"Boxed In" Featuring Punchy and You (INFORMATION UPDATE 6/22/07)

Here's a fun contribution from faithful reader Doug G. I'll let him tell you all about it:

This was a premium offered to drinkers of Hawaiian Punch in the early 90's. I don't recall how many cans of Hawaiian Punch I had to drink to get this, but it seemed like a heck of a lot (mostly because I HATE Hawaiian Punch, but I'm also a cheapskate so if I bought the darn punch I was sure gonna drink it). What we have here is a cassette tape hailed as a "Sonic Adventure" in "3-D sound" starring Punchy, that ultra-violent Hawaiian Punch mascot. The story takes place in a sort of first person with Punchy talking to the listener throughout. Through some fluke, you and Punchy get sucked into your TV set and are being pursued by two guys who border on copyright infringement in their all-too-close resemblance to the Mario Brothers. They (I think they're called the Fellini Brothers or something like that) chase you and Punchy through several TV channels with many a pop reference to early 90's television. Well, in the end those Fallini's get theirs when Punchy asks them "How about a nice..." nah, I won't spoil the ending for you.

I couldn't have said it better myself! Thanks again Doug G.!

UPDATE: As I've mentioned before I love getting comments and emails from you all regarding the blog, but this email was an especially pleasant surprise:

Hi, Tony... my name is David Dean. I've just discovered your blog through TV Squad, and it must have been fate for me to find it when the current page was up... because I wrote and directed that Hawaiian Punch cassette extravaganza, "Boxed In."

This was indeed a premium that you could get through Hawaiian Punch, produced by a small company I worked for called Teeman-Sleppin Enterprises. I edited a few music videos they produced (actually, they were commercials masquerading as music videos -- one was for Cap'n Crunch cereal and featured none other than Rick Derringer, another was for a strange fuzzy toy called Furrever Friends, and one was for a Skittles-like candy called Rascals, where they cast a three-man boy band, called them The Rascalords, and wondered why they couldn't get the thing on MTV), and they asked me if I could produce this twenty-minute or so audio tape that would attempt to -- I'm not kidding here -- make Punchy "hip." The idea was also to try and make the tape itself as much of a 360-degree sonic experience as possible, so if you were to wear headphones it was supposed to feel like you were right in the scene. This is why there are a lot of swirling sound effects, and radical left-right-and-center placement of sounds, and why I wrote it to be a "you are there" kind of format.

We had a cast of only about three or four actors doing all the parts; Punchy was voiced by a guy named Chris Phillips, who was (and still may be) Denis Leary's writing partner (if you look at Leary's old one-man shows, Chris is playing guitar behind him) and was the original signature voice on Cartoon Network. We had a great time working together, and, all in all, I'm pretty pleased with the writing and execution. We may not have made Punchy "hip," but I don't think the tape is dumb, either. (And yes, The Fabulous Fellini Brothers were a direct steal... note the fake Nino Rota music as accompaniment to their videogame...)

Anyway, thanks for the blast from the past. It does look like you have a great site, and I'm looking forward to exploring it now that I'm over the shock of seeing my work on its front page.

P.S. I'm currently the editor of the Travel Channel series "Samantha Brown: Passport to Latin America," airing Wednesday nights at 8:00 eastern and pacific. Last night our previous series, "Passport to Europe," won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in a Lifestyle Show, for an episode I cut. I'd love to make some kind of connection between Punchy and Samantha, but alas, I cannot.

Thanks David for the inside information on this fun album (and thanks for letting me quote you here)! Since you were nice enough to do that I even threw in your plug for free! :-D


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