In the end this turned out to be a wild goose chase, I'm afraid. But I just wanted to report my results here for the benefit of anyone who comes a-searchin this way in the future.

The plong script provides a glimpse of a possibility, to be sure, but I don't possess the skill to reverse-engineer the plong script into a script that creates a box with a header, text and an image, where the text flows around the image.

The frustrating thing is I suspect there IS a way to do it, but since the author of the SWF::Builder package chose not to document it, and since the perl community as a whole seems more tolerant of those who publish inadequately documented work than it is of those who say "better documentation, please!", I'm going to have to give up.

And that means goodbye to Bedford Falls and ZuZu's petals and all that. Welcome to Potterville.