Anybody who has been on the internet long enough will have some goofy image or meme that resonates with them and a group of friends. Something so absurd and silly that it just becomes a part of you, and a small meme along a group of friends. For me, it was Glunch.
Around 2019, I had shared a post on a my friend mavica’s discord from a tumblr called “VHS Dreams,” which featured a computer graphic with the word “GLUNCH” and some guy making a silly face. I was oddly fascinated by the image, as one of many pieces of ephemera folks discover off a random VHS tape.
With anything that I find and share to folks, I like to know the origins of where it came from. Even if it’s a nugget of trash knowledge. I figured it came from a game show due to the set, and the computer graphic pinpointed it to somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s. Since I tend to watch a bunch of mostly forgotten game shows, it didn’t take me long to find the show in question: WordPlay, a short-lived game show that aired on NBC daytime from December 1986 to September 1987.
Produced by Fiedler-Berlin Productions, Rick Ambrose Television, and Scotti Brothers-Syd Vinnedge Productions, WordPlay was a game show based off the classic Fictionary parlor bluffing game. If you’re familiar with the board game Balderdash, it’s similar to that.
The rules of WordPlay went a little something like this: Two contestants, one often a returning champion, compete. A grid of obscure English language words are shown. A contestant picks a word, of which three celebrities will each give a definition of what the word might be described as, with one of them always having the correct dictionary definition. If the contestant picks the celebrity with the right definition, they get cash, otherwise their opponent gets to pick from the remaining two celebrities to steal.
The words are put on a grid to encourage players to pick connecting words, as correctly guessing a word that’s connected to a previous word that’s already scored earns a combined amount of money. Like in the example above, the contestant would get $100 for the word they just correctly guessed, and it’s connected to three previous words, which were at $25, $50, and $150 respectively. That would earn the player $325 for that word. Words started at $25-75 per word, then to $50-150, and finally to $100-300 for the final two words.
Highest score wins and goes to the bonus round, where the player must go from one side of a game board of 24 squares to another, guessing two short definitions of a common word. Correct answer gets $100 each, and successfully getting from one side of the board to another won a cash jackpot that started at $5,000 and increased $2,500 each day until it was won.
WordPlay was a perfectly serviceable game show. It aired right after Super Password at 12:30PM, which meant it was butting heads against the immensely popular The Young and The Restless on CBS, but it held out enough to last several months. WordPlay would be Tom Kennedy’s last game show he would host, after a nearly 30 year history of hosting TV game shows. The only other interesting factoids about WordPlay is Mouseketeer Lonnie Burr was a contestant, and there was a brief one week stint where actor Jamie Farr from M*A*S*H was guest hosting due to Tom Kennedy falling ill.
The celebrity panel would go from your run-of-the-mill B-listers who’d often do other game shows like Night Court’s Richard Moll and The Golden Girls’ Betty White, to celebrities that rarely did game shows like Leslie Nielsen, Corey Feldman and several others. A nice change of pace from seeing the usual suspects on these kind of shows.
So, back to Glunch. I figured out it was WordPlay due to the grid-light set the show used, but who the celebrity was I had no clue. I opted to search YouTube and other sources for 1987-era commercials, just to see if I could find the origin of the image. Eventually I did back in 2021: from a promo around early January 1987 on NBC daytime. In a promo for WordPlay, actor Stephen Furst from the TV drama St. Elsewhere was giving a description of the word “Glunch.”
I’d post that clip here, but unfortunately the place I found it all those years ago deleted their videos, and there’s no backup of it anywhere. I imagine they kept getting hounded by obsessed nerds demanding for episodes TV shows from specific network affiliates and just got tired of them. As someone who has her own VHS vault channel on YouTube and has gotten similar requests, I can’t blame them. (If you have the specific promo in question, please drop me a line and I’ll post it here accordingly.)
So now we know the origin. A promo for the forgotten NBC daytime game show WordPlay, from January 1987, with Stephen Furst on the panel. Now the challenge was finding the episode in question. The show lasted less than a year, and it wasn’t reran on common game show blocks on the The Family Channel, USA Network, or even Game Show Network. Then around 2017, Buzzr, a notable game show channel started airing WordPlay. They aired the pilot episode, featuring Peter Tomarken as host, and the first three episodes of the series… then immediately yanked it off the schedule. Turns out Fremantle, the parent company of Buzzr, didn’t fully own the rights to the show. So seeing Glunch in glorious high quality was off the table yet again.
Thankfully they’re not the only place to watch old game shows. There’s a myriad of YouTube channels these days, either officially owned by the production companies or ran by rabid game show fans. One of them is “The Game Show Vault,” a channel dedicated to obscure episodes of forgotten game shows, often in studio master quality. It was previously named after game show host Wink Martindale, but it was strictly a branding thing, he had very little involvement with the channel itself. After Martindale passed away in late 2025, the channel went through a brief rebranding as “Wink Martindale Games” before rebranding under its current name. (The older videos still feature Wink in the thumbnails, though.)
Episodes of WordPlay started appearing on the Game Show Vault, some in studio master quality, but also in lower-quality VHS recordings. On March 9, the channel posted episode 12, which originally aired on January 14, 1987. Featured on the panel are Ned Beatty (longtime actor in several different roles), Roseanne Barr (before her big ABC sitcom the following year), and Stephen Furst (from the aforementioned St. Elsewhere). They show the board of words they’re playing for today, and I recognized a certain word.
Folks, I found Glunch.
Of course, since the image and the previously mentioned promo mentions the word being described, I get to finally see the full clip of Glunch in its entirety. I shared the video of the episode above if you wanna watch it for yourself, but if you don’t, here’s what the descriptions were, and what the right answer was. (Spoilers for a 39-year-old game show below.)
For the record, the descriptions each celebrity gave was: (correct answer in bold)
- Roseanne: A Frown
- Stephen: A Deadbeat
- Ned: Eat Too Fast
Now I can live in comfort knowing the origins of Glunch, even though I probably could’ve just looked up the damn word on the web on dictionary.com back in 2019. But that’s not really as fun, is it?
I hope you don’t mind me doing some dumb pop culture indulgence that only really matters to me and a few friends. I figure there’s some people who might find this interesting, or at least amusing. Hell, you probably have a similar story of trying to find the origin of a meme or an image. I surely can’t be the only one who does that…
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