Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  Binder also thought Pee-wee would work well in prime time and pitched Reubens a late-night television spin-off about the secret life of Miss Yvonne as a “kinky next-door neighbor” in Puppetland. While actress Lynne Stewart was enthused about the idea, Reubens was not.

  Pee-wee and Santa meet for the first time in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure [Photo courtesy Warner Bros. / PhotoFest © Warner Bros.]

  Even while promoting the Christmas special, Reubens publicly expressed doubt about whether the show would appeal to a broader audience in prime time.

  “I think half the reason adults like the show is that they’re semi-groggy when they watch it,” Reubens said in character during a 1988 promotional interview. “Then again, the same rationale could apply to late night.”

  The strike ended on August 7, which didn’t give the creative team a lot of time to prepare for a Christmas special that had yet to be written. Reubens was eager to get back to work after Big Top’s disappointing box office performance.

  “The real story behind the Christmas special is the failure of Big Top Pee-wee,” Reubens admitted in a 1997 interview. “[The movie] wasn’t a smash hit, to say the least. I’d had no failure up to that point and I kind of got blocked [thanks to] that.”

  Motivated to prove the film’s box office returns had no bearing on his creativity, Reubens and cowriter John Paragon let their imaginations run wild. A new animated opening sequence would be shot, with an opening number featuring the United States Marine Corps Choir. The show’s runtime would be expanded to a full hour. Reubens also had another sure-fire way to drum up interest in the special.

  “We were constantly being called by agents, managers, and stars themselves, wanting to get on the Playhouse,” Binder recalls. “Paul insisted that the show just be our repertoire company. I think he made up for it with the number of guest stars in the Christmas special.”

  Reubens and Paragon hit the ground running. They wrote the episode in only five days in Reubens’ office at Paramount Studios. Heeding criticism that Big Top Pee-wee’s plot was too far reaching, the two made sure their script focused on the festivities and fun of the holiday season.

  “It’s a little thin on story,” Reubens said in character during a 1988 interview. “I didn’t want to weigh it down with a lot of heavy thought.”

  Writing a conventional holiday special also made it easier to work within the time constraints.

  “I remember one of the things that made this special write itself was the fact that there were kind of so many iconic things to Christmas,” Reubens recalls. In an homage to past television specials, Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special includes the characters drinking hot chocolate by a roaring fireplace, singing Christmas carols, reenacting the nativity scene that explains the true meaning of Christmas, and an angry little puppet screaming, “Bah, Humbug!”

  Decking the Playhouse Halls

  As principal photography began on the special, the animators began working on their sequences. The most daunting task was recreating the show’s “Happy Village” opening. The grazing deer and curious rabbits had to be replaced with mechanical elves and a curious fox scurrying over a blanket of snow. Guest animator Joel Fletcher, who had worked with animation and effects producer Prudence Fenton on previous non-Playhouse projects, was brought on to animate the opening sequence.

  The new, winterized opening was shot on November 25, 1988, over 12 hours. However, in the middle of the night, a low-impact earthquake tremor caused the entire sequence to have to be reshot.

  [© Joel Fletcher]

  “In those days, once you started a stop-motion shoot you had to keep going until it was completely finished,” Fletcher explains. “The shot was extremely long with an elaborate camera move which required animating until the wee hours of the morning. In order for the miniature Christmas lights to shine bright enough, the camera had to run through the move a second time with a special exposure for the lights. The earthquake caused a misalignment on the second light pass and ruined the shot. I had to pull another all-nighter to reshoot the animation. The little fox I sculpted for the sequence had to be rebuilt as well since it was made of clay and was pretty beat up from animating the first shot. I’m pretty sure the first version was better, but we will never know.”

  Fletcher remembers Reubens visiting the animation stage to see how the reshoots were going. “Paul stopped by to see how the animation was coming along,” he recalls. “I had never met him before. It was surreal to see him in costume and makeup, yet speaking with a normal voice. I think he had a pack of cigarettes in the top pocket of his outfit, which seemed out of context as well.”

  The reshoot was worth the time. Fenton and Fletcher were nominated for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences.

  Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special was nominated for Emmys in two additional categories. Gary Panter, Ric Heitzman, Wayne White, Jimmy Cuomo, Paul Reubens, and Deborah Madalena-Lloyd were nominated for Outstanding Art Direction for a Variety or Music Program. Max Robert and Robert Turturice were nominated for Outstanding Costume Design for a Variety or Music Program.

  The evening of the Emmy Awards was bittersweet for the Playhouse crew. Although it was an honor to be nominated, they had been informed that not enough votes had been cast in the Graphic Design and Title Sequences category, which meant that there would be no winner. As a result, Prudence Fenton decided not to appear at the Emmys in protest. Fletcher attended with his girlfriend, as the only representative from the Christmas special nominees.

  “Actually, without the anxiety of wondering who would win, it allowed us to fully enjoy the evening,” Fletcher recalls.

  Tuturice, who also designed the costumes for Big Top Pee-wee, created a memorable dress for Miss Yvonne on the Christmas special that caused a wardrobe malfunction long before Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl. The lighting apparatus inside Lynne Stewart’s wig short-circuited and began smoking, which in turn caused her red-and-green Christmas tree–inspired dress to spark and nearly catch fire while filming. Several cast and crew members went to her rescue, taking off her famous bouffant and removing the power pack that controlled the lights.

  Stewart escaped unscathed and has fond memories of the costume, which she still has and wears publicly whenever possible.

  “I’ve worn the dress to kids’ parades and benefits,” Stewart says. “When the kids were too young to know who Miss Yvonne was, I told them I was Santa’s second wife, Jennifer Claus!”

  Lynne Stewart in 2010 wearing her Christmas Special dress [© Steven Perfidia Kirkham

  Miss Yvonne wasn’t the only Playhouse character to get into the Christmas spirit. The art directors and set designers worked overtime to transform the set into a winter wonderland. All of the puppets and human characters were decked out in scarves, mittens, and snow boots. The festive costumes and the completely redecorated playhouse set created a look that was uniquely Pee-wee but still classically Christmas. Some of the special additions included a new wing to the playhouse that appeared to be made entirely out of fruitcake and a Christmas tree made out of a barbeque grill and train set.

  In a 1998 Newsday interview, Reubens recalled, “I got a lot of cool new stuff from the special. When the art department was packing things up they were missing quite a few things.”

  The animation department also put a holiday feel on their sequences. The Penny cartoon involved a quest for Christmas gifts and the dinosaur family celebrated Hanukkah, a segment Reubens continues to be proud of.

  “I believe that was one of the first times you had Hanukkah represented on a television Christmas special,” Reubens said in the show’s DVD commentary track.

  Fenton was particularly tickled when she was assigned to show the food in the refrigerator celebrating and drinking eggnog by sticking a straw into an egg.

  “It was really fun to
decorate the refrigerator for Christmas,” Fenton explains. “Of course you would have a grape tree.”

  Art directors Ric Heitzman, Wayne White, and Jimmy Cuomo created a new outdoor set for the special, complete with an ice-skating rink and pounds of plastic snow. Although the creative team initially planned on building a real ice-skating rink on the set, director Wayne Orr came up with an easier solution that was also easy on the budget.

  “I worked on The Donny and Marie Show where they had an ice rink, so I knew what that entailed,” Orr recalls. “It was a very big deal. I was concerned about that and [about] our financial situation. There was no place to get an ice rink that was financially reasonable. I had heard of a plastic that could be laid down on the floor that people can actually skate on, so we went out on a search and I found a place out into the Valley that did have this. It was a lifesaver. It was just large sheets of plastic that are linked together and you can actually skate quite nicely on it. It was a great save to find something like that because you are not concerned about what the temperature in the building is and it’s just a ridiculous difference in cost.”

  Playhouse fans opening gifts on Christmas morning [© Craig Shimala (top); © Sarah Llewllyn (bottom)]

  Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special has the unique distinction of being the only episode in which the characters venture into Puppetland. As a result, the eight-foot-tall playhouse model from the opening credits makes a special appearance in exterior shots. The model can be seen best during the sequence when Pee-wee makes tracks in the snow and attempts to hide from Cowboy Curtis.

  The show’s creative team was well aware they were creating a visual feast for the viewing audience.

  “We figure the hardcore Playhouse fans will flip out,” Binder said in an interview leading up to the show’s broadcast. “Just decorating the playhouse lends itself to the whole fantasy aspect of a Christmas special.”

  The opening musical number, “Oh, It’s Christmas in the Playhouse,” is one of the show’s most memorable moments, but surprisingly, the sequence almost didn’t happen. Reubens and Paragon wrote into the script that a choir of children would open the show dressed as angels. During the first preproduction meeting for the special, Orr expressed his displeasure with the idea.

  “I said, ‘Geez, I don’t know, but that sounds a little kind of precious to me,’” Orr recalls. “‘It doesn’t really sound like the Playhouse. How about if we had some sort of military glee club from the army or the Marines or something? A group of guys in uniform in the playhouse sounds immediately funny to me.’ They totally got behind that right away.”

  Binder put out a search for a military glee club, but they were all booked. He decided to go in a different direction, offering the UCLA Men’s Choir the opportunity to be in the special dressed as Marines. However, there was a catch.

  “They had to shave off their facial hair,” Binder says. “I was shocked when they said they would do it to be in the show!”

  After the show aired, Binder received a very special long-distance telephone call in his Los Angeles office.

  “I got a telephone call after the show aired from the commander of the Marine Corps out of Washington, D.C.,” Binder recalls. “He called me to officially reprimand us for impersonating Marines and to tell me how embarrassing it was to them. He went through this whole speech, and after he said, ‘Okay, that’s the official thing. The unofficial thing is that my kids loved it.’”

  The UCLA choir learned their choreography for the opening number in a few hours and the sequence was shot later that morning. Niki Haris, Madonna’s longtime backup singer, appeared in the opening musical number as one of Pee-wee’s backup singers, sporting a Supremes-style wig and gold sequin dress.

  Although the sequence isn’t the version that he and Paragon had originally planned, it is Reubens’ favorite part of the special.

  “From the animated beginning through naming all the live-action characters, all the guest stars, all the puppets with that music and that choir,” Reubens said excitedly on the Christmas special DVD commentary. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”

  Pee-wee’s Christmas Guests

  Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special is best remembered for its guest stars — a combination of retro icons and mega-celebrities of the day. Frankie Avalon, Charo, Cher, the Del Rubio Triplets, Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, k.d. lang, Little Richard, Joan Rivers, Dinah Shore, and Oprah Winfrey all made appearances.

  “We just made up a wish list of people [we wanted], and then we got every single person on that list,” Reubens says. “So it was really great, especially on not a lot of notice. A few people changed their plans to be able to be on it.”

  Pee-wee on Joan Rivers’ short-lived late-night show [Courtesy Fox / PhotoFest © Fox]

  Having special guest stars allowed the show’s creative team to finally appease some of the celebrities who had long wanted to be on the show, some since its first season — it also broadened the appeal of the show to include a more adult audience.

  “You put Grace Jones on any show and you’re opening yourself up to cutting-edge television,” Binder says.

  “To say we had an eclectic group of guest stars is kind of an understatement,” Reubens said at the time.

  While Pee-wee’s guest stars were all enthusiastic about being on the special, not all of the celebrities were able to make the trip to the playhouse. Because of scheduling constraints, Oprah Winfrey’s cameo was shot in Chicago, and Joan Rivers’ was filmed on the set of The Hollywood Squares.

  Zsa Zsa Gabor, who appears in a brief scene with the Cowntess, got under the skin of George McGrath, the actor who provided the puppet’s voice.

  “Zsa Zsa was crazy,” he recalls. “She loved to improvise, which would have been great except nothing she ad-libbed made any sense. She was by far the biggest pain in the ass of [all] the celebrities.”

  Magic Johnson’s cameo appearance as Magic Screen’s distant cousin had to be shot in less than an hour because he had a basketball game against the Lakers later that evening.

  As rushed as Johnson’s appearance was, it was an eternity when compared to Cher’s brief time on the set. Orr was able to leverage a connection with her management in order to get the singer to make an appearance at the playhouse. The shoot was shoehorned in between appearances to promote her Uninhibited perfume.

  “We basically set everything up for Cher,” recalls John Paragon. “Cher was in there for twenty-five minutes and then she was gone.”

  George McGrath and Cher on the Christmas special set [© George McGrath]

  Even though her time was limited, she left a lasting impression on the cast and crew. Puppeteer Kevin Carlson, who shared a scene with her as Conky, calls his time filming with Cher “the coolest moment of my time working on the show.”

  George McGrath, who voiced a number of the puppets during the special, also says meeting Cher was his favorite thing that ever happened at the Playhouse.

  “I brought my Cher doll,” he recalls. “She signed it. I said, ‘You know, I’m a big fan of yours,’ and she said, ‘Yes, I guess so. Not many people bring the doll around.’”

  Little Richard accidentally pulled Magic Screen’s arm off during one of his takes. Even though the artist only made a brief appearance in the special, he was conscientious about his performance.

  “He said, ‘You want me to scream like a white woman or a black woman?’” Paragon recalls, in reference to the shriek the performer lets out when he falls during ice-skating.

  Grace Jones, Dinah Shore, the Del Rubio Triplets, k.d. lang, and Charo all performed new arrangements of classic Christmas songs on the special.

  “We tried to do nontraditional things with traditional songs, while still keeping the show in the spirit of the holiday,” Reubens later told Newsday. “I didn’t want people to think I
was satirizing a Christmas special.”

  Grace Jones, never one to shy away from an opportunity to make a unique fashion statement, wore an outfit created by an avant-garde Japanese designer.

  “That hat was just a piece of foam with a slit in it,” Reubens joked on the DVD’s commentary track. “We should have taught kids how to make it. That would have been a good thing to do.”

  Her rendition of “The Little Drummer Boy” was an arrangement she had received from David Bowie. The two were sitting next to each other on a plane shortly after Jones agreed to be on the special. She asked Bowie what she should sing and he suggested the song. A few weeks later he mailed her a track with an arrangement she could use just for the special.

  Although her performance went off without a hitch, Jones’s reputation as a diva was a concern to some of the show’s creative team.

  “The word was just ‘Why would you get Grace Jones? She is really difficult to work with,’” Orr recalls. “Everybody who was a guest, including Grace Jones, just absolutely left any baggage outside the studio. They could not have been nicer.”

  However, off the set, Jones caused a financial problem. “I was shocked at the charges Grace Jones billed us at her hotel when she checked out,” Binder recalls.

  Even though Dinah Shore’s extended rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was sung over the picture phone, the sequence was actually shot in the playhouse kitchen.

  “Someone was in the kitchen with Dinah,” Reubens joked at the time.

  Shore was initially hesitant about appearing on the show, but agreed after producers complied with her one request.

  “I didn’t want to sit on Chairry,” Shore recalls.