Pee-Wee Herman returns...

...it says here.

Fuck yeah!

awwwwesome

but will Cowboy Curtis be played by Laurence Fishburne? I need to know.

http://twitter.com/peeweeherman

Pee-wee Herman will be on the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on Thanksgiving... tune in or set your DVRs!

about 17 hours ago from web

Interview from latest...um... INTERVIEW

I went the the first night of this last week in LA at the Nokia theater...absolutely fantastic people should go check it out.

On Broadway this fall for 6 weeks:

http://peewee.com/broadway/

Every Pee Wee's Playhouse and the Xmas Special is now streaming on Netflix, yowza

YES HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

watched the xmas special yesterday. it's one of those things i kind of wish was 10 hours long because anything you watch right afterward seems like a letdown.

KD lang was so much more game than cher. cher looks uncomfortable, and doesn't even sing. but KD lang goes all out. the queer aspect of this is so loud it's amazing that it passed as harmless children's entertainment (which, y eah, it also is) for so long.

HOW DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pee-wee's_Big_Holiday

is this actually happening now? it's been "announced" numerous times over what must be a decade by now.

John Michael Lee[1] (born 1972) is an American television writer, producer, director, voice actor, and musician. He is best known for his work on the MTV2 comedy series Wonder Showzen and as a member of the rock band/art collective PFFR.

hell yeah

just watched big adventure today in honour of discovering this, it's tim burton's best movie by a mile

It's during the dream sequence that we always wonder "How the hell did this get marketed as a children's film?"

Simone: I know you're right, Pee-wee, but...

Pee-wee: But what? Everyone I know has a big "but". C'mon, Simone. Let's talk about *your* big but.

http://www.netflix.com/title/80031800

the show always seemed more sophisticated and even subversive than the movie to me

but i like the movie a lot!

holy shit the director is one of the Wonder Showzen dudes

which I see is noted upthread (never mind)

ha i somehow managed to only hear about this today when i read the piece in the times about it.

next month!

yup. psyched! so i take it this will be like the more "adult" pee-wee from before the tim burton film?

read the NYT piece, its very good

TV show is p adult, it's not like he toned shit down. Just look at that Xmas Special! It's like a parade of super-gay icons

Times piece is fascinating. He talks about how he's no longer as limber as he was, not as skinny, etc., but the one thing I found most jarring in watching video of his Broadway show was his voice. It's changed, of course, and he can't really hit all the familiar timbres and pitches. It's like 1980s Mel Blanc: you know it's the same guy you associate the character(s) with, but more because of the timing and rhythm rather than the voice itself.

yeah I didn't really like the Broadway thing for precisely that reason. Dunno if the movie will overcome it but the general plot and the people involved are promising

trailer's up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quo-Oen1wkY

It looks pretty good, but I can only think how much funnier it would be in his 1980s voice (which I admit is a totally unfair criticism, but it's really disconcerting).

yeah looks p fun - nice Faster Pussycat and Priscilla Queen of the Desert refs there

this was fun and cute. reubens still has got it

Oh good, I'm watching it tonight.

Reubens on his comeback, Phil Hartman, Russ Meyer etc

http://www.villagevoice.com/film/pee-wee-s-big-friendship-paul-reubens-talks-phil-hartman-and-more-8389055

I thought the end was a little hollow, but everything else about this was pitch-perfect!

"We worked together on a lot of stuff. We were going to go out and rule the world. That didn't work out very good. I think about Phil all the time."

oof

this movie was fucking wonderful. Is this the first deeply queer children's film?

You mean apart from Big Adventure?

I haven't seen Big Adventure but I know that it wasn't a love-at-first-sight beefcake romance.

It is pretty gay

His playhouse xmas special is prob his queerest tho

^^^^

ok yes otm. also the episode where he fucking MARRIES FRUIT SALAD

https://youtu.be/UVKsd8z6scw?t=1m38s

I liked this but it was pretty much a remake of Big Adventure. The slow-mo dream sequences were great, and Pee Wee finally got to use his gag toys.

Yeah it was kind of like what Star Wars 7 was to the original Star Wars. I enjoyed parts of this a lot, particularly the opening sequence (rivals Big Adventure's) and all the scenes with Manganiello. The middle was spotty, but that was true with Big Adventure too

The only encounter I didn't enjoy that much was the weird forest man. Dud.

Everything else was fantastic.

this was pretty great! although I ended up watching it over 4 nights spaced out over about a 2 week period because I kept on breaking elements of my audiovisual set-up so im not able to comment on how it flows or whether it sags at any stage

i really enjoyed the gag when Joe Manganiello first arrives, hits the jukebox, and it's playing Major Lance (I think). pee-wee is in awe. "Cool!" he hits the jukebox again, and it's Joan Jett (I think). pee-wee gushes, "COOLER!" then he hits it again and it's a mashup between Major Lance and Joan Jett. "Coolest!"

xpost

most people sag around middle age

this was pretty good! A lot of clever gags, great bit parts. There was something strange about it that I can't quite articulate - something to do with being overly camp and coy at a time when that isn't really culturally, idk, necessary(?) anymore. After seeing this I totally get why Stevie asked if this was the "first deeply queer children's film", cuz it did feel like a bunch of the nudge-nudge/wink-wink-adults-will-get-this queer stuff was v much in the foreground, even moreso than before (cop strippers were a bit much imo). But all those signs and hints are rooted in a prior era where being closeted was a big deal, and you couldn't just come out and BE GAY, it had to be wrapped up in these specific cultural signposts, and thus embedding that stuff in a children's milieu was deeply subversive and great. And now maybe it feels more quaint than subversive?

Anyway divided on whether to watch this w my kids - being familiar with the Playhouse this might be a bit too weird for them (not just for the explicitly gay camp stuff that I would have to explain but primarily because Pee-Wee looks/sounds different, and it's not the Playhouse)

Watched this the other day. It was good. But kinda off. I mean Pee Wee himself was kind of off, seemed a bit too melancholy and bitter. He had that side of him in "Big Adventure" but he was still a winner. He's kind of just a loser in this movie? Still had fun. But "Big Adventure" is miles above this. In that movie he is a true legend, a saint, a living Bugs Walking walking the earth. This was a little too self-aware in an wink-wink Apatow way.

living Bugs Bunny

I haven't seen the new one but I did see the technical of the old stage show in LA and that was def a bit harder edged and more ironic than the show I grew up watching, so maybe that had something to do with it?

bugs bunny was way more malicious than pee-wee! pee-wee is a gentle soul who can't help performing a prank once in a while. bugs is a punk.

“I’ve been working with HBO since they were called Home Box Office,” said Reubens. “I’m honored and excited to continue my long history there. I love HBO, but I’m not going to marry them.”

https://deadline.com/2021/03/hbo-paul-reubens-pee-wee-herman-documentary-safdie-brothers-1234712332/?fbclid=IwAR1EBHMIy4pol6XaScqf4QIP3zcrjEsDlHhoH3lNKbxMALBCX4r9DloJBLI

Produced by the Safdies, directed by Matt Wolf (!)

it's gonna be a thing

Given how private Reubens has been over the years, this will mark the first film that will document his life

...out of dozens more to come. You gotta love press agents.

https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/music-special/pee-wee-herman-radio-hour

Direct mp3 link
https://od-media.kcrw.com/kcrw/audio/mobile/music/mx/KCRW-music_special-pee_wee_herman_radio_hour-211125.mp3

ty

yeah, that's a good time

I suspect he used old clips of his laugh, since Reubens couldn't do it as well in Big Holiday.

Today would have been Large Marge's 84th birthday... if it hadn't been for that WRECK! 🚚 👀https://t.co/kJ8BJgEgJ2 pic.twitter.com/x77Fe7GIx0

— Pee-wee Herman (@peeweeherman) December 5, 2021

Thread reminded me to rewatch my favorite moment from any of the MTV VMAs, when he in fact returned after the whole, uh, thing. 1991. The ecstatic scream that pulses through the crowd when he steps into the spotlight is just divine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCxEAJGdIrs

he was one of a kind! RIP

Absolutely. Found the 1981 HBO special on Facebook, oddly enough, so I'm watching away for the next hour here:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=300965893931335

Remember him in Cheech & Chong.. so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGqXf-x59Vo

I laughed so hard with this man's antics. Brilliant. Rest In Peace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LieBhrpf_jQ

I meant to post this one instead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBDBI5ddJJY

Really sad news, R.I.P. He was such a funny, creative guy

was recently lucky enough to introduce my neices to the tv show and felt blessed to see them immediately transfixed and dial into the sensibility right away. there is something primal and perfect about how he & the show understood kids, like you could show it to a kid 100 years from now and it would still feel fresh.

Big Adventure is one of the century's great comedies, would have been on my sight & sound ballot no question.

he was the best thing about the Buffy movie, so funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHVh_S9NGIU

damn, rip to a legend

massive loss, huge bummet

From Pee Wee's Big Holiday. The fact that this long, awkward, unbroken take of complete nonsense was allowed to stay in the final cut of the movie is a miracle. pic.twitter.com/gnqjdAZ8TA

— Jay Bauman (@JayBauman1) July 31, 2023

I will miss the playhouse

I love Playhouse. It reminds me of everything I liked about Tim Burton's work only to a greater degree - it brought so many things on the fringes into mainstream children's culture, and it also made it richer and more interesting. Just look at the people designing the show, from Gary Panter to Wayne White, and all the music coming from Mark Mothersbaugh, Todd Rundgren, the Residents, etc. Then there's the animated bits by the guys who would go on to do Wallace and Gromit, and how many U.S. shows had cartoon breaks in Spanish, with NO subtitles? This feels the kind of show that would put the GOP today in a mouth-foaming rage over its "wokeness."

I hope the Blu-ray set gets reissued, but at least the episodes are streaming. (They were newly restored from the original 16mm negative for the Blu-ray release, something they were able to do thanks to Reubens's foresight to preserve the film elements, and that's what's streaming.)

Not to slight Burton (or your comment), but I would de-couple Playhouse from Burton's work / "influence"; not only b/c I'm not a huge Burton fan, but I also b/c I think Playhouse really was its own thing (and "pure Reubens," at that)?

Oh yeah, absolutely - I wasn't trying to suggest they were tied together that way (even though Burton directed the first Pee-Wee movie), just that what they did for the culture seemed similar in a broad sense.

It's interesting because you have to see Pee-Wee as the concept evolved - there's the HBO special, and Panter did the backgrounds for that (minimal backgrounds because he understood they had to break them down and build them back up on a nightly basis, so they couldn't be too elaborate), but that's very different from the movie and both are different from the show. Pee-Wee the character is more or less constant, but Reubens also knew enough to re-shape what he was doing to fit the project. So the original on-stage production could arguably be a parody of a children's show, but then he did it as an actual children's show that was also consciously trying to build on that tradition while stylistically doing something completely new.

For sure, +1 to all that!

xps not quite miraculous - that's one of Pee-Wee's classic bits and the ridiculous length was always a part of it - but to be fair how often does a comedian get away with a bit like that?

One of the most bizarre moments in his show was in the last season, when they shot a close-up of a dog eating dog food for a very, very long time. The late John Paragon (best-known for playing Jambi and other characters, but also directed episodes) talks about it on the Blu-ray set - he says he did it because he thought it would be interesting for a kid to look at if they never owned a dog.

but I also b/c I think Playhouse really was its own thing

i agree entirely while also understanding the point about burton, it’s all part of a broad stream of midcentury american kitsch art (postmodern knowing kitsch) that had its naive beehive / flinstones / poodle skirt before moving through cool brittania / pizzicato five / exit planet dust style 90s to 00s mad men / masturbing over dwr catalogs for to wherever we are now

still, pee wee towers over 99% all that, i don’t know how to describe what sets him apart

he’s a loner, maybe. a rebel

Yeah I can see that... Burton & Reubens shared a "warmly arch appreciation of '50s Americana" vibe that made Burton such a great fit for the movie.

Went down a rabbit hole after reading the NY Times obit. I had no idea his father helped change the course of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. And his sister is an accomplished civil rights attorney, getting her J.D. in 1979 and later challenged Tennessee's "Homosexual Practices Acts" law, which criminalized sodomy. (The sodomy law was overturned in 1996.) In 2013, she organized a group of attorneys and plaintiffs to challenge Tennessee's ban on same-sex marriage. She filed the lawsuit that led to Tennessee's inclusion in the U.S. Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage nationwide. They also mention his brother, though sadly what little that came up suggests a troubled relationship between the two.

I heard a local interview with Cheech Marin & Tommy Chong a couple months back.. they didn't quite take credit for launching his career, but were just listing some of the up and coming talent they were writing into the films back then, including Reubens. It was cool to hear them talking out of character, both erudite and down to earth dudes

haha i died the first time i saw him behind a hotel desk

my parents were well aware of both comedians but i was a lot older before they let me watch cheech and chong (east in LA not included)

lost* in east LA

that was a family favorite comedy up there with “blues brothers” “trading places” and “desperate people”

was pee wee in other films? i only remember his own movies and cheech and chong and that’s kinda it

born, lost etc

Back to the Beach!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7lHOYEYpF0

Also Mystery Men which half sucked.

I really liked this though from 30 Rock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ2nDX05rDY

i really like Mystery Men

i always think he was in movies that he was not in, like
ghostbusters and scavenger hunt

Played the Penguin's Dad in Batman Returns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_L04BPyxYo

He was a waiter at Chez Paul in Blues Brothers too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puO1kya-OqA

Letterman's unofficial archivist put together all of his classic Late Night appearances into one glorious YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p66R294bDZc

Also an early Pee Wee TV appearance on a comedy special hosted by Carl Reiner:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YRJEN5OsP4

Reiner would soon appear as Geppetto to Reubens's Pinocchio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTPCQ6kzH6g

that’s what i’m remembering. i thought that was ghostbusters, and then i was like, no for sure that’s not, because they didn’t cg him into the remake

xp also it sounds like Father Guido Sarducci is the narrator - that's a crazy episode, James Coburn, Jim Belushi and Mike Richards are all in it.

Man, he was still blogging and selling new wares just three days ago:

https://peewee.com/2023/07/28/look-pee-wees-playhouse-tiki-mugs/

Had no idea he was 70, but the Pee-wee character is kind of ageless. RIP

He was on an episode of 227!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR4FMBSnqgo

uh yeah I think he was actually on WWE recently and he looked almost exactly as he did back then. was a bit freaked out to see he was that old!

Watched Big Adventure with the kids before bed tonite… everyone enjoyed it, felt like a nice tribute.

I loved the Pee Wee's playhouse show. I barely spoke English and wasn't so attuned to its offbeat, sharp edges. I think I found coziness in it. My adult brain hasn't been able to locate that place, i wish i could, but it was deeply formative shit for me in a number of ways, my queerness and my cartoon mania and animism and everything.

the Letterman appearances are so good <3

gutted, can't overstate his presence in my early childhood development

was six years old when he was pilloried and worse for what was described to me at the time as "being naked in a movie theater" and that's why I can't watch the playhouse anymore...?

didn't understand then, I suppose I do now but what a crock of shit and tragedy and wasted potential and what an ugly stupid place the world is, I gather he was especially close with Phil Hartman and seeing pics of them together smoking cigarettes and hashing out their latest brilliance (Hartman co-wrote Big Adventure) is heartbreaking

they did what they could though and did they ever

Reubens actually helped a guy propose to his wife when he did his reunion show in 2010 - and they planned it over 4 months! He really was dedicated to his fans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHibA1COwG4

Also bittersweet to see the late John Paragon as Jambi at the end with a hilarious congratulations.

Was enjoying the Reiner performance until the racist Asian glasses bit around 8:55. Yikes.

Ugh, didn't know that was there. Unfortunately, racist Asian caricature was pretty common shtick in the '80s - John Hughes and a large number of SNL cast members were guilty of that shit. At minimum a mea culpa or thoughtful apology would be nice, but AFAIK, none of those people have done so. IIRC I think Playhouse had at least a few cringe moments, but over the course of his life/career, I also think Reubens evolved with the times even if so much of his work is aesthetically rooted in '50s kitsch, and AFAIK that kind of humor disappeared altogether from anything he did by the time he had a late-in-life revival.

This may be a function of age, but as a young adult during the heyday of the "Playhouse" I almost always found Pee-Wee to be creepy af.

i completely agree, there’s an edge of sadness and weirdness to pee wee’s personal vision which does not start and end with the section of big adventure that is bookended by large marge and the basement of the alamo

maybe a beetlejuice comparison is in order?

hot take of the day that film is a little bit like twin peaks the return for kids, with pee wee’s bike as agent cooper

I love when Pee-Wee gets pissed off or annoyed, and makes that scowl and/or eventually screams in frustration… it’s like there’s a rawness just below the surface, which his sunny, unbothered facade can no longer constrain.

(Or maybe it’s just like the way an actual child can be!)

Yeah, but it's a grown man doing those things. YMMV, but that creeps me out.

How do you feel about grown men dressing up as bears?

i was just joking but yeah that’s the sort of theme that connects, say, blue velvet to john waters movies to pee wee herman’s work. that essential weirdness of … i’m a plumber who flattens turtles and mushrooms, ok. sometimes childhood is nonsensical fun, too often real life childhood is adults yelling about weird shit like, um, magic words

Lynch obv another “skewed ‘50s Americana” obsessive

“chairy? may i have the *privilege* of sitting on you?”

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

that’s also a dumb joke but that’s the sort of childhood scariness i think pee wee tried to address in the “message” part of his kids show

to use a less loaded example, which is probably not actually less loaded for many people, i meant something like your parents arguing about divorce before you understand the concept of marriage

This is probably putting too fine a point on it, but to complete my thought above — I guess the Pee-Wee character sort of embodies that theme in Lynch, Burton, etc. of an Id-like weirdness penetrating the exaggerated show of normalcy associated with their midcentury childhoods.

and even then there were a lot of shows about hiding weirdness! bewitched, leave it to jeanie … even the flinstones and jetsons broadly touched on those themes.

it’s tempting to go nuts with this line of thought but it’s also too easy to make dirty puns based on 50s tv show. maybe that’s why i resonate with pee wee’s humor!

“leave it to beaver” nyuk nyuk yeah no wonder i still
find pee wee watchable

and even then there were a lot of shows about hiding weirdness! bewitched, leave it to jeanie

The Addams Family (which flipped this script, so to speak) may tie into Burton's obsession with goth-y stuff(?) Just speculating, I don't know much about him... tho he grew up in Burbank, CA (where I'm typing from), and vintage/'50s/horror/Halloween culture is strong here generally.

i’ve always felt tiki is a sort of colonial horror, like it disney made a ride out of lovecraft. but, boozy, with luau vibes, so only a bit creepy

One of the cooler tributes I saw to Reubens on social media y'day was from Elvira, Mistress of the Dark

i forget if i’m thinking of the polynesian section at the top floor of LACMA (or is it the deyoung?) but the masks are very dramatically lit and i always loved that section

hopefully goes without saying but obv they are not that culture’s version of tiki and have sacred functions etc etc etc

but still!

Gilbert Gottfried gets banned from the Emmys in 1991 by riffing off the Pee Wee arrest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qTiqQz29t8

i had an interesting conversation w/my wife once about how old pee wee is. she didnt watch him as a kid and part of her hangup was she didnt get how old he was - is he a kid, is a he an adult, does he have parents, whats his deal?

imho (on the tv show at least) he embodies a real specific moment of development, maybe 10-11yo, when the days of constant unstructured play are in the past and youve already been in school for a few years, but school is getting more structured, more like "real" school, social interactions are getting more demanding, adults are expecting more from you, etc. very soon will be the time when you want to be seen & treated as a grownup, but before that is a brief period of dissonance when youre getting your first tastes of the grownup world but but you still feel like & want to be a kid and live in a fucking crazy playhouse.

i have been watching the letterman clips & thought to myself, maybe when dave had a kid of his own many decades later & he’s just sitting with his kid playing & thinking “this is what pee wee was trying to teach me” lol

1979 Dating Game, when Pee Wee was still just a Groundlings character https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzOQixyJseQ

This comment: The funniest part is that Pee-Wee is the least cringe of all of them. 😂

I think this may have been Pee-Wee's first public appearance - didn't Reubens want to "test" the character out before building a stand-up act or a show around Pee Wee?

(also I noticed most articles using "Pee-wee" as the correct grammar with that small "w," which I never realized)

hah! Pee Wee is by far the most likeable. Somehow I’m not surprised that she still chose “If Bob Ross was a sex offender” Bachelor 1.

also Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) was a favorite of producer Chuck Barris in the late seventies. Barris not only put Reubens on "The Dating Game," but he bent the rules by repeatedly allowing Reubens to perform on "The Gong Show," playing different characters in different guises.

I do so love that Blues Brothers Chez Paul clip. "I thought it was supposed to be five years. Didn't you get five years?"

Yeah, adolescent me when first discovering the Blues Brothers movie would just DIE laughing at the “sell me your children! Sell them to me” bit

Also Cassandra Petersen/Elvira was a Groundlings alumni with Reubens and shows up as the biker mama(“I say, give him to me.”) in Big Adventure, which gives some background for her eulogy of him.

https://tmlarts.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/groundlings.jpg

I still die laughing at "Wrong, glass, sir."

I somehow didn't realize Edie McClurg was a Groundling

Yup indeed, she's in the original theater show/HBO special

and shows up as the biker mama(“I say, give him to me.”) in Big Adventure

Oh wow, that was her?!

Wow, Cassandra Petersen's wikipedia page is really something. Anyone read her memoir? Sounds like it could be lots of fun.

It’s just a rip-off of Maila Nurmi’s wikipedia page

Cassandra P is amazing. She also took care of John Paragon's final resting place at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. His ashes are in a Jombi box and it's beautiful.

Didn't know about this single until now (xgau named it one of 1986's best singles):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnmJGwfWAo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hlieo6mM7rk

Shout Factory has repressed their Blu-ray set of Pee-Wee's Playhouse Complete Series which had been out-of-print for a while. Street date is August 27.

kinda creepy to see this thread get bumped now

The new HBO documentary is so good! highly recimmend

just watched part 1 and very much enjoyed it. I have a childhood memory of watching the HBO version of the stage show at a friend's house and realizing that there was this whole other side of Pee-Wee's Playhouse that was more ... adult. fun to see where all of it came from.

Pee-wee Herman will be on the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on Thanksgiving... tune in or set your DVRs!

― kingfish, Tuesday, November 24, 2009 2:42 PM

Make America 2009 again...

Loved the doc. Really well done.

all of matt wolf's docs are great btw would recommend any of his other films, marion stokes project in particular

i think i've only seen the Biosphere one and yeah it was really good

i’m definitely going to check out his other work, he really had the perfect sensibility for the Pee-Wee doc

couple of lingering questions
1) wikipedia briefly mentions another brother Luke, who is not referenced at all in the doc. I wonder what happened there.
2) re the 2000’s child p0rn bullshit: is the implication that Jeffrey Jones gave up Paul’s name to try to reduce his own charges? Or is that just me reading too much between the lines

iirc the talking head who provides the information in the doc says that the person who accused Jeffrey Jones also named Reubens, having been to Reubens' house with Jones. the fact that jones was an actual pdophle and actually was abusing the person in question goes unsaid

ok thx (also ugh, obv)

I’ve only seen Wolf’s Arthur Russell doc. I think this new one is much better. No unnecessary talking head opinions from people outside Reubens’ sphere, for one, or dinky “homages”.

I still need to see the doc, but I remember those accusations collapsing once it became clear he collected an enormous amount of erotica - like he would actually purchase things in bulk - and they found a publication or two filled with really old photographs that also included a photo of someone that was underage. Unfortunate, but not evidence of pedophilia much less someone indulging in it. Having said that, I had one social media connection who refuses to believe anything but the worst about Reubens and was very vocal about that after he died, and sadly judging by the comments, she wasn't alone in that regard. I don't doubt the documentary will keep such misconceptions from growing, but unfortunately I'm sure there will always be people who just want to believe the worst and act all high and mighty over anyone who says otherwise.

Unsorted lots, common with collectors of all kinds. Cheap, and there's often something in there valuable enough to make sifting through the heap worthwhile.

yeah even the lawyer that represented him said something like it was the first child pornography case she’d been involved with where there wasn’t even a single obvious photo etc (paraphrasing)

Hollywood is crazy, man. Jeffrey Jones was found guilty of MAKING cp and they're like "Do you wanna do 33 episodes of Deadwood, big homie?

i know, plus they brought him back for the movie!

yeah it’s fucking wild.

it does scare me what happens to reubens, there's this sort of... i mean it kinds reminds me of the roddy mcdowall thing, where he got busted for collecting prints of films back in the '70s. and particularly... i'm glad it's ok to say this because reubens does apparently acknowledge it in the new documentary... there's a long history of queer people being involved in collector culture. i don't know to what extent his doing a children's show influenced his being closeted. i don't know the situation and i don't want to make a blanket judgement, but i feel like kevin clash got done the same way, that he was specially targeted because he was queer. i don't feel comfortable saying that because i don't want it to be taken as justification. it's not justifiable for an adult to have sex with a minor. it never was, and at the same time, it was _endemic_ in former times. and the moral outrage about that has been _selective_.

he was publicly out in the '70s when he was all but unknown but made a decision to go back in the closet in order to advance his career. this was well before the late '80s TV show, maybe even before he created the Pee Wee character with Groundlings in the late '70s, if I'm remembering the timeline in the doc. I'm sure the show contributed to his desire to remain closeted, but it seems he had already accepted that decision as the price of fame.

yeah that whole aspect of his story was harrowing. the unpredictability of what element of queer lifestyle is going to trip someone’s moral alarm - especially if that someone is running for public office and is going to make their name off you.

I'm pretty sure they got it worse because of their sexuality. So much of the right-wing LGBT hysteria is about how they're going to corrupt children, not just in leading that lifestyle or merely accepting it but that they're somehow preying on them. I'm sure when an accusation comes up, privately they're like "SEE! I TOLD YOU!" If anything, they're more open it now and more comfortable about their paranoid bigotry thanks to our current far-right government.

*open about it

interesting thing from the doc that i never realized was that the idea of doing a children's show was never on his radar in the slightest until it was brought to him after the success of the first movie. in hindsight the idea of a children's show seems like the obvious progression/endpoint for that character and i always assumed it must have been bouncing around his brain, but in the doc he claims that he was totally shocked by the suggestion at first, that it had never once occurred to him that this character would be presented to children in that way. obviously he got on board pretty quick, but i was surprised that it wasnt something he ever would have considered on his own.

I don't think it was accidental that they focused on his resistance to outside perspectives for a bit towards the beginning of the doc. He couldn't see what other people saw plainly (i.e. his detour into Saturday morning kids' tv).

I always thought it was funny/weird that one of my uncles, who was in his late 20s when Pee Wee's Playhouse was on TV, seemed to like the show as much as I did as a kid. But I don't think I knew just how big of a deal Pee Wee was *before* the show. Like, my uncle and my dad (who sometimes watched with me) probably first got hip to Pee Wee from his Letterman appearances.

I'm pretty sure they got it worse because of their sexuality. So much of the right-wing LGBT hysteria is about how they're going to corrupt children, not just in leading that lifestyle or merely accepting it but that they're somehow preying on them. I'm sure when an accusation comes up, privately they're like "SEE! I TOLD YOU!" If anything, they're more open it now and more comfortable about their paranoid bigotry thanks to our current far-right government.

― birdistheword

Unfortunately I can confirm that this is very much a thing that still happens today. I have some friends who were public school teachers. One of them, when she came out to her administrators as trans, was given the choice of either not transitioning or no longer being a teacher. She is no longer a teacher.

yes this was an exceptional documentary and obviously bittersweet.

I kind of missed the CP charge when that happened, must have not been paying attention to popular culture. It seemed much less damaging to his career than the porn theater charge; his defiance about it must have helped in that regard, but it's clear from the audio recorded the day before his death it was personally much more upsetting.

the other bummer in this was the reminder that Phil Hartman publicly repudiated him after the theater arrest.

yeah there was a lot going on there - both of those dudes are like icebergs where 95% is below the surface so i think that was more about unresolved beef than phil actually believing it, yknow. which kinda makes it worse.


and by many accounts phil could be a petty motherfucker when he wanted to be. (much like reubens.)

A fun surprise to learn that his closest celeb friends post-arrest were David Arquette and Debi Mazar.

Arquette seems like such a good dude, almost in spite of kooky weird fuckup vibes

I know someone in LA who was his friend; she would get the full birthday greetings experience every year, and like many others, had no idea he was ill.

Reubens appears in Arquette’s OKish low budget slasher comedy The Tripper (2006 - think I saw it at an old FrightFest, didn’t seem to get much of a UK release otherwise).

I'm glad to see HBO/Max are carrying not only the films (I've still never seen Big Top or the last one) but also the whole Playhouse series, which I plan on watching this weekend while baked.

I remember watching Pee-Wee's Playhouse every Saturday during its first season. Saw the first movie in theaters, too. Never saw the second movie, and kinda slipped out of the habit of watching Playhouse after the first season, but it really was a brilliant show and so uniquely nuts and deliberately timeless that I bet it holds up beautifully.

oh yeah the clips in the doc really stirred crazy memories. I too don't remember how many of these I watched, def not all of them; I was already in my late teens when it aired. I was particularly impressed by the opening titles and the talk about all the work that went into making that perfect enough to pass his approval.

I have also NEVER seen that Christmas special. I've never even heard of it! It looks amazing!

anyway I came away from this with so much deep admiration for Reubens as an actor, performer, artist, and human. I'm sure his was prickly and hard to deal with until the end, but whatever.

My senior year psychology teacher (who bore the name Dick Koch, but styled it out) sent my boisterous table of jokers, punks and theatre nerds to see Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure in its first week of release, as an extra credit assignment.

i'm going to one-up suzy here and relate that my parents knew one of reubens' friends in new york, who i remember us having lunch with in 1987. she told us that he had always been obviously incredibly talented, and that he had tons of different characters in his stand-up act, and that pee-wee was just one of them, and she never even thought it was one of the best ones

Hahaha, nice.

Finished this tonight. I delayed because I was low-key annoyed that Wolf went with fgti-lite (Jon Brion) on this one, but that is not a besmirchment on either Wolf or Brion, just an acknowledgement of the real feelings of human people

scott was annoyed on FB about the insertion of Wolf and his ethic on the closing bookend of the film and I was prepared for it, but my interpretation was so different. There didn’t seem to be a way for Reubens to possibly communicate (within the context of a doc about Pee-Wee) the grueling and brain-changing effects of being targeted with weird homophobic/sexual-deviency allegations being press-promoted-for-profit

It felt important I think that Paul’s withdrawal was reflective of how traumatizing this aspect of his arc was in the storytelling of Paul’s life— he claimed to have become “a different person” and I believe him

otm