Good Mourning, Pee Wee
Belated thoughts on Paul Reubens' death, from a lifelong fan of Pee Wee
Paul Reubens died one week ago, after a six-year battle with cancer he never disclosed to his fans. “Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” read a statement written by Reubens and released posthumously. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”
This one hit me pretty hard, as far as celebrity deaths go. I can’t think of a pop culture figure that was more influential over my early-to-mid childhood imagination and sensibility than Reubens’ character Pee Wee and the characters and world that surrounded him– maybe Jim Henson or The Pleasant Company, original manufacturer of American Girl dolls– maybe.
This post took me forever, not because I was too sad to write, but because I couldn’t stop watching old clips of Pee Wee, which led to buying and downloading every existing episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse on Amazon Prime, which led to me marathoning the show until I could feel it permeating my brain like sugar cereal on tooth enamel, which led to me watching Pee Wee’s Big Adventure twice in one night, which led to me ordering a physical DVD copy of every episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse plus the Christmas special (sold separately) just in case Amazon does what streamers do and pulls the content.
Pee Wee Herman still whips ass. I love Pee Wee’s Big Adventure — everybody does— but today I want to deep dive into Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
Pee Wee’s Playhouse was Saturday Morning event television in our house when I was a kid. It was my entire personality for a few years. Maybe it still is.
My younger brother and I would watch it with our dad, who laughed at it just as hard if not harder than the kids, often at jokes that we were too young to understand. We would abide by the secret word, screaming real loud just as Pee Wee instructed, even after the show’s end credits rolled. We would emulate the crafts Pee Wee would make, like puppets with holes at the hips, so that you could make them look like your fingers were their legs. For years, I would turn my ice cream into “ice cream soup,” which was just ice cream stirred around until it was smooth. We tried to make a “tin foil ball,” hoping that one day, ours would be the size of a gigantic boulder, like Pee Wee’s (we gave up on that one in a matter of days, probably to the relief of our parents.) I even could get down with El Hombre, a cartoon that was entirely in middle school-level Spanish with no subtitles.
My cousins and I memorized the choreography of the intro for Penny, a claymation little girl with pennies for eyes who acted out rambling, barely-sensical stories narrated by a real little girl’s voice. I loved Jambi, the flamboyant disembodied genie head who granted Pee Wee one wish per day. I was dazzled by Miss Yvonne, Pee Wee’s glamorous and flirtatious neighbor. I hated Randy, the snotty marionette puppet who Pee Wee also hates. I wanted to live in the Playhouse. I wanted a flying scooter and a helmet with wacky acid-trip molding affixed to it. I wanted an ant farm like Pee Wee. My brother got one. It was boring and all of the ants died.
Real life was frustratingly dull compared to the vibrant, playful, slightly naughty Puppetland.
Watching Pee Wee’s Playhouse again, I was struck by how gay the show is. Jambi was a flamboyant male genie with a face full of glamorous makeup. Mrs. Rene and Miss Yvonne’s campy, over-the-top hair, makeup, and wardrobe would be at home on a Ru Paul’s Drag Race runway today. Pee Wee’s sexuality is never defined beyond his fascination with dramatic forms of femininity and masculinity– from Ricardo and Tito the hunky, scantily clad lifeguards who allegedly keep Pee Wee’s swimming pool safe (we never actually see the swimming pool) to Grace Jones to Little Richard to Lawrence Fishburn as the winsome geri-curled Cowboy Curtis to Jimmy Smits as the sexy robot repairman who flirts with Miss Yvonne to Sandra freakin’ Bernhard. Pee Wee, and by extension all of Puppetland was, at its center, fascinated with gender expression and was in conversation with the guardrails the entertainment industry of midcentury America erected around them.
I was a little Catholic in a small town in the middle of nowhere and I never would have been introduced to the fun and magic of queer culture without Paul Reubens. I had no idea what I was watching, but I knew I liked it. (At the time, some conservative voices protested the subversiveness of Playhouse, but despite it helping me develop an appreciation for aspects of queer culture, it did not successfully make me gay, even though everybody in Puppetland was horny for my hero Miss Yvonne.)
There’s something not only subversive, but punk about the audacity of Playhouse. It hit airwaves in 1986, a year that saw 2900 American deaths from AIDS. President Reagan hadn’t even addressed the crisis when Playhouse premiered; that wouldn’t happen until 1987, when what had once been known as “gay plague” was a full-on epidemic and 23,000 people had cumulatively died of the disease. There’s something defiant about the mere existence of a children’s show with a fascination with gender play and queer culture plopped down right in the gooey center of Saturday morning cartoons at the height of America’s cruel refusal to acknowledge a public health emergency impacting the gay community.
Playhouse also exposed kids to art they normally wouldn’t encounter– involved in the show’s maximalist midcentury acid trip design and feel were surrealist artist and puppeteer Wayne White, animator Nick Park, animator Craig Bartlett, and cartoonish Gary Panter, among many others. Park would later go on to create Wallace and Gromit; Bartlett would go on to create Hey, Arnold!
Beyond its subversive cultural context and artistic incubator of a production team, Pee Wee’s Playhouse was the rare children’s show that acknowledged that children were full-spectrum human beings. It didn’t talk down to them or pretend they weren’t capable of kid-sized versions of ugly adult feelings–jealousy, annoyance, manipulation, anger, frustration– or that having those feelings represented moments that needed to be corrected. Pee Wee and other denizens of Puppetland were sometimes visibly annoyed with each other– like Phil Hartman’s Captain Carl, the nosy Mrs. Steve (a prototype of what would later be known as a “Karen”). Not every interaction contained one party who was doing the “right” thing and one who was doing the “wrong” thing, as in many children’s shows. Sometimes– especially when the sassy marionette puppet Randy was around– both characters were annoyed with each other, because both characters were being assholes– because children can be assholes.
Good kids’ TV shows are being made today– probably more than was being made when I was mainlining extended Hasbro toy commercials at the tail end of the Reagan years– but the specific niche that Pee Wee’s Playhouse filled remains empty. One parent friend offered the suggestion that somebody named “Blippi” is the new Pee Wee. I was unfamiliar with this “Blippi” character, and so I watched some videos.
Sorry folks, but Blippi sucks ass. He took all of the wrong lessons from Pee Wee. Paul Reubens trained at Groundlings; Blippi is a creature of YouTube. Pee Wee would hate Blippi. Blippi would be an enemy of Puppetland. I will take no questions and explain no further.
I’ve waxed poetic about my love for the cartoon Bluey, one of the greatest shows for kids– of for any audience– currently on air. However, the weirdest character in Bluey is Bluey’s dad, and Bluey’s dad would be the least weird person in Puppetland. The only core cast member of Bluey who I could see fitting into the world of Pee Wee’s Playhouse is Muffin, Bluey’s bratty cousin, but only in old lady drag as Granny Gladys.
Sponge Bob Squarepants has a little Pee Wee’s Playhouse energy to it, I suppose, but as a cartoon, it’s not as imagination-stimulating as Playhouse– in fact, SpongeBob looks like it might have taken some aesthetic cues from the Playhouse set design. No kid with their wits about them believes that they could possibly go live in a pineapple under the sea. Lots of kids thought they could do things they did in the Playhouse, like walk on the walls and ceilings with suction cup shoes and fly through the American southwest on a scooter. (Right? Not just me?)
Luckily, old episodes of Pee Wee’s Playhouse still hold up. Maybe one day when my daughter is old enough to pronounce “Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho,” we’ll be able to enjoy its unbridled zaniness together.
Pee Wee’s Playhouse meant so much to kids around the world– the weird ones, the sassy ones, the know-it-alls, the budding artists, the wacky ones– and the adults who will always feel sad when they hear the end credits. I hope that, before he passed, Reubens understood that.
Amen.