The world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was a realm of kinetic fantasies. A house where your imaginary friends could live. Claymation dinosaurs lived in the walls. All the furniture was alive and chatty. There was an in-house band of marionette beatniks. The exterior of the Playhouse, a lush and ornamented thicket aching to be explored, stood next to sphinxes with snowmen.
In fact, Pee-wee’s Playhouse was a converted loft under a clothing sweatshop on Bleecker and Broadway, around the corner from CBGB. The show, which aired Saturday mornings on CBS, clearly drew on the surrounding scenes. Sets and props were designed by underground cartoonist Gary Panter. Music was composed by Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh with an uncredited Cyndi Lauper on vocals. Young Rob Zombie and John Singleton were PAs. CBS gave Peewee Herman creator Paul Reubens almost unlimited creative control, albeit not a TV studio. The result was a unique children’s show that sought not so much to subvert as to awaken a greater appetite for outside art and quirks. It would echo for generations.
In Reagan’s reactionary America, politics and pop culture focused on a particular vision: to strive for a neat 1950s style, as opposed to the perceived degeneracy and decadence of the decades after, as if to say that the root of Western decline was a lack of heteronormative views. single earners and lawn care. It was an easy target for underground and emerging artists, who remembered a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Sexual Revolution era as hardly idyllic. This tone became the standard for most American countercultures. John Waters, David Lynch, The B-52’s, The Cramps, the Church of the SubGenius and Tim Burton all explored these themes. Rubens was no different. His Americana was a blur of Florida tourist traps, B-movies and outsiders. Rejected from SNLhe and comedy collaborators Phil Hartman and John Paragon created a drunken show in LA with Soupy Sales and Captain Kangaroo.
With a doll face and too much caffeine, Pee-wee Herman would transcend the Saturday morning clowns and captains in whose image he was created. After performances by Letterman and Tim Burton’s feature film debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the giggly male child became a phenomenon, a prism for New Wave art and a part of it. Counterculture clung Pee-wee’s Playhouse like a giant ball of foil, welcoming all the camp, kitsch, and junk that motivated Reubens. Even Herman himself has a dragging edge, living in a toy box while dressed like an accountant, nervous like a boy forced to put on his Sunday suit for school pictures.
It was a collage of pink flamingos, pogo punk, puppetry, public domain cartoons, singing, dancing and screaming. The most curious about PlayhouseThe success of ‘s and its menagerie of material was how little it needed to be translated for young audiences. Pee-wee’s Playhouse believed that children had the ability to understand art if given the chance. With only minor adaptations of the adult-oriented show that ran on the Sunset Strip, millions of kids tuned in weekly to marvel at this free-form dream in action.
TV welcomed craziness for many years to come. You can use crayons to draw Pee-wee’s lines The Simpsons, Animations, Twin Peaks, Get a life, Mr Toon, Spongebob Squarepants, Adventure TimeMTV and Adult Swim (where Pee-wee’s Playhouse would eventually be rebroadcast). Each built on Pee-wee‘s legacy of counterculture irreverence and adoration with new genre-bending, medium-mixing, taste-busting, brain-melting, no-brow-highs. Traditions of very smart people in love with pulp and garbage. But it didn’t last forever.
Photo: John Kisch Archive/Getty Images
These days, commercial entertainment all too often feels like a sterilized lab. Netflix brags about its internal investor stats and how it televises around user trends. Disney – who should never to be trusted as an arbiter of cool – has assimilated the lion’s share of entertainment in his bloated Magic Kingdom. I’m not going to be precious and pretend Viacom or Warner Bros. were altruistic. Green lighting Space Ghost or Liquid television (also produced by Playhouse‘s Prudence Fenton) was almost certainly as profit-oriented as anything else. At the very least, the environment exposed an artistic possibility that new generations clearly crave, culture can serve raw creative impulses rather than a 20-year plan.
Digital platforms and streaming libraries are mirages of cultural democracy at best. Unseen algorithms serve themselves. Streamers don’t even archive their own original material anymore. But when they go off-road, teens wear TikTok trends that resemble Jheronimus Bosch triptychs. The kids got the stuff. They should be entrusted to interpret all the pomp and circumstance of risk, past, present and future, without it having to be viral or an internet easter egg. Stranger things.
The culture wars, fixated on pop culture but special cartoons are exhausting. Which is not to say that good, weird art is apolitical, but to draw a door with your finger and walk through it. Transcend routines that thrive on bad faith and online feedback loops. Be loud, serious and beyond.
Playhouse was the reverse of the TV landscape and hyperaware of the political atmosphere. Herman, cocky and sometimes narcissistic, left plenty of room for a lesson of the week on kindness and acceptance, but he was hardly a Punky Brewster. A grown man learning to share his toys from a real child is in itself a divorce from reality. The strange undertone of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the fact that black artists like Laurence Fishburne and Gilbert Lewis played cowboys and kings, that there was an inviting space where all this could happen – all on purpose. You can only imagine what the world’s most annoying people would say if a new Christmas special came out a Christmas carol sung by kd lang.
When I spoke to Reubens beforehand in 2015 Pee-wee’s big holidaydirected by Wonder Showzenby John Lee, he emphasized how happy he was to be surrounded by creative people. It’s no mystery how he magnetized the most marginal and strangest of his time. What should have been a 15 minute conversation went on for hours as he kept asking about my own niche interests (pinball, monster movies, the fact that my dad makes teddy bears).
Even then, Reubens had many doubts. Questioning and wondering why people would continue to adore a nearly 40-year-old children’s show, questioning the persistence if not the existence of its fan base. I assured him that his fans were very real, very passionate and the influence of his genius was obvious. He was very sensitive to receiving love, and I’m glad he received so much of it. The best wish we can fulfill in the future is to provide a platform and appetite for the next big, unhinged Pee-wee Herman. May they not be denied any marionette and potpourri needed to fly.