How Paul Reubens Saved Pee-Wee's Playhouse From An Animated Fate
"Pee-wee's Playhouse" was an anomaly. It premiered a year after the surprise box office success of Tim Burton's "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," and, like "The Pee-wee Herman Show" before it, seemed to be strictly kids' stuff. But Paul Reubens' overgrown child act uniquely appealed to the inner brat in all of us. It wasn't like Looney Tunes, where artists snuck in adult-skewing references, nor was it a full-on, off-color parody of the kiddie show format that you'd find on "Saturday Night Live." It was honestly, disarmingly, good clean fun. Its target audience could enjoy it over a bowl of Frosted Flakes, while college students and beyond could enjoy it over a bowl of Frosted Flakes preceded by a bowl of ... something else.
A weekly half-hour dose of Pee-wee was bliss in 1986. I'd just started junior high, which is when your action figures are immediately consigned to the attic, so admitting to watching a kids' show on Saturday morning should've been a first-class ticket to Swirly-ville. But Pee-wee, in the words of the mid-'80s pop poet Huey Lewis, made it hip to be square. And Pee-wee, in the flesh on a zonked-out set populated by talking furniture that screamed when someone said the "secret word," was what made it cool.
So of course CBS, during the development of the series, tried to coax him into making the lamest version of "Pee-wee's Playhouse" possible.
The secret word was live-action
Paul Reubens wasn't the first comedian of his era to mine television nostalgia to strangely earnest effect. Andy Kaufman famously interviewed Howdy-Doody with nary a hint of condescension or snark. It was a magical moment, one that Reubens gleefully recreated every Saturday on "Pee-wee's Playhouse."
But CBS had other ideas prior to greenlighting the show. As Reubens told Rolling Stone in 2014:
"I'd had the stage show originally, so I was much more interested in doing something closer to that, something live-action. So when they suggested doing a cartoon, I said 'I'm not really interested in that; let's do a real kids' show.' I was a big Howdy-Doody freak growing up — I was actually on one show when I was a kid, in the audience — and was more interested in doing something like that. Howdy-Doody, Captain Kangaroo, a lot of the local kids' shows that were on a long time ago — those were the influences."
A Pee-wee Herman cartoon would've cut the audience down to grade schoolers and your garden variety swirly recipient. Worse, there'd be no Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis, no Phil Hartman as Captain Carl, no Natasha Lyonne as Opal and, for heaven's sake, no William "Blacula" Marshall as the King of Cartoons. Thank god Reubens hewed to his vision of "Captain Kangaroo" on mushrooms. He made the late 1980s splendidly weird.