I knew there was a reason that I didn't feel good about the code. (I have another module in the middle, as my debugging serializer calls that, and not SOAP::Serializer directly, but I didn't think you wanted 15k of code to explain the basic concept).

My main serializer had to manipulate @ISA directly, rather than using 'use base'.

package Physics::Solar::VSO::Serializer;

use SOAP::Lite;
use vars qw(@ISA);

@ISA = ('SOAP::Serializer');

...

package Physics::Solar::VSO::Deserializer;

use SOAP::Lite;
use vars qw(@ISA);

@ISA = ('SOAP::Deserializer');

....
[download]