‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ Was Always More Than a Kids’ Show

Pee-wee Herman wasn’t originally meant for kids. So when Paul Reubens did make a Saturday-morning TV show for them, his signature character came in a package shaped by underground art, punk rock and improv comedy.

Reubens, who died Sunday at age 70, launched “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” on CBS in September, 1986. In a cartoon block populated by “The Berenstain Bears” and “Muppet Babies,” the live-action show was an eruption of creative anarchy. When Pee-wee urged children at home to “scream real loud” every time someone on the show said a secret word, it was like a mission statement.

As MTV was to cable and “The Simpsons” would soon be to prime-time, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was a disrupter of the TV domain for kids. The show’s psychedelic absurdism also attracted an audience of teens, college students and savvy parents of the show’s target viewers. With his wild remix of the kids’ shows that he grew up with as a baby boomer, Reubens put a stamp on Generation X.

“This was an inclusive show for all the rejects and weirdos. I think that’s written all over the set,” said Gary Panter, an artist who helped oversee the design of the show.

Everything in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” had a handmade look that mixed cute with chaotic. Many of Pee-wee’s co-stars were anthropomorphic objects. Chairry, a plush blue lounger, had big eyes and arms that hugged or tickled whoever sat down. Conky the robot talked like a hip-hop DJ scratching a record. Pee-wee had a booth for his “picture-phone” that basically predicted Zoom calls. Various nooks, from the interior of his refrigerator to the mousehole in his floorboards, revealed creatures animated with stop-motion.

Reubens introduced Pee-wee Herman in the late 1970s when the actor was a member of Los Angeles improv comedy troupe the Groundlings, a talent pipeline for “Saturday Night Live.” Pee-wee, who paired an impish attitude and adult innuendo with his bow tie and barking laugh, scored on David Letterman’s late-night show and a 1981 HBO special. Next came a 1985 feature film directed by Tim Burton, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” which turned into a surprise hit. 

Eager to leverage the popularity of the Pee-wee movie, CBS gave Reubens carte blanche to create a show for children. The network saw an opportunity to inject some relevance into the “Saturday-morning ghetto,” as CBS executive Judy Price described the perception of kids’ programming at the time.

Pee-wee is widely remembered as a sort of one-man show for Reubens, but behind him was a group of artists, comedy writers and actors who helped reshape a landscape then dominated by merchandising vehicles like “The Smurfs.” 

Reubens collaborated with other Groundlings who first helped him form the world of Pee-wee. They included future “SNL” star Phil Hartman (who appeared as an old salt named Captain Carl), John Paragon (as the green-faced genie Jambi) and Lynne Marie Stewart (as the coiffed Miss Yvonne). Other soon-to-be-famous denizens of the Playhouse included Laurence Fishburne (as Cowboy Curtis) and S. Epatha Merkerson (as Reba the Mail Lady). Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh contributed music. 

To build the Playhouse and populate it with nonhuman characters, Reubens recruited artists who had more edge than experience. 

Wayne White was a struggling but prolific artist who had been putting on “punk-rock puppet shows” at drunken parties and on the streets of New York. That work, like Pee-wee’s, was a riff on the old kids’ shows with colorful hosts that were common to local TV markets in the 1960s. White joined Panter and Ric Heitzman on the “Playhouse” staff with other hires from the New York art scene. 

“We were all a bunch of downtown artists,” White recalled. “We weren’t tied down by any television tropes and Paul wasn’t either.”

In the hectic run-up to the debut season of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” the artists set up shop at Broadcast Arts, a hot production company known for animating the MTV logo.

White contributed character designs too. He made his first-ever marionette for Randy, a pug-nosed kid who caused trouble around the Playhouse. Randy’s look, including a crew cut and high-tops, was inspired by bullies of White’s youth.  

“Those were the guys that used to beat me up,” said White, who also provided the voice of Randy, Dirty Dog and other characters.

He recalled Reubens as a calm presence behind the scenes, who paid for overruns in the show’s production budget from his own pocket and rallied behind wild ideas—like the grotesque look that White devised for Floory, a section of Pee-wee’s floor that reared up and talked. 

Still, the “perfect boss” had his limits. When his collaborators yammered on too much about their ideas and anecdotes, Reubens would respond with a deadpan, “Huh, I love that story.” That line (also used by Pee-wee) translated as ”shut the f— up,” White recalled. 

When “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” became a commercial and Emmy-winning hit, the show moved to Los Angeles for its remaining seasons. The misfit production team suddenly had clout and the show sprawled out with a bigger staff and sound stage.

Unlike many programs made for children today, there was no formal educational curriculum behind “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”  

“Oh, we didn’t think about kids for one minute. We were doing that all for our own entertainment,” White said. 

But the show’s star was weighing the messages he was sending to his youngest viewers, even if they were unspoken.

“I never set out to do a big educational show,” Reubens said to an interviewer in 1990. “We’re trying to expose children to as much creativity as we can muster in a half-hour, to be entertaining and to transmit some subliminal messages like ‘nonconformity isn’t bad.’” 

Reubens produced 45 episodes of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” plus a Christmas special. As he wrapped up the fifth and final season, which finished airing in the fall of 1990, Reubens told his collaborators that he planned to retire Pee-wee and experiment with other roles and projects. 

But then Reubens got busted for indecent exposure at an adult movie theater in 1991. The scandal effectively froze the actor in time, making it hard for the public to see him as anything other than Pee-wee. 

People who grew up with “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” may first recall its zanier features, like the host signing off by catapulting out of the Playhouse on a scooter. But the show’s legacy also rests on the aesthetic it brought to Saturday mornings. 

“We infused it with as much art history and pop art that we could,” Panter said. “The giant can opener. Exploding shapes. Sequined walls. Hybrid characters.”

Following other hotbeds such as MTV and “SNL,” “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was “another attempt to be this experimental thing, and we got pretty far with it,” Panter added. “It looks like a museum.”