Shaun Weiss, Natasha Lyonne, and Diane Yang [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]
“I wasn’t offered to go to Los Angeles,” Johann Carlo says. “It would have been nice to do, but it was what it was. If I was asked, I would have done it. I liked Paul and liked doing the show.”
Natasha Lyonne (who would later go on to critical acclaim in 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills), Shaun Weiss, and Diane Yang were replaced as the Playhouse Gang. Vaughn Tyree Jelks, Alisan Porter (who went on to star as the title character in 1991’s Curly Sue), and Stephanie Walski all took to their new roles with ease and enthusiasm.
“It was a really great experience,” Walski says. “Paul was extremely kind to all the parents and children [on the set]. It was a really fun environment to work in. My birthday was on one of our shooting days and the whole crew had a party for me. They were all really kind.”
Because she had been familiar with the show from its first season, Walski remembers being particularly excited about her audition.
“It was really fun,” she says. “I was definitely a very outgoing child. During my final callback Paul was there and he asked me if I could sing a cappella. At the time I didn’t know what that meant, so I said, ‘No, but I can sing ‘You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile!’ I thought a cappella was a song or something. I sang for him and showed him how I could do the Pee-wee dance. He thought it was all really funny.”
With Paragon stripped of his role as the voice of Pterri, his only involvement in the show was appearing as Jambi. Despite the changing of the guard, Paragon took the modification with maturity and grace.
“It made things a little awkward when John was on the set,” McGrath recalls. “However, knowing Paul as well as he did, John completely understood that replacing him wasn’t my doing. He made that clear before the season began shooting. I spoke to him about it beforehand because I didn’t want him to get the idea that I had lobbied for the part. He was actually really cool about it. At least he was to my face.”
Greg Harrison, who had provided the movement for Conky during the show’s first season, was replaced by Kevin Carlson. According to Carlson, his casting was due in large part to his ability to fit inside the puppet’s small body. Despite the confining nature of performing inside a four-foot-tall puppet, Carlson enjoyed the opportunity to play Conky.
“It was actually quite great being inside the puppet because Conky was pretty much front and center in the playhouse,” Carlson remembers. “The helmet part of the costume had a glass window where I could see out but people couldn’t see me looking at them. A lot of times I was just taking in the whole process of shooting the show.”
[© George McGrath]
With the set and puppets now being reconstructed and a new cast in place, production continued on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. However, as the train started to leave the station, Reubens remembered he was still without a conductor. With Broadcast Arts no longer producing the show, Reubens asked his friend Steve Binder, a television producer and director, if he had any suggestions for who might be suitable to executive produce the next two seasons of the show.
[© Ken Sax]
“I met him at his office at Paramount,” Binder recalls. “We spoke a little while and he asked if I would be interested in producing it. I hadn’t even thought of it at all. I asked what that would entail and he said that we would go in as partners. He would own it, but my production company would produce it.”
Binder initially thought Reubens’ proposal was a joke, but he gave it serious consideration. Within hours he had decided to accept the offer.
“I always enjoyed working with young people and Paul seemed to have put together an interesting group of professionals and nonprofessionals,” Binder says. “I enjoyed watching his New York season. I thought it was excellent.”
Sid Bartholomew [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]
The onslaught of positive reviews and high ratings for the show’s first season cast a daunting shadow as production forged ahead.
“My first major task was to be as good as the New York season,” Binder recalls. “I have no critique of what they did. In fact, I knew that when people watched season two they would compare it to season one. I think we had some pretty good results. I don’t remember getting any critiques from Judy Price or the network. Paul came to work every day with a smile on his face, along with the rest of the crew, and I think it was a pretty smooth operation.”
[© Ken Sax]
While most of the season flowed a lot more easily than the tumultuous first season, it started with an expensive and nearly fatal series of complications. Stephen R. Johnson, the director from the show’s first season, was rehired to continue working in Los Angeles. Nearly immediately, his working style caused him to butt heads with Binder.
“I broke down the script for the first episode with the staff and asked Steve who he wanted to do the storyboards,” Binder explains. “He told me he didn’t use storyboard artists. I asked him how he directed his music videos if he didn’t use storyboards and he said, ‘I kind of wing them and get inspired on the set.’ I told him that I was a great believer in preproduction and homework. We couldn’t afford to waste time with his thinking creatively.”
Binder hired a storyboard artist to draft the first episode, but to his surprise, Johnson refused to meet with him. After a follow-up conversation during which Johnson became belligerent, Binder let the director go. With Johnson gone, Binder promoted the assistant director, giving him the responsibility of shooting the first episode of the season.
The new director wanted to use a new device called a barber crane, which would give the camera more mobility. However, the technology was relatively new and the crane was particularly sensitive and hard to operate. When the son of the crane’s inventor signed on to operate the machinery, Binder agreed to use it.
However, problems soon arose when it came time to get the film processed. Reubens insisted on shooting the show on film, as opposed to videotape, in order to achieve a more cinematic look for the episodes. However, because 16mm film was becoming an antiquated way of shooting, the lab processing the film had to use equally antiquated methods, which made for significant delays in providing the crew with dailies. As a result, no footage was screened until the entire first episode was shot. When the footage came back, Binder remembers being horrified by what he saw.
“The show was a disaster,” he recalls. “The camera was bouncing all over the place and it looked unprofessional. I had just spent about four hundred thousand dollars on this show and I couldn’t let it air. I knew that if people saw the episode it would be the end of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
Without giving it a second thought, Binder made the decision to cut his losses and scrap the episode. He fired the newly promoted assistant director and asked his friend Guy Louthan to fill in.
“I went to Paul and told him instead of shooting the second show, we were going to shoot the first show again and throw away the negatives on the one we shot,” Binder recalls. “Paul was blown away. He couldn’t believe that I would make that decision.”
[© Ken Sax]
Although the reshoot put the production behind schedule, Binder was pleased with the results.
“We restarted with a whole new crew and got rid of that unreliable piece of equipment,” he says. “Eight hundred thousand dollars later, the first episode went off without a hitch. I think the decision saved the Playhouse. If I aired it we would have been crucified.”
After filming the episode, Reubens expressed interest in directing. Although Paul was enthusiastic, Binder harbored doubts about the actor’s ability to steer the ship in the right direction by himself. As a compromise, Binder hired Wayne Orr, a gifted cameraman, to codirect with Reubens.
“I felt Paul needed someone who really understood structure,” Binder explains. “Without a doubt, Wayne was the best cameramen in electronic media.”
/> The two met to discuss their vision for the show’s second season. Orr and Reubens hit it off right away, and this made for a seamless working relationship.
“Paul has a great talent for communicating with people,” Orr says. “It works when he speaks directly to his viewers and I thought it could be fun to take that to the next level, so we had a lot of shots of Paul speaking directly to the camera. It allowed him to perform without doing a lot of cutting. When I first discussed the show with him, Paul told me he didn’t want to see a lot of cutting, even though it had been fashionable at the time with music videos. He wanted to have time for kids to see something and absorb it, and I totally got that.”
Wayne Orr agreed to work on Playhouse, but only on a limited basis.
“My agreement with them was that I would do it for a week and then I would let them know if I wanted to stay on,” Orr explains. “If they didn’t want me, they could say, ‘Thank you very much, we enjoyed having you here, but we’re going in another direction.’ I knew going into it that there was a certain tension because they were a week behind schedule, so I wanted to be able to bow out gracefully if need be.”
At the end of his third day, Orr had gotten the show back on schedule. Binder told him that he was welcome to stay and codirect the remainder of the season with Reubens if he wanted and Orr accepted.
Reanimation
With Broadcast Arts out of the picture, Reubens’ biggest hurdle was finding a team of artists to animate the stop-motion sequences. Prudence Fenton left Broadcast Arts to retain her role as animation and effects producer on Playhouse, but few others who had worked on the first season made the move west. Fenton’s first order of business was to assemble a team that could not only work at a brisk pace, but also retain the look and integrity of the inaugural episodes.
Craig Bartlett, who later went on to create the Nickelodeon channel’s series Hey Arnold, was hired to animate the Penny cartoons. For him the experience was stress-free, despite a rigorous shooting schedule.
“We had ten weeks to shoot ten shorts,” Bartlett remembers. “That meant a couple weeks of story-editing the recordings and drawing storyboards, then a week or so of building, then shooting each one-minute Penny cartoon in three or four days.”
Unlike the tumultuous job of getting approval for the show’s opening sequence for the first season, Bartlett found the approval process to be easy.
“We edited our pieces from the interviews with the girls into one-minute tapes, and then drew simple storyboards,” he says. “We went to Hollywood to meet with Paul every couple weeks to show him a couple storyboards and he would either say yes or no to them. If the answer was no, I had to just start over with a new idea. It was that simple. Once the sequences were shot, there were no changes at all.”
Don Waller took over for Kent Burton animating the dinosaur sequences, while Tom McLaughlin took over the ant farm. The refrigerator sequences were animated by Doug Chiang.
While the established animated sequences continued to earn adulation in the show’s second season, the most memorable segments were two sections from the “School” episode. In that installment, Pee-wee and Magic Screen explain Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in two clips animated by Dave Daniels. What makes these sequences stand out is the unique strata-cut animation style that has remained impossible to duplicate, even to this day.
To animate with a strata-cut technique, Daniels built an entire sequence into an oblong-shaped clay loaf. He would then cut the loaf into 1/8-inch slices to reveal the animation inside. The result was a sequence that seemed less like traditional stop-motion and more like computer animation.
“Viewing it as a two-dimensional animation on screen is a little weaker than when you are in the presence of the actual loaf,” Daniels says. “By the time I was doing this in the mid-’90s, people assumed it was being done with a computer. People in the presence of it see a real performance piece and understand the planning that went into it.”
Daniels’ achievements with strata-cut made him one of the most respected of the Playhouse animators. He is the only person to have animated on all of the show’s seasons. After Playhouse, he opened his own animation studio and is responsible for designing and animating the talking M&Ms commercials.
Animators Craig Bartlett and Dave Daniels [©Dave Daniels]
Branding the Playhouse
In addition to his other responsibilities on set, Reubens frequently took meetings with companies offering to collaborate on officially licensed Pee-wee Herman merchandise. Matchbox toys, best known for Hot Wheels, their die-cast miniature car line, signed on to release an extensive catalog of Pee-wee’s Playhouse merchandise. Karen Lyons, one of the designers on the Matchbox plush toy line, remembers her process of creating the toys for Pterri and Chairry.
Karen Lyons’ early prototype of the Pterri doll [© Karen Lyons]
“I had been working as a freelance designer for several companies and became known as the designer who could handle the weird and unusual designs,” she explains. “Beth Hall of Matchbox toys contacted me and asked if I would like to tackle the Pee-wee Herman line they were working on. Of course, I jumped at the chance. I already was a fan and thought Pee-wee’s Playhouse was the most creative show around at the time.”
While the offer was exciting, the task of creating plush toys with elaborate mechanisms inside them was daunting.
“This was the first time that soft toys would have so much interaction with the owner,” Lyons says. “Paul wanted toys that were original. Chairry had to talk and roll her eyes and Pterri had to have wings that flapped and eyes that moved. It was a challenge. Some of the solid toy designers had complicated mechanisms they suggested, but these designs couldn’t work with soft designs because the stuffing exerts a lot of pressure on any mechanism and there were no fixed points to attach supports. It really pushed me as a designer and I loved it. At the end of the day, the toys were well received by the public and Paul Reubens’ ideas were proven worth the extra design work.”
While the process of designing Pterri and Chairry was challenging, the biggest challenge lay in creating the 18-inch talking Pee-wee Herman doll. From the concept’s inception, Reubens was insistent that the doll be built with a pull-string mechanism, an antiquated style of building talking toys.
“He insisted upon the doll not being battery operated,” Judy Price recalls. “He wanted it to be usable by all children. Pull-string toys don’t require batteries.”
Reubens ultimately won the pull-string battle, and the results were good but short lived. Though many dolls are still in existence, few have maintained the power of speech. The most common complaint about the doll in later years is that it speaks too fast. Recognizing the limitations of the technology, Matchbox rereleased the doll in 2000, and this time, Pee-wee’s voice was activated by pressing his stomach.
The process of approving the doll was difficult, especially when it came to sculpting a head that closely resembled Pee-wee’s.
“I can’t tell you how many heads we went through,” Reubens says. “It just didn’t look like me. It was always supposed to be a cartoon — it wasn’t supposed to be me. That was a decision we made pretty early on. But the doll just didn’t look right.”
Ultimately the doll was completed and, much to Reubens’ delight, it was an immediate hit with children.
Pee-wee with his doll on the Playhouse set [© Ken Sax]
“I don’t know exactly how many dolls were sold,” Reubens says. “But I have one they gave me in a case honoring the one-millionth doll sold.”
In addition to the plush toys, Matchbox also released six-inch poseable action figures in the likeness of many Playhouse characters. Characters like Pterri, Conky, and Magic Screen were given movement with a wind-up mechanism, which, like the Pee-wee doll’s pull-string device, gave the toys a distinctly retro feel
. The figurines fit perfectly inside the most elaborate piece of Playhouse merchandise, a deluxe playset crafted in the image of the television show’s set. Although the majority of the Playhouse characters were sold separately, the set did have its own unique features such as a working front door, hands that spin on Clocky, and a moveable Floory. The toy was so accurate that when John Paragon and Paul Reubens codirected the show in the fourth and fifth seasons, they used the playset to block the action.
Later, a Billy Baloney ventriloquist doll and Vance the Talking Pig, from Big Top Pee-wee, were also released as soft-body dolls.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse merchandise was not limited to toys. During the show’s run, JC Penney exclusively carried a line of Pee-wee Herman clothing, including blue jeans, sweaters, and T-shirts. A.C. Reed released a brand of Pee-wee party products; Collegeville put out an officially licensed Pee-wee Herman Halloween costume; and Topps released a line of collectible trading cards, just to name a few. Throughout the ’80s it was virtually impossible to escape Pee-wee Herman memorabilia.
In an understatement, George McGrath says, “Paul had the merchandising opportunities covered pretty well.”
Perhaps the rarest collectible items are a full-sized Chairry, put out by Foam Merchants, and a 48-inch non-talking Pee-wee Herman doll. These items occasionally turn up on eBay, fetching several hundred dollars each.
While there was no shortage of Pee-wee merchandise released in the mid- to late ’80s, several items got stalled in development. In 1987, toy designer Timothy Young worked on a prototype for a talking Penny doll that was to be released by Matchbox alongside the Pterri and Chairry dolls. However, the project was killed before Penny could hit store shelves.
Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse Page 9
