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.
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