HOLLYWOOD – You are all lucky boys and girls, however old you are, because “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” has come back to TV.
As part of its Adult Swim franchise, the Cartoon Network earlier this month began airing the show’s original 45 episodes, which ran over five seasons of Saturday mornings on CBS from 1986 to 1991. That it runs at 11 p.m. is not especially child-friendly, except in households with lenient bedtime rules, so fire up the TiVo or the VCR if you have kids or you head to bed early yourself. (The show has been available on DVD since November 2004, but that is not at all the same sort of cultural moment.)
A winner of multiple Emmy Awards, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” is a pretend children’s show that became a real one, a fact that you can see as some kind of meta-event or just as a version of “Pinocchio.” It has some of the recombinant postmodern qualities but none of the jaded irony of its Adult Swim neighbors, many of which work by amplifying the creepy unintended subtexts of old cartoons.
But although some do find the “Playhouse” itself creepy – and so rife with hidden meaning that they write articles with titles like “The Playhouse of the Signifier,” “Pee-wee Herman: The Homosexual Subtext” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Pee-wee: Consumerism and Sexual Terror” – the show itself is a thing of pure celebration.
“I’ve been really careful to try to not dissect what I do, what I did, too much,” Paul Reubens said one afternoon in his publicist’s West Hollywood office.
The man who was and is Pee-wee is now 53 and a few pounds heavier but otherwise the off-duty image of his alter ego. He is soft-spoken where Pee-wee is explosive and self-deprecating where Pee-wee is, well, not self-deprecating.
“There are college dissertations on ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ Miss Yvonne and her raincoat, and what does it all mean, and reading things in that I really didn’t feel like I meant or was trying to do,” he said. “People writing about the underlying whatever in both the ‘Playhouse’ and the movies, and some of it, I go, ‘Well, that’s not hidden, it’s all right out on the table.’”
Like the punk and new-wave scenes that flourished around the time of Pee-wee’s ascension, the show speaks loudly to making the marginal the mainstream. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh contributed to the music, Cyndi Lauper sang the theme. Reubens calls “Playhouse,” among other things, “a celebration of nonconformity, being energetic and doing what you want.” It could only have been made by outsiders.
The budget for the show was unusually high, at least at first, and allowed for a lot of beautiful puppet and clay animation. The final season, which was completed but pulled after Reubens was famously arrested in a Sarasota, Fla., adult movie theater and charged with indecent exposure (a charge he denied but to which he pleaded no contest), seems to be made with a slightly cinched belt, and perhaps a hint of exhaustion, and an overreliance on filling time with old found footage.
Although the character of Pee-wee Herman has not been seen in public since a Minnie Pearl tribute in 1992, Reubens shows up regularly in small films and as a voice artist. He also recently appeared in a video for the Raconteurs.
It is widely believed that Reubens’ 1991 arrest killed Pee-wee forever, but Reubens is not done with him. He has two Pee-wee scripts finished.
“I never said it was over or I didn’t want to do it anymore,” Reubens said about the possibility of putting on the suit and bow tie again. “That’s something that’s been said by other people.”
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