Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  After gaining approval for music (which incorporates the theme and animal sounds from Martin Denny’s cover of Les Baxter’s “Quiet Village”), Mothersbaugh went to work on the final version. Trumbo and Fenton worked with the animators from Broadcast Arts to complete their portion of the opening titles.

  Kent Burton animates Pee-wee entering his playhouse [© Richard Kent Burton]

  The long test approval process gave way to an easy shoot for the final sequence. “When we went to shoot it, I don’t think we really had to do any re-shoots,” Fenton says. “We had the camera move right and knew exactly what was going on. The only hard thing was that the animators stayed up for twenty hours to finish it.”

  Kent Burton was the lead animator on the first portion of the animated sequence. The first image the viewer sees, the sign for the playhouse, was designed by John DeFazio, while Barbara Gallucci, formerly of Industrial Light and Magic, constructed most of the clay forest. To make the trees drop during the first portion, Burton rigged the trees to wires. This enabled him to suspend the trees in the air while he moved them gradually frame-by-frame to create the illusion of falling.

  [© Richard Kent Burton]

  The second portion of the opening sequence was animated by Dave Daniels, and this one posed more technical challenges. Not only were there more animals, with white rabbits and squirrels moving through the landscape, but also, as the playhouse came into frame, more animation was required to establish it as a place where — as the lyrics to the theme song state — anything could happen. Outside the playhouse, deer swayed to music, a penguin revolved on the roof, and an inflatable toy created ripples in Pee-wee’s above-ground pool. To animate these additional elements in a timely manner, more members of the animation team were brought in to assist Daniels. Kent Burton contributed the blue-screen birds, and Trumbo added the digital composite shot of the live-action Pee-wee giggling before the transition into the third segment.

  In the final segment, animated by both Burton and Daniels, the camera pans around the playhouse, emphasizing the animated windmill, the snowman, the bucking bronco, and the Sphinx head on the house’s exterior. According to Trumbo, the model for the playhouse was between 20 and 30 feet in diameter and took up the majority of the studio where the sequence was animated. Sharp observers will notice a few differences between the model and the actual live-action set, like the absence of greenery around the flowers.

  The multitude of moving objects posed some unique problems for Burton. “We never used frame grabbers [when animating] like everyone uses nowadays, where you can record every frame and flip back and forth to see what you just did,” Burton recalls. “We had to remember everything.” In fact, Burton’s memory failed him when animating one prominent element on the playhouse model.

  “If you look at the barber pole, you’ll see it switches directions constantly,” Burton says. “I don’t mind because it was such a wacky show, but that was actually me forgetting which way I was turning it.”

  The animated model for Pee-wee Herman, designed by Jeff Raum, also posed an animating problem. After the model walked across the playhouse deck, camera operator J. Reid Paul pushed in with his camera. Because of the limited space between the camera and the playhouse model, Burton had to animate the last few frames blindly, relying on faith that the finished product would be acceptable. Luckily, it was.

  After animation was completed, Trumbo made his way back to Reubens’ dressing room for approval. “By the time we animated the sequence, it was August,” Trumbo says. “The show was supposed to air in September. We were really down to the wire on this thing. I brought the completed sequence down to the set. [Paul] had an old-fashioned Moviola projector set up on his desk so he could look at dailies from each day’s shoot. We ran the sequence on that. He gave his final approval and said, ‘I bet you thought I’d never approve that,’ referring to the endless hell of revisions. My reaction was ‘Well, the show has to go on in two weeks, you would have to approve it eventually.’”

  If the revision process for the animation and music was hell, the process of writing the lyrics was absolute heaven. The show’s memorable theme song, sung with pitch-perfect pop perfection by Cyndi Lauper, was written from soup to nuts in less than a day.

  George McGrath, who cowrote the lyrics with Reubens, remembers his first meeting to discuss the song.

  “One day on the set, Paul asked me to come into his dressing room,” he says. “He said he wanted the theme song to have an old-style razzmatazz feeling. He may have mentioned that he wanted the person singing to sound like Betty Boop. He went on to sing the first line in a raspy voice with jazz hands and wiggling hips. He said ideally the lyrics would mention all of the puppets.”

  After that day’s shooting, McGrath went back to his hotel room and wrote the first draft of the lyrics on a sheet of legal paper. Barring a few minor changes that were made at a later time, the show’s memorable theme song was complete.

  The handwritten first draft of the Playhouse theme song [© George McGrath]

  The next day, McGrath showed Reubens the lyrics he had written. Reubens liked it and the two sang the lyrics together into a tape recorder. The tape was sent to Mothersbaugh, who composed and then submitted a sample track that closely resembled the tape he’d received. “We were both a little surprised when his track came back and it was the same tune we sang,” McGrath says. “I think we thought he was going to make a new tune and just use our tune as a guide to the flavor Paul was looking for.”

  Reubens asked Cyndi Lauper to sing the lyrics in a style that had become her signature after the success of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” However, to Reubens’ surprise and disappointment, Lauper declined the offer. Instead, she suggested Reubens use one of her backup singers, Ellen Shaw. “Cyndi wanted to be taken more seriously as a singer,” McGrath says. “She was transitioning from her ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ image to her ‘True Colors’ image.”

  The theme song was recorded at CBS on 57th Street. Lauper came to the recording session with hopes of being able to coach Shaw into singing in Lauper’s style. According to McGrath, after several attempts, it was apparent that the backup singer was having difficulty reproducing Cyndi’s inimitable style. Paul convinced Lauper to record the track for him as a personal favor, and he agreed to credit Shaw as the vocalist.

  The final product clocked in at two-and-a-half minutes, almost double the average run time for television theme songs. For their efforts, Trumbo and Fenton earned Daytime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Achievement and Title Design in 1987. The sequence even impressed Steve Oakes, who remains deeply proud of it to this day.

  “You never get tired of looking at that opening,” he says.

  Showtime

  Pee-wee’s Playhouse was scheduled to debut on CBS as part of a brand-new Saturday morning lineup at 10 a.m. on September 13, 1986. Recognizing that the program might stand out like a sore thumb in comparison to the rest of the shows broadcast on the network, Michael Chase Walker designed a schedule on the premise that Playhouse would be successful and that children would stick around to watch Teen Wolf and Galaxy High School, two new programs that had an edgy animation style and sensibility. It was a risky strategy, but one that CBS was willing to try.

  “They were so in the ratings gutter that Judy Price basically gave me a free hand,” Walker explains.

  Even with a new lineup, CBS faced a serious challenge in attracting viewers to Playhouse, mostly because the advertising opportunities were very limited. It couldn’t broadcast commercials on rival networks and CBS’s own primetime lineup didn’t allow for any opportunities to advertise their Saturday morning shows, as the primetime demographic didn’t include young children or even their parents. Interestingly, Walker suggested advertising the children’s television schedule in AMC movie theaters, a now-standard practice that was unheard of in the mid-’80s. Instead, the network decided to trust the mantra
that “if you build it, they will come.”

  Playhouse’s first airing was the ratings equivalent to a tree falling in the forest. “I had this spectacular, really creative, dynamic Saturday morning lineup, but nobody to show it to,” Walker says. CBS remained in third place, trailing behind NBC’s The Smurfs and ABC’s The Real Ghostbusters.

  Walker bore the brunt of the heat at the network, which caused minor tension between him and his bosses.

  “I had gone from being this hotshot genius of Saturday morning to this pariah,” he recalls. “It was clear my days were numbered. I was being called on the carpet constantly for having my lineup fail so disastrously.”

  Under increased stress and disappointed by the ratings, Walker resigned from the network only weeks into the new season.

  However, as tensions were rising at the network, the tide was starting to turn in Pee-wee’s favor. An onslaught of positive press and word of mouth began to bring more adults to Saturday morning television. Although adults were not the target audience, and were considered worthless viewers as far as the advertisers were concerned, they were bringing their children, nieces, and nephews to the show. Within weeks, the show started climbing in the ratings, ultimately surpassing The Smurfs before the first season concluded.

  Michael Chase Walker remembers Playhouse’s slow ascent to the top of the ratings chart as a primary reason why he left. But Judy Price has no recollection of the network being unhappy with the show in its early days.

  “I don’t recall, and can’t really believe, that Michael was called on the carpet for any ratings deficiency,” she says. “It’s not uncommon for a show to start off low and build from there. We all wish for a blockbuster, but that’s the exception, not the rule. Few shows ever explode out of the gate. Ratings or not, a show that creates buzz like Pee-wee’s Playhouse did is worth its weight in gold. It was the hippest show on the air.”

  Within weeks of the show’s debut, CBS was being heralded in the media as a frontrunner in producing innovative children’s entertainment. Other television networks would have to alter their programming to compete or risk being left in CBS’s dust.

  “My goal was never to mount a Saturday morning revolution,” Price says. “I wish I could say I was that much of a visionary. The goal was to try and find something that was new and exciting. CBS needed a show to breathe fresh air into what had become a very controlled Saturday morning environment.”

  The success Reubens had achieved with Big Adventure simply multiplied when Playhouse hit the air. The network requested two more seasons of the new hit show. This time, without hesitation, Reubens obliged.

  While the nation was quickly catching Pee-wee fever, those involved in the original production were split in their reaction to the concept’s transition from an homage to children’s shows for adults to an actual program for children.

  “You could put a stopwatch to episode after episode and there would be no variance,” Dawna Kaufmann, executive in charge of production on The Pee-wee Herman Show, says. “The secret word was in the same place every time. It was all just rote and that’s never what I envisioned.”

  “The original show was funny because it was a children’s show for baby boomers who needed to talk to their inner child on a more mature level,” says Guy Pohlman, a crew member on The Pee-wee Herman Show. “I think the children’s show lost some of those elements.”

  However, Monica Ganas, who played Mrs. Jelly Donut in the original production, was pleased with the accomplishments of the children’s show.

  “It was different in substance, but not in kind,” she says. “It was very artistic. I was extremely proud to have been a part of something that gave way to something that iconic.”

  The first season crew of the Playhouse [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  3: Puppetland, California

  Despite the nation’s enthusiasm for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Paul Reubens still wanted to make films. When shooting wrapped for the first season in the summer of 1986, the star approached writer George McGrath with an offer.

  “Paul felt I made an important contribution creatively to the Playhouse and I think he found me easy to work with and fun to be around,” McGrath recalls. “After the first season, he asked me to write the second season with him, and, the same day, he asked me if I wanted to cowrite a circus movie with him.”

  Unbeknownst to McGrath, Reubens had started fleshing out ideas a year earlier for his second feature — and he had intended to work with a different set of collaborators.

  Michael Varhol had cowritten Big Adventure and the first season of Playhouse.“The Christmas after Big Adventure, I received a Ringling Brothers Circus postcard from Paul in Sarasota with the words ‘Hint, Hint, Hint! Shhh!!!’ written on the back,” says Varhol. “His next film was going to be a circus story and he invited me to write it with him. I thought it was a fantastic idea and was very excited. It was a great Christmas present.”

  According to Varhol, the duo, along with John Paragon, began working on the still-untitled circus movie in January of the following year and continued to do so for three months. During that time, the deal on the first season of Playhouse was brokered, so writing on the film stopped as Reubens focused on television.

  “In the twelve weeks John Paragon, Paul, and I worked on the circus project, we were trying to find the story,” Varhol explains. “We screened every circus film ever made but hadn’t settled on a premise. John developed the notion that Pee-wee at the circus would be too confining and claustrophobic, and that it needed to be opened up like a stage play being adapted for a film. He thought we needed to get Pee-wee away from the circus. I was strongly for a pure circus story, with the plot involving circus characters, and that we should use the circus as a world Pee-wee enters, learns something from, and exits an unlikely hero. Paul also wanted to have an element of Americana in the story. That, and John’s insistence that we needed to get away from the circus, led to Paul’s resurrecting ideas from the pitch that he, Phil, and I had made for the original version of Big Adventure.”

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  Before settling on the bicycle road-trip quest concept for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Reubens, Phil Hartman, and Varhol had written a version of the script that was a pseudo-adaptation of Disney’s Pollyanna. In this story, Pee-wee injects a much needed dose of sunshine into a lifeless town. Although this film never materialized, Reubens hoped to revisit many of the ideas from this draft as he developed his circus feature.

  “This led to talk about Pee-wee owning a farm, inventing wild new vegetables, and a tornado blowing a circus onto his property, which is where we left off when the Playhouse assignment came up.”

  Although Warner Brothers executives were initially excited about the idea of releasing a second Pee-wee feature, they passed on the idea, thanks to Reubens’ inflated salary request and their own fears that a circus movie would be a harder sell to the public than Big Adventure had been. Reubens made a plea to his former agent Doug Draizin for assistance in getting the film produced.

  “I was working as a film executive at Lorimar Studios,” Draizin recalls. “And Paul called me, told me about the situation with Warner Brothers, and asked if I was interested in doing the Big Top.”

  Draizin brought Paul in to a pitch meeting with Jerry Weintraub, who was the head of United Artists, but Weintraub was unenthusiastic about the project and declined to produce it.

  Luckily for Reubens, the third time was a charm. Paramount Studios, which had passed on an early version of Big Adventure written by Reubens and Gary Panter, liked the concept and signed the star to a three-movie development deal.

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  Just as the film seemed on the right track, further derailments occurred.

  “Shortly after the first season, Paul fired his managers and producers,” Michael Varhol recalls. “Unfortunately, my relationship with him was par
t of that fallout.”

  Richard Abramson explains that a number of factors led to the dissolution of his business relationship with Reubens.

  “I think what happened resulted out of Paul being unhappy with the conditions of the Playhouse,” he says. “That’s show business. Everyone acts in their own self interest, whether it’s Paul or anyone else. As long as he had a reason to do what he did, he thought it was the right thing to do. I don’t agree, but he’s entitled to his opinion. There have been a couple of times in my life where everything went the way it was supposed to and I still ended up fucked.”

  According to George McGrath, Paragon and Reubens’ relationship became rocky at around the same time, which contributed to Paragon being removed from the project.

  “John and Paul have had a long history of ups and downs,” McGrath explains. “They had a falling out sometime during the filming, which is why I replaced him as the voice of Pterri in the Playhouse’s second season. It may also be why he wasn’t asked to write the second season of the show.”