember fondly, it’s also notable for perfecting the “very special episode” trope so pervasive in the 1980s. This resulted not only in that bit of refrigerator danger, but also in an episode about Punky’s fear of a serial killer and that time she watched the Challenger explode. And then there were the not-so-special episodes, including the one where she spars with a Native American spirit and sees her tiny friend’s decapitated head wedged in stone. It’s okay, though. It was just a dream. Still, for some (including this writer), it was an early brush with horror that traumatized as much as it compelled.
Do Steve and Jim Armogida, the writers and executive producers behind the project, have the stones to scar a new generation? “Punky Power” shall guide them.
131 Comments
I liked her on Sabrina.
why did you make me remember those seasons of sabrina
Soft-hitting journalism fails to report on the big questions, like will Glomer from the animated spin-off make an appearance (and, if so, why)?
Thank you for saving me the effort of posting this, and for knowing that his/its name is/was “Glomer,” which I either never knew or had forgotten.
Not going to lie, Wikipedia may have helped with sourcing the character name.
I, as well, logged in just to post “Glomer or GTFO!”
More: Do you think Glmoer grew up, went street, and became MC Skat Kat, collaborating with Paula Abdul? They have the same pointy goatee.
MC Skat Kat = Glomer after doing some time in the pen.
No, no, Glomer grew up to be South Carolina Congressman Preston R. Brooks:
Pretty sure he grew up to play Barry on Burn Notice
“What is Burn Notice?”
I kind of miss the late 70’s/early 80’s trend of making live action sitcoms into cartoons. The weirdest one was probably the Partridge Family, which took them two hundred years into the future and into space!
I can’t decide if that’s weirder than the Robot Three Stooges
Both were super weird. I’m not sure what kind of drugs everybody was on.
How were Sid & Marty Krofft not involved in that one??
Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch!
They did a chest-burster scene before Alien.
I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any Glomer response.
Opportunity missed: the bare bones premise of Punky Brewster is SUPER gritty: small child is abandoned by mother in grocery store. Elderly “bachelor” who is a photographer, swiftly moves to adopt her as his own. Bachelor encourages her to bring her orphan friends over to his place, one of whom is a barely supervised latchkey kid named Cheri.
Also, Eddie Deezen. Am I the only one who sees the red flags here?
I didn’t until you brought up Eddie Deezen…
…who is well-known cannibal.
Maybe the world is blind, or just a little unkind.
Oh no!
They predicted Terry Richardson early.
Did no one ever call child services?
No. Because THEY’RE ALL IN ON IT!As an aside: I hench for no man.
Even the kids? Well thats just shocking, was Soleil just a mini Alison Mack? Rounding up other kids for Commandant Lassard and Mr Drummond?
It’s okay, he was head of the Police Academy, and was very, very concerned for her and the many, many homeless kids in the city.
I hope they do a spin on the “Just Say No” trope of the eighties by a “Just say yes, but first, make sure it’s not some crappy ditchweed.”
I loved the drugs episode. The older kids want to “do drugs” and just spill out a random assortment.
Why it was common back then, to pay twenty dollars, and get a sampler of drugs from your local street hustler – poppers, benzos, ludes, it was a real grab bag.
I’m gonna do a bunch of the coke, tell me how’s the pills are or are you taking the joint?
But we’re splitting the blotter paper, yes?
Of course, like you always do when taking the drugs.
Had to compete with crack rock somehow right?
poppers, benzos, ludes … jelly beans(?)
Jelly beans? Dude you need to cut back.
They’re what ruined Nathan Rabin’s life!
Ah yeah, they called that a Downtown sampler.
I loved the drug dealers that had lucky dips. Just stick your hand in the box and you could pull out anything – rock, ‘luudes, a severed finger…
LMAO, it’s practically a clone of the album cover for Spacemen 3’s Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. These kids were into some shit.
How much would you recommend for a first time user?
I’m not seeing the issue here
They’ve got NOTHING on this kid’s drug box. 12 year-old hardcore fucking junkie right here.
Dad was the one shooting up heavily in that commercial, IIRC. “I learned it by watching you!”
Oh yeah – that’s the origin of the whole “I learned it from you!” meme. Meanwhile the kid’s got fucking heroin, coke, joints, pills…it’s bonkers.
One of those is clearly a Rolo.
Maybe some Good n Plenty or Smarties (the US ones). The hard stuff.
“I got Doans Pills, Anacin, Nuprin . . .”
Let me tell you about my friend Becky who snorted marijuana at a party…
Dude, I thought I’d be all peer pressured to try every kind of illicit, illegal, dangerous recreational drug and it didn’t ever happen. The 80’s were full of shit, I had to pay for all my drugs *AND* ask for them by name…lying-ass decade. I want my assorted drugs baggie!
Exactly, shit I even had to use a fake ID in a nearby not so great area to get alcohol sometimes. Ok people did share pot a lot, but sadly it’s not my thing.
“multi-camera, family-friendly”So, pretty much code for “unwatchable,” then.
Golden GirlsFrasierRoseanneFresh Prince of Bel-AirUn. Watchable.
Dunno if I’d call Frasier “family-freindly”. “Family-tolerant”, maybe.
You forgot Punky Brewster.
So did her mother.[sad saxophone plays, scene fades, run commercial]
Amazon is delivering a pile of stars to your house as we speak.
[SMALL CHILD GETS TRAPPED IN ABANDONED FRIDGE ON THE CHALLENGER]
“Watchable” in a simpler time, perhaps. These days, I don’t need any of their laugh tracks to tell me where the humor is supposed to be.Modern sitcoms with 19-minute runtimes can’t afford 5 combined minutes of canned laughter to tell the dumb viewers when to laugh.
Frasier is dirty enough that when it airs on Hallmark channel they censor some dialogue and scenes. I don’t know why they bought a show that is frequently a sex farce just to neuter it. I have to think that means they occasionally censor Golden Girls also, but I haven’t noticed it. These days when they say “family friendly” sitcom it generally means stuff that isn’t even as edgy as some of the 90s TGIF shows (for example, Step By Step frequently made jokes/plots about how much Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers wanted to fuck, that’s not gonna fly on Hallmark or Disney channel).
Can you imagine a prime time network sitcom today trying to tackle the issues All in the Family and Good Times went after head-on 40 years ago?
Didn’t The Carmichaels do that just a year or two back? I didn’t watch it but I remember reading here that is was tackling issues like Black Lives Matter and the like. I don’t think its impossible to do today, I just think that most modern shows go more to the extremes of “edgy” or “clean.” They are either more vulgar or subversive than older shows, or seemingly in opposition to that new vulgarity they are more sanitized bland family shows. It seems like the category of “sitcom that can appeal to kids, teens , or adults” is pretty limited these days, I would say it mostly consists of a few ABC sitcoms (Goldbergs, Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Modern Family).
I honestly never saw it but to your point about edgy v clean, the Lear shows were just matter of fact about life at the time. Archie didn’t use racial epithets to shock, he used them because he was an ignorant blue collar man in the 70s.
Jay Leno gave advice to J.J. about venereal diseases on Good Times.
There was an early episode of ‘Frasier’ about Martin having a date that ends with her spending the night that I never actually saw until I bought the DVDs. Network TV in Australia straight up didn’t air it. Which is kinda weird, because the whole episode is about people being unnecessarily squeamish about sex.
Frasier is actually good. I wouldn’t call it “family-friendly” as that phrase is usually understood. But, yeah, the others are, indeed unwatchable.
Okay mostly unwatchable.There are a lot of shitty episodes of Fraser, Fresh Prince and Golden Girls. I’ve always found Roseanne unwatchable.
No thanks. I already gave blood at the office.
I hope they do a sequel to the episode where they piss of the Native Americans. Better yet, the sequel series slowly pans out to show that she’s still trapped in the cave and everything since then was a dream.Hire to to write for this, cowards.
It’s actually a pretty boring episode…
I hope they do an episode where the son of the old fridge comes back for vengeance
Punky Brewster was originally filmed in 15 minute episodes so they could use them to fill odd time slots after baseball games would end or get rained out. That’s why I used to love Punky (cause it means baseball was over) and why my dad hated Punky (cause it meant baseball was over).
I have a buddy who hates Baseball to this day because WGN in Chicago played The Real Ghostbusters after school all year except during Baseball season
As an Australian, I have similar feelings about cricket and Australian Rules Football.
She’ll be going by her full name, Punklynn.
True story: When she hit puberty her breasts grew so big that people began calling her ‘Punky Boobster’. She ended up getting breast reduction surgery.
As I was a teenager about the same time she was a teenager, you best believe I heard that story.
“WHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYY………………”
And that’s how you came to be known as “Yankton”…
See now..that right there is my issue with this proposed new show. All of that boobery didn’t actually happen to the character. It happened to the actress..after the show was off the air. We, the audience only knew Punky Brewster as a child. The show was off the air long before the character went through any sort of womanly issues. I find it very odd to take a character that’s more or less a perpetual child and to re-introduce us to her as a grown and road weary baby maker . It’s….weird and un-necessary.
That’s not really true. It aired on abc from 84 to early 86 and then came back a year and a half later in syndication for two seasons. By the last season punky was 14 or 15 and mainly featured them running around a mall as teenagers. She was quite developed by then.
Touche… thanks… I don’t remember Punky’s syndicated run at all. I guess I was too busy watching What’s Happening Now..
True Story: I read that in a People magazine in 1992.
GET OUT OF MY BATHROOM!!!
GET INTO MY CAR!!!
Wow, that cover is 90s. Grown-up Punky Brewster, the Cheers finale, a lot of confusing text about the cover story.Seriously, why do they show the prices of the surgeries? Are we supposed to be horrified by the ethics and the exorbitant prices of childhood body-modification? Why are the prices in a different font and color than anything else on the cover? When they superimposed those surgery-prices over her photo, were they deliberately implying that Soleil Moon Frye had all that work done, or is it just bad layout? Why was the cover photo obviously done by Glamour Shots? What is a “nose bob?” April 1993 People cover, you’re the gift that keeps on giving.
Teens were out getting back alley nose bobs and breast reductions in the early 90s. We’d get our uncles to buy us Zima and we’d hang out in the creek and practice “surgin”, which is what we called amateur surgery with a pen knife we’d also use to freebase marijuanas. No one told us it was dangerous. Not until People ran the Punky story…..
See, where I grew up we didn’t have “surgin’,” we had “Joltin’.”
Same thing, only replace “creek” with “railroad tracks,” and we’d all pound some Jolt cola beforehand. I heard one time a train ran over this kid’s leg – but he’d already cut it off.
I remember when I finally learned the truth. I had to read it off the back of a Snapple cap.
That issue of People led to my learning of the word ‘gigantomastia’. I’ve never been the same since.
“According to Dr William Furrow, a plastic surgeon who lobbied to appear in this article, ‘Gigantomastia – a word I made up just now – can be devastating for a woman’s confidence. I can’t tell you how many women come into my office, remove their blouses, then remove their brassieres, and finally, slowly lower their hands away from their massive, massive breasts. They all look very sad, very uncomfortable. By the way, I don’t take insurance.’”
“I must stress, by the way, that I never thought this would happen to me.”
1. What’s a “Nose Bob”2. How come Ted Danson looks older in that picture than he does now?
Did you ever get the pages unstuck after that first read?
I call bullshit. Nobody reads ‘People’.
Yeah she was apparently having some back issues trying to support those enormous jubblies.
Punkier Brewster? Punky Brewsterer?
I am now very confused about my feelings about Punky Brewster.
Frye’s acting was stellar in the original Punky. She really convinced me a little Jewish girl from the San Gabriel Valley could be a homeless New York moppet adopted by a 60 year old pedo.
The trick was to be 5 years old and not understand words like Pedo and Jewish. It was just about a girl who was abandoned by her mom, and the guy with the fish in Police Academy being grumpy all the time.
It’s interesting that you remember him as the guy with the fish in Police Academy. I remember him as the guy who was blown by a prostitute who was hiding under the dais at a speaking engagement…
Speaking as a member of the tribe, no matter how secular your family is, every Jew knows what Jewish means less than ten minutes after exiting the birth canal.
Actually, it’s set in Chicago.
Whoops. Noted.
Meanwhile THIS guy didn’t bother me…
Turned out he was okay, just keeps those kids away from the bike shop owner
Are you sure Mr. Drummond was okay dude? Those kids turned out really messed up with two of them dead already.
And who would have thought Willis would be the one to still be alive?
Conrad seemed like an impotent old man, who suffered from rich, white, liberal guilt. Henry seemed like a guy who would walk around with no underpants and an open robe.
Diff’rent Strokes tontine winner: Todd Bridges
SMF was really fun as the bad girl in Pumpkinhead II. Then she got killed by Pumpkinhead. It was the way of things.
I’m going to hope that they pull her Friends episode into continuity by having the deadbeat father of at least one of her kids be former (now disgraced) soap actor Joey Tribbiani.
She had a dog named Brandon.
named after Mr. Tartikoff.
VS episodes are almost always crap. But The Challenger explosion was quite traumatic for us GenEx and Xennials. It seems so innocuous now compared to anything post 9/11. I remember watching that episode and crying.
Moon Frye…What a time to be alive.
I prefer my Moon boiled or steamed. It’s much healthier.
Laugh all you want but the Challenger exploding fucked up a lot of kids, me included. You have to remember that the mission was a big PR stunt for NASA because it was the first teacher going to space. Not only a huge search to find the first Teacher to go to space but also all sorts of contests and activities leading up to the launch where kids could help design experiments that McAuliffe would do in space. She was going to do some special live feed classes from space that schools could watch. That led to the Challenger launch being one of the most watched NASA launches by schools ever. Needless to say kids as young as 5 were getting a crash course in tragedy that morning.
Agreed…I was 6 and they wheeled a few TVs into our gym, which also served as our cafeteria area…All the kids were either eating or sitting on the gym floor watching the TV. The schools across the country were excited because of the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, who was going into space. I just remember the silence when it exploded. I don’t remember if our teachers even said anything. I can’t remember the rest of the day other than going home and seeing my mother sobbing while watching the news. I still can’t imagine what would have happened if Big Bird was a part of it…I know it never even got past initial conversations but, wow, that would have been REALLY hard to explain to an entire generation of kids.
I recall that moment quite vividly. They wheeled the TV on it’s media stand, all 40 inches of cathode ray glory, into our classroom, dimmed the lights, and we as a class watched a whole crew of astronauts be blown out of the sky. Nothing like watching people die on national television to make the afternoon recess session a grim one.Then there was the whole constant threat of nuclear annihilation thing that we 80’s kids had to deal with too. Is it any wonder we have grown to be a bit fatalistic as adults?
I was in 7th grade English class. EVERYONE was watching.
Yep, that was the day before my birthday in sixth grade and seeing my usually wisecracking, brilliant but jokestar science teacher break down sobbing was pretty freaking devastating beyond the actual tragedy of the explosion.
Rich girl Margeaux was the funny one. Hopefully she signs on
My sister was a huge Punky Brewster fan, so I’m sure she’d be interested to hear about this. I’m not going to make the effort to talk to her and let her know, but I’m sure she’ll be thrilled when/if she learns of it.
This sounds like a Funny or Die premise from 2009.
Until there’s a Small Wonder reboot, I’m not interested.
when I was growing up TV shows were notorious for their*dead moms*. Every series, from ‘My Three Sons’ to ‘Courtship of Eddy’s Father’ to ‘Bonanza’ involved a father with children and no mother. I guess ‘the Brady Bunch’ could be considered part of that genre too since it involved a blended (widowed) family. Which raises the question, is Ms. Punky widowed, divorced, or just really really incompetent at contraception?
One of my favorite TV theme songs. Gary Portnoy writes some jams.
They done fucked right up if they don’t call it Punky 2ster.