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

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