“The Simpsons,” “Family Guy,” and “SpongeBob SquarePants,” with their breakneck pacing and throwaway absurdities, owe Reubens a debt, too.Īt the center of this cheerful frenzy was Pee-wee: pale of face, red of bow tie, and dressed in a suit several sizes too small. The series’ archness drove its rat-a-tat-tat rhythms-Hi, Chairry! Hi, Conky! Let’s dance! Tito, what’s shaking? How ’bout a cartoon?-which either mimicked or induced short attention spans. Nearly every corner of the Playhouse was animate: Mr. There was also Pterri (a pterodactyl), Conky (a robot), Randy (a pugnacious red-headed marionette), and Globey (a globe). Green Jeans, Bunny Rabbit-Pee-wee had dozens upon dozens: the aforementioned Tito, Miss Yvonne (“the most beautiful woman in Puppetland”), Captain Carl, Cowboy Curtis, the King of Cartoons, Reba the Mail Lady, Jambi the genie. The show was aware of its own tropes, a pioneer of TV irony alongside “Late Night with David Letterman.” Where Captain Kangaroo had a handful of sidekicks-Mr. Did kids watch it, too? They must have, since CBS kept it on for five seasons with all due respect to Reubens and Pee-wee, there couldn’t have been that many young adults willing to watch TV at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was my and many of my cohort’s first acquaintanceship with so-called appointment television. The medium, in those days, was still mostly in thrall to mediocrity. I was in my late twenties when Reubens’s series began its Saturday-morning run. Just as “Barbie” (in tandem with “ Oppenheimer,” its marketplace Ken) appears to have reawakened a love of moviegoing, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” was a reminder in its day that TV could be worth watching-at least, it was if you were me. I should also note that the series’ proudly ersatz vibe emerged not in a vacuum but rather from a contemporary atmosphere thick with retro New Wave bands, Kenny Scharf paintings, Pyramid Club drag shows, and zines full of clip art. Pee-wee’s lifeguard pal Tito, evincing no personality beyond shirtlessness, has a dollop of Ken in him-the circle of kitsch, if you will. Barbie predated Pee-wee Herman by several decades, and the Dreamhouse aesthetic was certainly part of the plastic postwar clutter that inspired the Playhouse. Influence can be a two-way street, however. The show, which aired on CBS between 19, was funny, knowing, refreshing. Back in the nineteen-eighties, when postmodernism was still fresh and dewy, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” staked out similar territory: a self-conscious riff on mid-century children’s television and, simultaneously, a relatively sincere reboot of the genre. With a Pepto-Bismol-meets-aspartame production design and an arch, winking take on both Barbieland and the so-called real world, the film is at once a sendup and an earnest tribute to (not to mention a two-hour commercial for) a sixty-four-year-old toy. Think of Gerwig’s Barbie as Pee-wee Herman’s great-niece. There is a debt, conscious or not, small but true. Greta Gerwig’s spectacularly popular film wouldn’t exist in quite the same way, I don’t think, without the example of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” the ostensible kids’ show that Reubens created and starred in as his signature character and seeming alter ego, Pee-wee Herman. I hope Paul Reubens was well enough to see “Barbie” before he died this past Sunday, at the age of seventy, following six years of privately battling cancer.
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