Pee Wee's Playhouse: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. Where we are your talking chairs of talking points, you're disembodied genie heads of general interest trivia, your bow tie claude bastions of binality. My name is Jordan run Tag, you're.

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Speaker 2: Porn theaters of petty talking points, and I'm Alex Sigel.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: Not even ninety seconds into this episode, we already got that in there.

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Speaker 2: It's the other shoe of a two part pee Wee Hermon series.

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Speaker 1: That is correct. We are back with part two of our deep dive into the lives and times. I guess there's only one life and really one time of pee wee Herman. You take my meaning. That's right. It's pee wee two, pee harder nay, good day to pee wee. Stop stop it. You don't like a good day to pee wee. They're all so bad, they're so they're so bad. Last week we discussed his rise via alternative comedy, stage show and Tim Burton produced film. Today we're going to explore the delightly acidic Saturday Morning kids show, Pee Wee's Playhouse, his trip to tabloid infamy, and his return to regain his rightful place in the pop culture pantheon. And this is all in honor of his creator, the late great Paul Rubens, who died of cancer in July at the age of seventy. Higel. As we opened last week's episode, you spoke at length and very eloquently. I might add about how much the character of Pee Wee Herman unsettled you. I was wondering, after all we discussed for that episode, have your feelings on him changed at all now now that you know more about him, is there less to fear? No? I still find it. I still find.

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Speaker 2: It and and kind of horrifying.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: But I'm happy other people don't.

00:02:05
Speaker 2: You know.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: It's weird because I always found him scary, but I loved him anyway. I don't know why, Ei. There's something it's like looking into the abyss. Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: There's just I don't really cotton onto like it's because you love the fifties, man.

00:02:22
Speaker 1: I just I don't really cut it into that.

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Speaker 2: That just the day glow for my bake light Pastel you know John Waters bowling shirt. How many other things can I cram in here to describe this vision?

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Speaker 1: Plastic flamingos, Yeah from my hometown Leminster, Massachusetts.

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Speaker 2: That's where the plastic lawn flamingo is invented. Lemonster or wister is somewhere near where I grew up. Huh, lemister mid National news this week when there were historic floods. It was on the Weather Channel's TikTok page and everything. I mean, it's either that are fentanyl, right, Yeah, that's a Springsteen song.

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Speaker 1: Will they shut.

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Speaker 2: Down the pink Flamingos and worster last night?

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Speaker 1: The flamingo doostm fentanyl? I mean as a kid, I used to find something very calm about all the fifties bland this, and now I really like it because I like the uncanny valleiness of it and the darkness of it. Oh yeah, the creepiness of it. I No, I mean my journey, I I I that's the part of it. I love.

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Speaker 2: It's like like I was saying that like Judy Garland Christmas Special Aesthetic.

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Speaker 1: But yeah, no, I don't know.

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Speaker 2: I haven't can't say I really like, Uh, I'm gonna will get my favorite mean iTunes review, only for Alex to lazily declare his ignorance of whatever topic they're they're discussing, like, you know, fine, we.

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Speaker 1: Got a very nice review this week. Somebody said that we've been all they listened to all the last month, which I think is very nice. Thank you. Somebody else has asked us to be their brothers, which listeners, Dear listeners, please accept this in your hearts. As your brothers, we are more than happy to be your audio brothers, your audio brethren. Do we get any more requests recently? I need to check. I wrote a lot of them down. Well.

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Speaker 2: I can reassure people that Big Trouble is happening, not the two thousands movies, Big the Masterpiece, Big Trouble, Little China.

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Speaker 1: Spoiler. You got some good, good ones coming up for Halloween. Yeah, it's my time. Yes, and I saw a. I was lucky enough to attend the screening of Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert documentary last night with it was the one after Toronto, so it's the second time the members of the Talking Heads have shared a stage since their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction twenty years ago, which was really cool. They had all Q and A afterwards, and I forgot what a great concert film that was part of me really wants to do stop making sense? Yeah we should. If anyone agrees, please tweeted us. And because I'm worried that not enough people would caref like that, please let us know on Twitter anyway, before we dive into the tigle. I imagine you did not watch Pee Wee's Playhouse growing up?

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Speaker 2: No, I again, it was just like something that my I was more of a Saturday Morning cartoon kid, like I was my big childhood says No, my big childhood memories are like Ninja Turtles really and then like Spiderman and X Men. Something about this just escaped me at that point. I think also, like, if this is what is this late eighties, I probably would have been just doing like Land Before Time constantly.

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Speaker 1: God that movie is way more unsettling and upsetting than Pee Wee, Herm and Jesus Christ.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I know my parents, my parents. Yeah, my parents told me it was like my favorite movie around this time. Says a lot about me.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I own know. This was just not on my radar. My parents had.

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Speaker 2: No none of my friends or peers like he was not like something that I was exposed to via osmosis. Just a real blind spot for me, which is part of why it's so fascinating to me.

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Speaker 1: Well, it's not the last time we used the word exposed in this episode. Ah, Let's dive in from the insane lengths that Paul Rubins went to preserve the illusion that Peelee was in fact a real person, to the insane lengths that he went to achieve his creative vision for the perfect googie playhouse, to the insane lengths he went to create an all natural cereal for kids that look like dog food, to the insane length of his weight. Oh, I don't know if you can keep that? You know what? What? End it there? Here's the second installment of our two part episode about pee Wee. Herman exploring everything you didn't know about Peele's Playhouse. Wow.

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Speaker 2: Wow, even the name sounds obscene. Sometime a playhouse pee Wee and playhouse clubhouse would have been better? Maybe Yeah, house.

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Speaker 1: Hog house, phe Wee's hog House, June, can we add a ding sound every time heigels as hog in this episode? According to Law, the story of Peewee's Playhouse begins at the premiere of Pewee's Big Adventure in nineteen eighty five, when the vice president of children's Programming at CBSUP approached Paul Rubins, manager about potentially working on a show for them. In reality, I get the sense that this offer didn't materialize, or at least solidify until after the financial success of the film, because, as we talked about in the last episode, everyone thought pee Wee's Big Adventure was kind of weird and didn't really think it had much of a chance for mass appeal. They rolled it out slowly in theaters across the country, So yeah, I can't imagine that a network TV executive would have watched that and said we want that on our airwaves, So they probably waited until the dollars rolled in. But what is agreed upon is that when the CBS network did approach Paul Rubins, the original idea was for it to be an animated show, and this didn't really sit well with Paul. As he later told Rolling Stone, I'd had the stage show originally, so I was much more interested in doing something closer to that, something live action. So when they suggested doing a cartoon, I said, I'm not really interested in that. Let's do a real kid show. I was a big howdy dooty freak going up. I was actually on one show when I was a kid in the audience and was much more interested in doing something like that Howdy Duty Captain Kangaroo. A lot of local kid shows that were on a long time ago, those were the influences, and in this era this was sort of a radical departure from the Saturday morning TV lineup. Though live action kids programming was big in the fifties, like he just mentioned, by the eighties it was pretty much unheard of. PBS had educational shows like Mister Rogers and Sesame Street, but major networks were dominated by cartoons. In fact, by the time Pewee's Playhouse premier in nineteen eighty six, it was the only fully live action kid show on the Big three Saturday morning lineup. The debatable exceptions are reruns of Kidvid on NBC, martially live action but mostly animated, and ABC's weekend special anthology series, which occasionally included live action specials. But Paul Rubins was passionate about live action. He told the av Club in two thousand and six, I was thinking about how important all those kid shows were to me when I was a kid, and how much I feel like they affected me, and that just seems really exciting to me. I was really excited about the idea that doing a real kid show could potentially affect kids in an amazingly positive and great way. However, he did incorporate elements of animation in the program. One of the most popular these segments follow the adventures of Penny, a young girl with as you may have guessed, pennies for eyes. Horrifying and why did they do that?

00:09:42
Speaker 2: Are they not familiar with the concept of placing coins over dead people's eyes to pay the way for the ancient Greek ferryman Karen.

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Speaker 1: That's how far back that goes? Yeah, that seemed like some kind of like ring around the rosy like plague era.

00:09:57
Speaker 2: Nicish thing to pay the ferrymen to get you across the river sticks.

00:10:02
Speaker 1: Wow, love sticks.

00:10:05
Speaker 2: That's a Simpson That's a Simpsons throwaway joke they do in one of the Halloween or a Treehouse of Horror episodes where they're like across the river sticks and they they it's like a river in hell and it's a bunch of skeletons singing along to a lady of the morning.

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Speaker 1: She's my lade. Did they name themselves sticks and then have come sail away as like a river sticks reference?

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Speaker 2: Possibly? I don't know who gives a shit. I hate that man. Really, they're no Boston, I'll tell you that much. You only like Boston because you interviewed Tom Schultz. I like Boston because Boston is diy as hell. Yeah, dude, that whips that is legit DIY rock. It might be like pompous, and he might be like a total weirdo who hounded his bandmates to death. But uh oh, Brad Delt was there and one of the drummers died on like a rock cruise, right? Did he like fall overboard? I was working on a theory that Tom Schultz is killing the members of Boston who don't live up to his exacting specifications. But that's illegally actionable claim. So hey, Brad Delt, didn't he like young himself?

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Speaker 1: Yeah? No, no, no, no, it was he. I think he suffocated himself with barbecue charcoal in his bedroom.

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Speaker 2: Jesus Christ. That's a plot point of that Netflix show Beef with Stephen Stephen. That's like a final destination thing with Stephen Young and have you seen that show.

00:11:33
Speaker 1: I've heard it's really good. It is really it's really good. Ali Wong and Steven Young. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: It opens with him returning barbecue grills to home depot, and the guy's like, you've bought and returned all these barbecue girls. And it's later revealed that he's putting them in his bedroom and using them for a suicide attempt and then returning them when it fails.

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Speaker 1: Two charcoal grills were found to be placed in the bathtub and lip, causing the room to fill smoke. I had to somebody had to have read the lead singer from Boston's Wikipedia page when they were writing that script. I refuse to believe that two people came to that. God, this is dark. It's pee Wee's Playhouse. Damn it, it fits. Penny Penny Yes, the animated segment Penny on Pee Wee's Playhouse. This clamation segment, which apparently originated from the network's request from more female characters in Peewe's Playhouse, was created by two men who would go on and become Titans in animation, Nick Park and Craig Bartlett. Nick Park is best known to me as one of the creators of the British series Wallace and Grommet, alongside Peter Lord and Craig Bartlett went on to create Hey Arnold for Nickelodeon. Oh yeah. In fact, the character of Arnold, you know, football Head, was created when Bartlett was testing clamation techniques for Penny And Speaking of Nickelodeon, one of the composers on Pee Wee's Playhouse was Mark mothers Bow of Divah, who would go on to do the music for Rugrats. According to him, a composition for Pee Wee's Playhouse was a tight turnaround. He told ew I would get a tape of the show on Monday, write the music on Tuesday, recorded on Wednesday, mailed it on Thursday, and Saturday we'd watch it on TV. The turnaround was fast. They were scrambling. That's basically our turnaround time for the show. That's insane. That's yeah, that's nuts.

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Speaker 2: People should not be working on that that schedule other spots a machine man.

00:13:31
Speaker 1: I love his work. That's insane. What else did he do had he done aside from rug Rats? Did he do some other kid adjacent or like kid show that's mostly for adults that he was involved with.

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Speaker 2: I think he did some of the Wes Anderson stuff that makes sense. Yeah, he did Clifford the Big Red Dog, the one with Martin Short, the show, Oh oh, the TV show.

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Speaker 1: Oh. I read that big takedown of Martin Short the other day and it made me smile. You don't like Martin Short, No, oh man, dude, I loved I loved Jimmy Glick. I thought that show was hilarious. Okay, parts of that were funny. I just can't it can't sustain them.

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Speaker 2: There's there's some off there's some off the cuff diss that he does to someone.

00:14:18
Speaker 1: Oh it's the big sad voiced loser from Ray Romano, Brad whatever with the sad eyes. Oh yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 2: He's like he's he's He prompts him with some question and the guy's like, well, you're just getting that off the website and Short as Jimmy instantly goes, oh, because there's so many books written about you. There's also a really great one of him just rasing Kurt Russell about the fact that Kurt Russell's middle name is Vogel.

00:14:46
Speaker 3: It just keeps going Vogel, Kurt Vogel Russell and Kurt Russell just loses it. They were apparently really good friends, which is adorable.

00:14:57
Speaker 1: Are good friends? Oh? I like that? Yeah.

00:14:59
Speaker 2: When Martin Shorts wife died, Kurt Russell went to the neighboring town and bought out an entire flower shop, uh, and then went and bought vases for all of them by himself. Goldie Hawn offered to help, and he said, no, this is something I have to do myself. And they were they were gonna put her ashes in the like lake that their property went, and Kurt Russell lined the entire dock and walkway.

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Speaker 1: Back to the house with flowers.

00:15:28
Speaker 2: So it's just like, if you could inspire Kurt Russell to do that, like you gotta, You're a good guy.

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Speaker 1: You're okay. In my book, the piece was a takedown of his acting style that had nothing but lovely things to say about him as a human being.

00:15:41
Speaker 2: Martin Schortz, Yeah, I haven't seen only murders in the building, but yeah, man, I just I just respect that. The Jimney glick bit. You know, I love anyone who is just obnoxious to celebrities and and just punctures, punctures that veil, you know.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: I like that. The George Harrison anecdote you sent me from in Short's memoir where he went to see the Hunt for Red October at some famous person's house and George Harrison was invited. Who is the director it was? It was a director. Oh it was Dick Donner. Is Richard Donna? Richard is right? Yeah? Richard Donner had a screening of a Hunt for Red October at his house and invited Martin Short and George Harrison, and they ended up next to each other at their home theater and George Harrison asked permission to spark a joint.

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Speaker 2: No, it was Donner, it was the joint and was passing it around. And George Harrison's reaction when he was confronted with the joint was, ah, the sixties, smoked a joint, got high and immediately started talking over the entire film.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: So he his science Theater three thousand style.

00:16:48
Speaker 2: So so yeah, So he and Martin Short like went to a different room and just like browed down.

00:16:53
Speaker 1: I think they got kicked out because George Harrison was saying, I can't watch Sean Connery and movies. He's just too damn famous. It's like watching a Beatle and you know him and Martin Shorter like stone out of their minds and they both laugh, and then yet then they kick him out, and then they were going to make plans to get lunch the next day, and Martin Short forgot that he had to fly somewhere and they never got lunch, which he was sad about. But then flash forward years later, after George Harrison died, Danny Harrison, who was a spitting image of his dad, walked up to Martin Short somewhere at some event he never met him, and just hugged him and said, explained, my dad told me that if I was ever to meet anybody that meant a lot to me in my life, to hug them, And so he was giving him a hug for his late father, George Harrison, which I think is great. We love our our tear jerker. George Harrison anecdotes on this show. Yeah, exactly, all right, Good luck he using any of that music for pee Wee's Playhouse. Oh yeah, kind of relates. Other famous physicians who wrote for pee Wee's Playhouse include George Clinton, which I need to hear that. Todd run Grin makes a lot of sense. Van Dyke Parks makes a ton sense. He did music for Brave Little Toaster Mitchell Froom, who I think has something to do with Crowded House. If I'm not mistaken, dueezl Zappa makes a lot of sense. And I can't. Sorry, my eyes are what's the last I can't my my nemesis, Danny Elfman. I didn't realize how much you hated Danny Elfman until last episode.

00:18:22
Speaker 2: I just it's like a It just reminds me of a Cassio keyboard on the Poka setting. I cannot find with a song that George Clinton wrote for pee Wee's Playhouse.

00:18:36
Speaker 1: Maybe did it under a fake name. This is not a gimmicky segue. This is a real segue. I say that because the theme song to pee Wee's Playhouse is credited to Ellen Shaw, but in reality it's sung by Cindy Lauper, who I guess was doing her impression of Betty Boop. She admitted as much in her memoir, writing pee Wee wanted me to sing the theme song. I told him I would, but I couldn't have it under my name because I was going to put out True Colors, which had a serious tone. In our superficial world, people couldn't accept both at the same time, so I sang the theme using the pseudonym Ellen Shaw, and then Paul Rubins sent me back a tape that was so hilariously funny of me singing the theme with him in between saying, Oh no, my career is ruined. Oh no, he's a nut. I love him. Oh man. The Residents did some of the composing for this. I saw that and I didn't think remind me of the Residents are. They're like some art pop collective.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're like one of the longest running avant garde experimental bands out of San Francisco.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: They've been like since punk day one.

00:19:37
Speaker 2: Really weird stuff and just like weird pioneers in terms of different approaches, Like they put out a CD ROM album at one point, like ahead of anyone else, and a lot of multimedia stuff. Oh yeah, they're fascinating guys. The eyeball heads, that's their big thing. They maintained their animinity by performing in tuxedos and giant eyeball masks.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: That's horrifying. You enjoy that and not pee wee herman. So those are some of the musical names who've showed up on Peewee's Playhouse, but there were also some feature acting stars as well. Higel tell us about some of the folks who got their start on Pee Wee's Playhouse. Well.

00:20:19
Speaker 2: We mentioned Phil Hartman last week as Captain Carl. Jimmy Smits made an early career appearance as Conky the Repairman. John Singleton Boys in the Hood director right Yeah, served as the PA on the Playhouse set five years before that movie. Cool Rob Zombie was also a PA around the same time that he formed White Zombie, which is that's you know, honestly, that makes more sense than I think you would think at first Blush like Zombie has that sort of same Tim Burton fixation on like fifties b horror.

00:20:53
Speaker 1: You know, didn't he just direct something I remember he like ruins something. Oh yeah, he just rebooted them Monsters with his wife. Yeah yeah.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: I hate his movies. I don't like his movies at all, but I respect the purity of his vision. Pre fame, Lawrence Fishburn played Cowboy Curtis and apparently Larry was he credited as Larry at this point.

00:21:17
Speaker 1: Larry Fishburn that his whole career would have been different if he remained Larry's.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: I think he's credited as Larry and Apocalypse Now and maybe also Nightmare in Elmstreet.

00:21:26
Speaker 1: That was like his first stage name, but I didn't know that.

00:21:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, he brought a level of intensity to the series that you would not expect. He told Entertainment Weekly. I was in the DC area making Gardens of Stone, and I got this call that Paul wanted to see me. I had almost no hair on my head because I had been doing this military picture. I auditioned as a Yule Brenner esque kind of cowboy, very dark and serious. Rubens and the show's co writer John Peregrine both looked at me and said.

00:21:54
Speaker 1: Could you lighten it up? What?

00:21:58
Speaker 2: So?

00:21:58
Speaker 1: Wait?

00:21:59
Speaker 2: He must be referencing, did you Brenner do a lot of Westerns? Or did Was he just the evil cowboy robot in Westworld? That's the only one I know that is an incredibly specific energy to bring to a children's television show. Audition the murderous cowboy robot from Westworld?

00:22:17
Speaker 1: God Love You, Larry might me just because he was bald too, might just be a bone reference.

00:22:21
Speaker 2: Well, he got the role, but he was absent for most of season one because he was filming the aforementioned best installment in my opinion of the Nightmare and Elm Street franchise Dream Warriors starring Patricia Arquette, and has an incredible theme song by Dawkin the Band Dawkin Anyone Riba. The mail Lady was played by the future Law and Order star Esapatha Murkison, who struggled to adapt with the on set buffoonery. Much like Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey, she could not sanction the buffoonery. Speaking on the bonus features of the Peebe's Playhouse Blu Ray Collection, Murkerson recalled that the mere sight of Rubens in his Pee Wee outfit made it hard for her not to laugh. She said, from the first time they met on sep from that point on, I know that Paul knew he could make me laugh, and he tortured me. At one point, the director came over and said, in this very low voice, I need to get this shot. How do I get this shot? And I said, well, I can't look at Paul. I really thought I was going to lose the job. Ah, great one, Natasha Leone. The first season of Pee Wee's Playhouse featured sewn Weiss later who starred as Goldberg and Mighty Ducks as one of the Playhouse Gang and Future. Ah, she's like a Netflix star at this point. Right, she did Orange, the New Black, Russian Doll. Oh, poker Face isn't on Netflix, but yeah, streaming icon Natasha Leone. Have you seen Russian Doll? He would love that show. She's just doing Colombo. She's really leaning into the New York accent on it. Just it's so great.

00:23:52
Speaker 1: Just one more thing though, by the way, while I have you, that's a hell of a Peter Folk.

00:24:00
Speaker 2: I'm doing Natasha Leone, but she adds the smoker's rasp to it. Yeah, but oh it's great. She's it's so good. Great show. But the two of them only lasted a season, and you posit two explanations for this one is that they were fired for being too rambunctious. Great note, it's like a Bond Scott's death certificate, right, death by misadventure.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: I wouldn't mind to read death by rambunctiousness. I just recorded a narrative voice over where I referenced death by misadventure. That's how Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones officially does.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: I think it was like a British thing, like they just like have they classified like overdoses and drunks. But the more likely reason is that CBS simply moved production during the second season from New York City to LA necessitating a new playhouse gang of children, including Alison Porter, who went on to star in nineteen ninety one's Curly Sue.

00:24:53
Speaker 1: What are you laughing at? You, son of a bitch? It requires a bit of explanation, but you know what, why stop now on the whole death by misadventure thing. I had a friend who worked at a factory in high school, and he was a very, very big guy, and he reprided himself on being able to lift things. And there was a big barrel and everyone's telling him not to lift this barrel. I mean, he did it anyway, and he lifted it and he was top heavy now and he tripped and fell backwards and the top fell off the barrel and it was filled with rainbow sprinkles and they came and just washed over his head and face. And I was just thinking, if he choked and suffocated, the death on rainbow sprinkles, like that's death by misadventure.

00:25:40
Speaker 2: I'm imagining like a very dramatic moment where like it's like Chief in one flew over the cuckoo's nest, like lifting lifting the water fountain. But it just He's was it was the ice cream sprinkles. Ice cream sprinkles. Yeah, God, what a way to go.

00:25:55
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:25:56
Speaker 2: Though Leon's time in the show was short lived, it did make an impact on her, she recalled twenty eighteen interview with Entertainment Weekly. Nothing makes me feel legitimately cool quite so much as the fact that I was on that show. She stayed in contact with Rubens throughout the years, mentioning in another EW video that he sends the best gifts gifts or gifts.

00:26:15
Speaker 1: Oh my good than this. I'm not I'm not getting into this. I say no now I don't even remember what I say. No.

00:26:23
Speaker 2: Is it gifts as in like present or like reaction gifts?

00:26:28
Speaker 1: Oh, reaction gifts? Okay, Yeah. Conan O'Brien said something about that too, like on somebody's birthday he would just blow up their phone by sending like old timey animation gifts and stuff all day. It's it's gifts, by the way, It's not just gifts. Okay, you can't you can't.

00:26:43
Speaker 2: People who say that are that's a wilful misinterpretation of the English language. It stands for graphics interchangeable format. You use the same sound as the words when you're pronouncing an acronym. It's not draphics interchangeable format. People say you, I don't know what to tell you.

00:27:01
Speaker 1: You're wrong. It's black and white issue. That's not the way the word sounds.

00:27:05
Speaker 2: You just say, what do you You can pronounce a t F instead of alcohol, tobacco on fire. You're gonna pronounce it a t F. You know, Well, that's an act.

00:27:15
Speaker 1: That's it. You're you're spelling it out. It's like NASA is like something that you say as a new word, as opposed to like FBI.

00:27:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that still doesn't that still gets in my point. Like you said, it's national air, but no one pronounces it NASA NASA. I'm sure there's still hard a sounds, there's still the valve sounds that are present in those words aerospace, NASA, not NASA, not how the English language works.

00:27:45
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I can sand people. I don't care.

00:27:49
Speaker 2: None of this, none of this postmodern every interpretation is valid. No one's feelings get hurt it bull, that's not the way words work.

00:28:02
Speaker 4: Full stop, cold blooded murder of the English tongue. I'll die on this hill. It's it's it's wrong, it's black and white. Has the world gone mad? We must have standards. I'm sorry, like you can't which there are rules Market zero.

00:28:26
Speaker 2: After Ruben's death, Natasha Leone posted on Twitter, love you so much, Paul. Thank you for my career in your forever friendship all these years and for teaching us what a true original is.

00:28:37
Speaker 1: That is true and that's why I like Paul Rubens true original. Yeah, that is true.

00:28:42
Speaker 2: Speaking of the location change, it's probably for the best that production of the show moved from New York to la and its second season because this set in New York was built on the fifth floor of a Soho loft that had once been a sweatshop so still was still was so yeah. Soeg machines had to be cleared out before the set could be and air conditioning had to be pumped in from a truck five stories below on the street because the room was so stuffy. George McGrath, who was a writer and puppeteer on the show, later told Entertainment Weekly the building was a sweatshop. If the elevator opened on a floor of four hours, you'd literally see a thousand Asian women on sewing machines. Rob Zombie added, it was this cramped mess. It looked so unprofessional. Supervising producer Steve Oakes also observed Paul sweats a lot, so we went out and rented one of those air conditioning trucks that cools off jets while they're on the tarmac. At one point everyone was wearing parkas that had colds in the middle of August.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: That's like the shoot for the thing.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: When they were shooting down, Yeah, bouncing back and forth between intense freezer cooled set.

00:29:46
Speaker 1: And the la heat.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: Rubens exerted a Jerry Lewis like auturist level of control over the set and its elaborate designs. Paul had a background as a visual artist and painter, and he brought that to bear through the art direction of the show. Employed artists like Gary Panter, Rick Heitzman, and Wayne White as designers, and together they approached the set like an evolving installation. Panter would later tell Rolling Stone in nineteen eighty seven, Paul's got a strong sense of everything he likes. He's really smart, and he's a collector of all the kind of stuff that's on the set, so he knows that genre inside out. He's got a great collection of children's textbook from the thirties and forties. His old house in la was covered with toys and art and objects.

00:30:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, this would cause legal problems for him down the road, but we'll we'll get to that later.

00:30:33
Speaker 2: A friend would describe the aesthetics of Pee's Playhouse to The Sun Sentinel as atomic fifties Peewee. Herman is completely into bad taste, completely into cheese. It's a very Jane Mansfield mentality. Wayne White would tell ARTnews dot Com my references were old Fisher Price toys and little Golden books. We were trying to start anew to find this niche of design that hadn't been poured over a million times. We were doing a lot of nostalgic kind of things because we were all baby boom and had grown up with the same kinds of toys and had the same kinds of memories. But I mainly thought of the packaging that the toys would come in. I was also thinking of old textile designs from the late forties and early fifties for wallpapers. I was mostly inspired by a lot of old shirts and ties, especially the Polynesian wallpaper that's around mister window. In this same article, Gary Panter, who appears to be the chief designer on the show, talks about how they saw themselves essentially straight laced rebels like Pewee and Big Adventure, who saw themselves as revolting against the brash contemporary style. He said, when I got to LA in the punk rock days, I became best friends with Matt Greening. We were both determined to subvert the media, and I wrote a manifesto about it in nineteen seventy nine, encouraging artists to infiltrate media and take the design of children's television and TV shows out of the hands of the money men. And that happened to a great extent. Peewee in a few breakthrough shows like ren and Stimpy and The Simpsons transformed the video landscape. But it wasn't all heavy handed missions and manifestos. According to Wayne White, it was a dreaming job. I didn't have any responsibilities other than to be creative. I was a child. I wasn't an adult at all. That was handled by the producers and the directors and the assistant directors and the cameraman and all that. We would just play like idiots. It's almost embarrassing how irresponsible I felt at the time, you know, and everyone just indulge us. We would just sit around and smoke wheed all day, laugh and it was just incredible. Just the best job you can imagine, must be nice, I just got it.

00:32:28
Speaker 1: It makes me so furious.

00:32:32
Speaker 2: The landscape in which we live, where we're like constantly forced to do more, produce more with less resources, and a big streaming giant can come in and just buy your streamer and delete your life's work that no longer pops up on IMDb. And we got so much incredible art out of this environment where shockingly, artists were just allowed to be artists.

00:32:55
Speaker 1: Like what a concept. I do have a question for though, go on, if you write a manifesto, yeah, are you automatically insufferable? I mean, what do you got? You got Karl Marx, you got the Unabomber, you got Jerry Maguire, the futurists. Is there anyone who's written a manifesto that would buck that trend? Yeah?

00:33:19
Speaker 2: I guess manifesto does kind of have an't negative Conde didn't to it tweet at us if you, if you were a loved one, has a positive manifesto, you'd like to share. God, we're gonna get like seventeen Now we're not gonna get anyone. No one's gonna tweet to me.

00:33:34
Speaker 1: But it's like the Jeff fox Worthy think, if you've written a manifesto might be awful.

00:33:44
Speaker 2: As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information. After these messages, Paul Rubins exacting attention to detail wound up costing him both emotionally and financially. It feels like financially should have gone before emotionally there, but yeah, just a note for the future. Most Saturday Morning cartoons were produced for about two hundred and fifty thousand an episode, or what David Zaslov makes per second. I think in today's media landscape, Peebe's Playhouse cost somewhere between three hundred and fifty thousand or five hundred and fifteen thousand dollars per half hour. That is truly insane. Yeah, what's the average cost of a half hour? I mean that sounds about like these days, commercials go for way more than that single camera half hours on broadcast and cable. Oh, this was in twenty seventeen. One point five to three mil. Sounds about right, all right, I stand corrected. It's not insane. Paul was on the hook for all of that money. That's crazy, though, he told Rolling Start in twenty sixteen. Originally, I love quite a bit of money on Pebe's Playhouse. I was responsible financially for PB's Playhouse. So when it went over budget, not if it went over budget. When it went over budget, that came out of my pocket. I don't want to mention a figure, but we had one season that was over budget by a lot of money. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, not a little bit. I'm a perfectionist. I went to rebuild the whole playhouse door if it's too big or the wrong color. So I feel like I'm a great producer, But I also have distinct limitations in that department because I will always spend more money and not sacrifice quality. So it went over budget a lot, like every season at the time in the eighties. He would get very testy about this. When a reporter for Rolling Stone mentioned an episode of Pebe's Playhouse costs as much as a primetime show. Rubens responded by pulling the children are our future card. Aren't our children more important than ourselves? Why shouldn't Saturday morning children's programs be just as expensive as the things we watch at night?

00:35:53
Speaker 1: They shot this show on.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: Film before transferring it to tape for broadcast, which could have saved them some money. Rubens paid himself scale, though I respect that one of the directors of the animated segments, Philip Trumbo, would admit that though the Dinosaur Family segments had more revisions than anything I've ever worked on professionally, it won an enemy good for him.

00:36:18
Speaker 1: But Pee Wee's Playoffs didn't just cost Rubens financially, it also came damn near close to costing him insanity too. One thing I didn't realize as a kid was just how hard he worked to keep up the illusion that pee Wee Herman was a real person. You'll notice that Ruben's name doesn't actually appear in the Pee Wee's Playhouse credits. Instead, they simply list pee Wee Herman as himself. It became this Andy Kaufman style performance piece, basically with Paul Rubins building pee Wee up as a distinct entity from himself, and this was done as a conscious creative decision with his management team early on Tomorrow praise from Ghostbusters, there is no Paul Rubins, only pee Wee Herman. Year years, he maintained this persona for all of his public appearances, from talk shows to WrestleMania. He refused to be photographed out of character, and this became difficult at points because, for example, he was a heavy smoker, so we went to great lengths to avoid being photographed with a cigarette in his mouth or even drinking SODA's, fearing that he would be a poor influence on the children who admired him or admired pee Wee. Even interviews were done as pee Wee. As Bob Plunkett, a journalist based in Reuben's hometown of Sarasota, later wrote in Sarasota Magazine, no interviews with Paul were ever allowed, no photos of him were available, no allusions to him were permitted. The hometown boy makes good story I kept wanting to do was always squashed, and with what I considered to be a very heavy hand. We were even told that if we persisted we would not be allowed to publish any pictures, including ones of pee Wee. Fellow journalist T. Gertler made a similar observation in his nineteen eighty seven profile for Rolling Stone. The ground rules allowed no questions about Paul Rubens or about Pee Wee Herman's work methods. His office explained that I would be talking to pee Wee, but he wouldn't be using his pee Wee voice. I wondered if I should use a different voice. I thought of checking Sybil in the Three Faces of Eve Out of the Library, famously books about people with multiple personality disorder. Paul or pee Wee or whoever discussed this himself in the Rolling Stone article, saying, the problem to me is that I have two names, and beyond that there's not much of a story. This feels more right. I'm able to do all the things I want to do with this arrangement much better. There are so many things I would like to do, so many people. I probably am that it becomes a lot less complicated for me. At the time, this all added to his reputation. Vanity Fair journalist James Walcott wrote in nineteen eighty seven, Paul Rubins might be one of the few remaining performance artists who still believe in secrets, distance, and mystique. He's contained dynamo is out to spill his innards. Rubens himself would offer an explanation towards the end of his life that relied less on high concepts and smoke and mirrors. He said there was a higher likability factor to pee Wee Herman, and I made a decision to I guess I just became pee Weee for a while because I couldn't figure out how to make it in Hollywood. I didn't feel like I had anything to separate me from anyone else in town. This sounds really weird, but I was actually thinking of that musical number in Gypsy, you gotta have a gimmick. There are these strippers singing that song, and I was thinking about that and going a gimmick, Yes, that's good, which was probably closer to the truth. But all of this took a toll on Paul Rubens's parents, Milton and Judy Rubenfeld, to whom he was very close. As his mom told Rolling Stone in nineteen eighty seven, I'm not sure where Paul ends and pee Wee begins. He'd already changed his name from the family name of Rubenfeld to Rubens, and by the mid eighties she was having a hard time keeping up. She said, it's real weird when you're a Missus Rubens or a Missus Rubenfeld A this is Herman, it gets very confusing. Paul actually created fictionalized versions of Pewee's parents, Herman and Honey Herman, Yes, Herman Herman, in order to keep up the illusion that Peewee was a real person. So his actual parents had strict guidelines to follow if they attended premiers or charity events or any other functions, they were instructed not to identify themselves, not to associate with Paul slash Peewee in public, and definitely not to talk to the press. Despite what could easily be construed as a massive public rejection, Paul remained a very dedicated son. He even moved back to Sarasota to help care for his dad after he was diagnosed with cancer in the early two thousands. Considering he literally lived and breathed this character, you would think that writing episodes of Pee Wee's Playhouse was second nature to Paul, and that's sort of true. He did find it very easy to tap into that childlike part of his brain. This was also helped by games of interoffice hide and Seek that he would play to distract himself and his staff from the task of writing. Much like mister Rogers, Paul had an innate sense of how to talk to children, although unlike Fred Rodgers, he didn't make it his crusade to better the lives of children. He told Rolling Stone in twenty fourteen, one of the things I feel the show did really well was that we never talked down to kids. It was a show that assumed its viewers were very young but very smart. Never seemed like a kid's show if you were actually a kid. That's true. That's one of the things I liked about it at that age. One of the most memorable moments of the series. I always remember this, and I kind of almost thought I Mandela affected it. But then I would read recaps of you know, Paul Rubins after he died, and a lot of people mentioned this bit, so I'm glad it wasn't just me. There was the old you know, Oh, I really love something. Oh if he loved it so much, why don't you marry it? There were so many great jokes. You know, so many stupid childlike jokes in that show.

00:41:52
Speaker 2: I also know you are, But what am I? I? Well, that was like his catchhrase. But when I was watching the movie clips, I was like, oh, ninety percent of like I heard on the playground growing up came from this.

00:42:04
Speaker 1: Well, I don't think it came from this. I think he took it from the playground, is my guess. Like I think they were just things that kids always said, and then he like legitimizes in the right word. But then he would make it part of this bratty Peewee character that he became a lot less bratty on Peewee's Playhouse and The Big Adventure and all this the stuff that he would do on Letterman. He was definitely like a brady kid. That whole description you had to use the way you indebibly put it, a child throwing rocks at birds. That that's less in the playhouse. She much more of a genial eccentric in Peewey's Playhouse. But yeah, there was a whole you know, if you loved it so much, money Marriott thing he took this joke to his very literal conclusion by staging a wedding ceremony with a fruit salad which included a bowl of fruit wearing a veil, and they had somebody act as the priest doing the vows, and they stuck a microphone out in front of the fruit salad, who said nothing. So the priest bent its ear down close and said up, he says, I do.

00:43:09
Speaker 2: So.

00:43:10
Speaker 1: I remember that was pretty surreal and weird, and you know, I stand the commitment to the bit. I think that's admirable. Paul continued, a rolling stone. I really love kids. I'm always knocked out by kids, how funny they are and what they appreciate. The greatest moments in the writing room were always when myself or someone else who'd come up with something that would make us say, this is going to make a six year old fall off the couch. It was so fun and so rewarding to do something where the goal was just to make kids laugh and entertain them and show them a world that embraces creativity and nonconformity. He also pushed the envelope every now and then. You may recall a scene where he unpacks groceries for the camera, pulls out a jug of milk, then another jug of milk, and then lemonade, a reference to the old grade school verse that Peewee completed explaining where fudge is made. Despite these barely codd nods to childhood grow tesquery, if that's a word, CBS had surprisingly few notes during the production of the show. Rubens maintained creative control throughout the five seasons of Pee Wee's Playhouse and only recalled a handful of incidents where the network's Standard and Practices department demanded changes. He recalled to the av Club in the first episode, the network said, you can't stick that pencil and that potato because pencils are sharp and you might encourage kids to stab things. So we didn't do that.

00:44:32
Speaker 2: I was like, are you afraid of the dark? Or they wouldn't let kids use matches? Oh right, couldn't show kids striking matches on TV?

00:44:41
Speaker 1: Oh, and that's why they threw the special igniting power of dust. Yes, yes, there was also an episode they got a letter about where there was a fire in the playhouse and a firefighter showed up and he and miss Yvonne were flirting and he said, you have to have a smoke detector, and she said, I have one in my bedroom above the bed. He asked us to change that for subsequent airings of the show, so we went in and looped dialogue over it, so instead she said, I have one in my kitchen. I put it back to the original version for the DVD release, and there was a shot of a bathroom that we held for a really long time and you could hear pee Wee peeing. They asked us to tone down the sound of the peeing and at a score, so it was a little less graphic. All the changes they asked us to make seems really reasonable to me, and we accommodated them. I think in forty five episodes there were only maybe three other changes they ever asked for. One of these was they forbade pee Wee from emerging from a bathroom with a trail of toilet paper sticking to his shoe, and I also forbade him from saying the phrase I'll show you mine if you show me yours, oho and also making sun tea because of concerns that viewers didn't know about the dangers of bacteria growth in making sun tea, which I didn't know either. I thought sun tea was a piss thing. I think no, it's making iced tea in the sun.

00:45:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's like a thirty rock thing about somebody peeing in jars.

00:45:58
Speaker 1: One hour in the sun versus is five minutes and oh wow, okay, hey, speaking of talking heads, I just got a text from my friend. My friend Morgan out Tina Weymouth believes that David Burn's an actual murder. Oh no, I didn't. This is per Salon. In two thousand and three, she heard at a party that Burn had killed a boy in Brazil using voodoo. She wanted us to play hardy boys and solve the case. David is a vampire in a way. She told me. Psychics have seen him and they say that he just has a firewall around him.

00:46:30
Speaker 2: I want to do a top ten rock stars who have got involved with voodoo, because supposedly when Guns n' Roses got a Did did I tell you this in the in the GENR episode about guns and Axel and voodoo?

00:46:42
Speaker 1: I don't remember. I know we talked about it with Michael Jackson. Well, there's a first episode, think on hook. There's a two parter to this story.

00:46:49
Speaker 2: The one is that in the Large Engrass Band against Me had to put out when they were first, like they were on one of their smaller labels, when they're kind of coming up, they put out this record live tour DVD called We're Never Going Home, and in it they do an interview with another guy in another band who shared like a management personnel or something with guns n' Roses, and he was he was relaying the story that when Axel heard about the Against Me record reinventing Axel Rose, he was so furious that he created voodoo dolls of the band Against Me and utilized them. And then follow up, when I was researching GNR at page six about their like fan bootlegging selling drama, I managed to get a hold of their anar original A and R guy Tom Zutau, and he told me all this incredible off the record, and that when I called him, I wanted to get it on the record and set up an actual interview. He ghosted me and he was telling me how that all this voodoo stuff comes from. They got a manager in the mid nineties who I think is from Venezuela, and the guy's mom was like a like a voodoo priest or something, or like a pests or like seriously believed in like indigenous Venezuelan witchcraft, and that's where all of Axel's interest in voodoo came from.

00:48:09
Speaker 1: So what were we talking about?

00:48:12
Speaker 2: Oh, my favorite talking Heads anecdote is I think Brian Eno talking about He's like, the thing you have to understand is that David Byrne is a genuine eccentric. I remember we were walking, Yeah, they get mugged and he's like, My vision of that night is David Byrne being dragged off into the shrubs by a gang of men and just going oh no, oh, oh oh yeah.

00:48:35
Speaker 1: Right, like a cartoon character.

00:48:37
Speaker 2: Oh, like his arms raping around.

00:48:40
Speaker 1: That's so funny to me.

00:48:44
Speaker 2: Peewey's Playhouse, Voodoo or Not, premiered on September thirteenth, nineteen eighty six, thirty seven years ago this week. At the time, most kids shows were essentially flimsy vehicles to sell to, so Reuben's creation attracted a great deal of attention from critics who were fascinated by this postmodernist fever.

00:49:06
Speaker 1: Dream man.

00:49:07
Speaker 2: I want to do a thing about like, do you remember in the eighties and ninety early nineties how much adult was co opted into children's animation. I think I talked about this before, but Rambo, RoboCop, Aliens, and the Toxic Avenger and swamp Thing were all turned into animated shows to hawk action figure lines. Not a sample, Yeah, not a single one of those source material movies or comic books were appropriate for children. Comic books that could maybe make the edge case. But there is a swamp Thing plotline where his arch nemesis comes back from the dead and possesses his stepdaughter's husband and rapes her. And there's also one where swamp Thing grows a hallucinogenic fruit and feeds it to that same woman, Abigail Arcane, and they have a crazy acid tripping fever dream sex. He is plant, He is a plant. I think I have it right here. Actually now, I'm not going to look that up.

00:50:11
Speaker 1: Here's what I made earlier.

00:50:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I dude, I remember being a kid and getting the Alien's action figures, Like don't you remember that? Did you remember seeing that advertise Aliens and Predators? Predator that's six And that's why I saw Alien when I was six, because my dad was like, well, you're getting these action figures, you want to watch the original movie? And I had nightmares about it for like five years after that, Like legitimately, I finally stopped having nightmares about an alien growing inside me and kind of bursting out through my chest five years later. And it was because of these action figures that were marketed to children insane.

00:50:48
Speaker 1: It was more of a Thomas the Tank Engine guy because of Ringo. Yeah. Yeah.

00:50:52
Speaker 2: The New York Times describe Peewee as sweetly loony and unpredictable gentle. You get always tiptoeing on the edge of devastating absurdity.

00:51:00
Speaker 1: By the grace of God, go both of us. Yeah.

00:51:02
Speaker 2: He's a one man force battling the plague of boredom that has settled on Saturday morning programming for children. One element that was frequently commented upon was the fact that the characters on the show came from very diverse cultural backgrounds. The show won a total of fifteen Emmys throughout its five season run, including two for Missy Vaughan's hair, created by legendary hairstylist Sally Hirschberger, who is famous for creating Meg Ryan's late eighties poodle hair Yeah Shaggy shag cut Hershberger was at one points the most expensive hairstylist in New York City charging six hundred dollars for cut in the eighties, which is like what four thousand today. Oscar winning makeup v Neil, a judge on sci Fi's Face Off, won her first major award, a Daytime Emmy, for her work on pee Wee's Playhouse, and then she went on to win Academy Awards for Best Makeup for Beetlejuice, Missus Doubtfire, and ed Ward pee Wee. Though crucially not Paul Rubins was honored with a star on Hollywood Walk of Fame in nineteen eighty eight, gotten on the cover of Life and Rolling Stone magazines, and the keynote speech at the Republican National Convention, during which he was compared to Michael Dukakis. It's hard to think of a more nineteen eighties sentence than that, yeah, football players did the Peewee dance after scoring a touchdown. By the end of the nineteen eighties, it was estimated from was this that Q research, that one place that does all this market research that ninety six percent of all Americans recognized Pewee's name. But perhaps most touching to pee Wee or to Rubens was the accolade that he earned props from live action children's TV legend Bob, Captain Kangaroo keishin. That was a show I watched, Captain Kangaroo. I love you, Captain Kangaroo. Yeah, where did you?

00:52:56
Speaker 1: It was not on where I lived? Oh really, it was on for us?

00:52:59
Speaker 2: Yeah uh. In fact, Captain Kangaroo was such a big fan that he reviewed Peewee's VHS release in nineteen ninety six for Entertainment Weekly, praising its awesome production values. With the possible exception of the Muppets, you can't find such creativity anywhere on TV. Star Paul Rubins is an absolute genius, but I am personally offended by his spastic approach. Quite a one to two punch of criticism.

00:53:25
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, a child lead with the goods.

00:53:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, a child at home imitating his motions all day could drive parents crazy.

00:53:33
Speaker 1: That's the point. Yeah.

00:53:34
Speaker 2: When I made Captain Kangaroo, we would never do segments like the one in which Pee Weee tells viewers to scream at the top of the lungs whenever they hear the day's secret word. Compared to what's available for kids, though, programs that send the message that violence is an appropriate solution to a problem. These criticisms pale pee Weee is a benign character who treats his friends with respect. Another fan was David Bowie, who apparently invited Pee Wee Paul to open for him on tour twice Yes and Paul turned him down both times with the all timer reaction, Sorry, Bowie, I'm not an opening act. He would later allow it was one of his few professional regrets. Rubens used his growing notoriety to keep eccentric company. He became close to Doris Duke, the billionaire tobacco heiress at one point known as the richest woman in the world, and became close to her adopted daughter, Chandy Hefner. Chandy Hefner, they married each other one night in what's been described as an impromptu mock ceremony that at a dinner party in nineteen eighty nine at Duke's Diamond Head estate. It was attended by Jim Nighbors aka Gomer Pyle, and also I'mel dea Marcos, the first Lady of the Philippines. Rubens later said, I still have the temporary marriage license signed by Immel de Marcos, a woman party to innumerable human rights violations and.

00:54:57
Speaker 1: A lot of shoes, and our life story was turned into a musical by David Byrne Here Lies Love See. I'm taking this all as a sign that we got to do stop making sense.

00:55:06
Speaker 2: Uh so was Paul Rubins gay segue. Jim Nighbors was famously closeted in Hollywood. He was close to Rock Hudson for years, and the rumor among many gossip columnists was that the two were romantically involved. It was such a widely reported story that at one point in the early seventies, someone in the pair social circle sent out a gag wedding invite to people to witness the marriage of Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors, at which Hudson would take the surname of Neighbours' most famous character, the aforementioned Gomer Pyle, thus becoming Rock Pile, which is a hell of a setup for a medium funny gag like a Flintstone's grade pun.

00:55:49
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Supposedly, as a result of this, the pair maintained their distick in public for the rest of their lives.

00:55:56
Speaker 2: It's a different time. Yeah. There are some who made assumptions about Paul Ruben's sexuality based on his social circle, which, neigh That's probably what we should have prefaced this with instead of just segueing right into Jim Neighbors and Rock Hudson. Many assumed Rubens himself was gay, due to a large part to the uh Camp sensibilities of Peewee, but he never came out in his lifetime and was in fact linked to several women, and it's unclear if that was for publicity reasons, though one of his long term girlfriends, Downtown NYC cool girl Debbie Mazar, say that their relationship was never consummated, but Rubens never commented on it, and with that in mind, we will respect his wishes and refrain from commenting further. The popularity of Peebe's Playhouse led to the inevitable influx of merch party supplies, clothes, bedsheets, lunch boxes, trading cards, costumes, a full sized replica of Cherry the Chair, a playset that was so realistic he used it to block out episodes prior to shooting, and a talking peeweed all that sold more than a million units. I think I've seen it good number of those things sitting around at flea markets. Paul Rubins held a tremendous amount of control over this side of his creation as well, since he was losing so much money on the expensive show, for which again he paid himself scale as an actor. The idea was that he'd make up through it for merchandising and syndication deals, but this was complicated by the fact that his standards were just as high for the merch as they were for the design of his show. For example, he sent the aforementioned Pee Wee doll back to the manufacturers with notes a total of eight times until he was satisfied. Sometimes his rigid adherence to quality came back to bite him. This was the case for his proposed Peewee branded cereal. He wanted to make a fruity breakfast cereal similar to his own childhood favorite tricks, but in classic mad cap fashion, he teamed up with Purina, the dog food company, to make Pee Wee Show a dog food themed cereal for kids. He followed his muse I'll give him that. The commercial was set to feature in nineteen fifty si mother pouring a bowl on the floor while kids crawl up and eat it like dogs. Shockingly, this made it all the way to the prototype phase, eventually failing at the final hurdle when it failed a taste test. The ever responsible Rubens wanted the serial to be made with all natural ingredients and flavorings like fruit juices, thus repulsing the kids who were the target maud audions and craved products. I guess made with high fruitose corn syrup. God, what a bizarre series of sentences.

00:58:32
Speaker 1: I just read dog food fine, all natural fruitures pass. No No. Around this time, Paul Rubins began production on the second pee Wee Herm in the movie nineteen eighty eight's Big Top Peewee, the idea presumably born from his childhood and Sarasota, the winter headquarters of Ringling Brothers where he dreamed of growing up and joining the circus. Directed by Greece director Randall Kleaiser, it marked the feature film debut of Dustin Diamond, who would make his first appearance on Saved by the Bill as Screech Powers just a few months after the movie's release, and Benicio del Toro, who played Duke the dog Faced Boy. I'm not over the fact that there was a world where Dustin Diamond and Benicio del Toro shared a screen together. That's insane. Do you ever know about the dog Face Boy? No, tell me he was a real guy. It was Russian.

00:59:28
Speaker 2: His name was Fador Jifticheu, and he was a peat Barnum guy. If you look up pictures of him, he looks remarkably like Michael London in I was a teenage werewolf. He had the medical condition hypertrichosis, which is abnormal hair growth, which is what a lot of people where a lot of folk tales from were wolves actually come from. He was a polymath. He spoke Russian, German and English and was toured around as part of the Barnum sideshow. But that's where the dog faced boy bit comes from. Tell me he had a happy rest of his life. Please tell me. But didn't I one of those Carnie deaths.

01:00:06
Speaker 1: Well, he was brought to the States in eighty four and he died twenty years later in Greece. So he was doing all that like in the eighties, like during our lifetime. This wasn't eighteen eighties, central eighteen eighties. Oh I was gonna say that, Yeah, that would have been a bomber. Huh, all right, you trade it up. It sounds like right, right, You have to believe that. I desperately want to believe that. All right, Well, moving on, I never actually watched Big Top pee Wee. We're not going to spend much time there. Arguably better received than this Pee Wee sequel film was this nineteen eighty eight Christmas special. The third season of Pee Wee's Playhouse consisted of just two regular episodes due to a Writer's Guild of America strike, but it also contained the aforemention primetime special that included all Manner of Kitsch Kings and Queens, Frankie Avalon and a net Funaceello of all the sixties beach party movie Charro, the staple of sixties and seventies talk shows and Variety TV incredible acoustic guitar player, which has just been out shown by I think the way that she pronounced things, if I recall, I think that was the bit, Yeah, Grace Jones, Katie Lang, Dinah Shore, Little Richard, Share, the del Rubio Triplets, Magic Johnson, Princess Jajah. I don't know if it's different from Shahjahgabor. That's a great question. I don't know. I just googled Princess Jaja and jo Jagabor is the only thing that came up, So I'm gonna assume it's just Joja Gabor, some kind of affectionate, honorific Wooby Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers, and the UCLA Men's Choir. It was so well received that pee Wee considered doing a second special for the fourth season of pee Wee's Playhouse called pee Wee's Playhouse goes Hawaiian. Another Playhouse episode idea that was tossed out was a parody of The Patty Duke Show, where pee Wee visits his lookalike country cousin Patti Duke Show. Patty Duke famously played twins. By this point, pee Wee was if the incredible fever dream of a cast for the pee Wee Christ's specials any indication pee Weeve Hermann was starting to suffer from burnout due to the strain of overseeing a feature film, a weekly TV show, a massive, overblown holiday special, a burgeting merchandise empire, all while pretending to be a bizarre manchild during every public moment of his life and rejecting his family publicly. Well, when you put it like that, yeah, his work meant that he really couldn't sleep or have a personal life like me. He was working from the moment he woke up until the moment he fell asleep. One friend said, he didn't have a life. It was the most exhausting thing. It also prevented it from enjoying the fruits of his labors, which is very sad. He told Rolling Stone in twenty fourteen. You might find this hard to believe, but I got virtually no feedback the whole time we were making Pee Wee's Playhouse. In the ensuing years since we stopped making it, I've met hundreds of fans, from little kids to grownups who watched it as kids when the show was originally on. But I was so busy with the making of it that I just didn't have much of a life outside of the show. I was very rarely in situations where i'd meet fans. It was just staggering when I finally did start to hear all that stuff because I just didn't have an outside picture of it at all. Uh oh, cool, you're sticking me with all the porn theater stuff. Yeah, I'm just going to riff on that. Okay. There's a common misconception that Pewee's Playhouse was canceled in the wake of Reuben's porn theater bust in July nineteen ninety one. But that's not true. The show had been off the air for a year by that time. The network had in fact asked him to continue, but according to an interview we gave with ew I just politely said no, it was time to take a year off. I had actually made a list of things I wanted to do, learn Spanish, learn to play the sacks. I never did any of them. His mother told Sarasota Magazine that he had long become sick of the character of Peewee, which he'd initially intended to be a platform that would lead to other roles and a serious acting career. Don't you think if he was a little silly, as mother said, a grown man dressing up in that suit. And you know understandably he was exhausted by maintaining the Pee Wee facade twenty four to seven, fearing that it would not only eclipse his own career but his own existence. Paul controlled every aspect of the show, from its concepts to its writing, to its direction and its production, and he also dreaded all the necessary work that came outside of taping as well. For example, he found meeting terminally ill make a wish children very tough. I mean, he always met their requests, but it understandably troubled them greatly. The Beatles had a similar experience where they, you know, obviously wanted to do what they could for these kids, but they just felt so powerless whenever. You know, it's like what they wanted to meet us, and we'd make them happy for a little bit, but then we'd have to leave. And it was like if he wanted to just stay there with them and help them as much as you could, but you could There's nothing you could do. So I mean, that's I know, it sounds heartless for me to say, like, oh yeah, I hated meeting the sick kids, but it took a psychic toll on them. The final episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse aired on November seventeenth, nineteen ninety and called Playhouse for Sale. It centers around the residents of the playhouse coping with the frightening site of a for sale sign outside, but eventually they realized that it was from a lemonade stand, and the playhouse itself wasn't going to be sold. The episode ended with pee Wee telling viewers the playhouse will always be here for everyone to play in, forever and ever and ever on that you have my word, and then everyone screamed real loud because word was the secret word of the day. That's cute. Yeah, can you give me a pee Wee scream? I feel like I'm just doing the high jump, Like, whoa, that's good.

01:05:46
Speaker 2: It's hard to do it is, Yeah, No, that's like it's difficult to get that. No, I'm doing like Tom Waits, well he.

01:05:56
Speaker 1: Has the two voice. No, that's as close as I'm getting. Yeah, you have to like constrict your throat. I'm doing my I damaged my throat.

01:06:07
Speaker 2: The other night we were doing a lot of Batman impressions because Low had Dark Knight on the other day.

01:06:11
Speaker 1: When I came in, it was a lot of like, what do you want for dinner tonight? Oh? That's good. Yeah.

01:06:18
Speaker 2: The secret is to sound out of breath. I think he has to push so much air through his voice to get that friggin' Tom Woyde's voice that he does that you like have to do Christian Bale. Batman is like constantly being out of breath.

01:06:31
Speaker 1: Didn't the voice of Batman from the animated series have asthma or something?

01:06:35
Speaker 2: Kevin what's his name? Maybe I thought he had more of like a sexy gentleman's gravel to him, whereas Christian Bales just doing like full on death metal.

01:06:47
Speaker 1: They We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Pee Wee took most of nineteen ninety and the first part of nineteen ninety one off to basically have a well served vacation as he attempted to figure out what to do next. He grew his hair and beard whenever the show is on hiatus, which had the benefit of making him unrecognizable, so he was pretty anonymous, which is surprising considering how famous the character Peewee was. Trips to Nantucket and Europe were in the works, as was a visit to his hometown of Sarasota, Florida, and on the evening of July twenty sixth, nineteen ninety one, a Friday, he bought a ticket at the South Trail Cinema, an ex art house cinema turned adult theater. On that night, it was playing a triple bill of Catalina five, Oh Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy, and turn up the heat. Somebody's gonna win bar trivia for knowing what movie is being played. When Paul Rubbins was busted. I'm going to take a lot of details from what I'm about to say from EW's fairly exhaustive contemporary expose on Paul Rubbin's arrest, as well as Bob Plunkett's retrospective piece for Sarasota Magazine from twenty sixteen. So Paul Rubins sat down in the movie theater, and also in the theater that night were four sheriff's deputies posed for a sting operation. You need four sheriffs steps in lapd man, What did that? Was the helicopster Dirisota, Sarasota, Oh.

01:08:25
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, right, yeah, I guess I mean no, still that I've been to Florida, was that the best use of your police department's time for deputies at a porn theater?

01:08:37
Speaker 1: That point was made. We will get to that in the vehement defense of Peewee. That we will get too shortly. But yeah, these four sheriff's deputies were in there planning to bust anyone who was in there who was a little too obvious about doing what people presumably go to a porn theater to do. The guy who ran the theater I loved this, apparently hated the cops because their quote undercover attire of T shirts and cut off jeans made them look markedly more scruffy than the rest of his client, who he described as quote having a country club look South Florida porn theater. But have we catered to an upper higher level of clientele. I would love to have a porn theater.

01:09:20
Speaker 2: I had a dress corl Yeah yeah, no white teas.

01:09:27
Speaker 1: The cops hung out in the theater for five and a half hours that day. They got paid to sit in the movie theater and watch porn. Think about that. They arrested four men that day. Do you think they Yeah? No, well I guess why not. It's the same way that like cops can speed and run red lights. Yeah, sure, you're going to stop them. Yeah, well they're friends. They probably weren't sitting next to each other, that's true. Immediately prior to pee Wee's arrival, they popped the brother of I shouldn't say popped. They busted the brother of one of the city's most bah oh man. They arrested, there we go, that's the word. They arrested, the brother of one of the city's most prominent businessmen. The arrest report for Paul Rubins is grossly specific, detailing how often he did, what and when. As he was leaving the theater, he was stopped in the lobby by two officers who identified themselves and told them he was being placed under arrest. Then they escorted him out to the parking lot, where, according to the police report, he told them, this is embarrassing. Can I show you some id? He retrieved his wallet and showed them his license, but the whole alter ego thing came back to bite him in the ass since the cops didn't recognize his real name. Finally, he just came out and said, I'm pee wee Herman, which is one of the funniest things a person can do after being arrested from masturbating in Pumplins. Yeah, I'm pee wee herm. According to deputies, he suggested that maybe he could do a charity benefit for the Sheriff's office. The arresting off officers didn't reject the offer, but they told him he had to go be arrested anyway. Rubens then reportedly defended himself by saying that he knew you weren't allowed to fool around with other people in a theater, but he thought it was okay if you were quote by yourself that tracks. He then asked, how can I handle this with the least amount of publicity? The cops presumably didn't know or didn't care one or the other. He was fingerprinted and photographed in charge with violating Florida State Stature eight zero zero dot zero three exposure of sexual organs. The bail was two hundred and nineteen dollars and he was forty dollars short, and in a Shakespearean twist, one of the officers at the station was a high school friend of his sister, and she ponied up the rest of the bail, for which she was suspended for one day because apparently cops can't help pay bail for anyone other than immediate family. Did you know that? No, that's probably good. So immediately after posting bail, he first flew to Nashville to stay with his aforementioned sister, who was an attorney, and then he called his old friend, the billionaire heiress Doris Duke, and asked to hide out in her New Jersey estate. I know that if I got arrested for something, I'd probably want a billionaire on my side, So yeah, that's probably a good move. So he went to her New Jersey estate, and he said, the first day I woke up there, the staff had done what they do for any guests, which has put out all the daily publications. Unfortunately, on this day they were filled with his mug shot and headlines like the New York Post's famous Oh Peewe with his really quite scary mugshot with the long, straggly hair and the creepy goatee beard. Yeah, that mugshot is really the worst. Yeah, I know. For those of you unfamiliar with how this stuff works, a kid show host charged with exposing himself in a porn theater guarded some attention. The fallout was swift and immediate. CBS stopped airing Peewe's play House reruns in the aftermath of his arrest. Disney's MGM Studios in Florida stopped playing a tape in its studio tour in which pee Wee Herman explains how voiceover tracks are made, and on July thirtieth, four days after the arrest, it was reported that Toys r Us was removing Peewee toys from its stores. The spokesperson took the time to twist the knife by adding that the pee wee fad had peaked a few years earlier, adding in an all time quote for the ages, It's not like something happened with Cabbage Patch. Then we'd have a problem similar to what happened when Fred Rogers died. Psychologists spoke to news outlets about the best way to discuss this news with children. Montreal child psychologist Jeffrey Dervineski said children should be told that quote, pee Wee is an adult, and while he can play children's parts on television, he's interested in some adult things. He's interested in other parts in real life. Yeah, I show us on the pee wee doll. Was the name of the movie again, Tiger Tiger's Parts? No, the porn movie? Oh? Uh there it was a triple bill. I don't I'm not actually sure which movie was playing. Uh, Catalina five, Oh, Tiger Shark, Nurse Nancy and turn up the heat. Oh, Nurse Nancy's Parts that is the name of the Oh it's sorry, it's Catalina five. Oh colon tiger Shark. When I say colon, I mean oh, what a rich text?

01:14:32
Speaker 2: Didn't Fred Willard also get yeah yeah, and then he died went out on top. There was a massive outpouring of support for Rubens. Pro Peewee rallies were held in New York, LA and San Francisco, featuring signs with slogans like hands off our Peewee, I could have gone back to the writer's room.

01:14:51
Speaker 1: No, it's it's kind of what exactly what he needed to be, that's true.

01:14:55
Speaker 2: In addition to showing support for Rubens, the main gist of the marches was to protest c for canceling the reruns. One of the organizers summed it up to Entertainment Weekly, Look, pe Wee, herman made CBS millions of dollars over the past few years. Now he stands accused of something and they were ready to sell him down the river.

01:15:12
Speaker 1: It's up the river, but sure.

01:15:15
Speaker 2: In one of one of your favorite incidences, the words we Heart you Peewee were spray painted in hot pink letters on the exterior of the offending porn theater the South Trail Cinema. The New York Times published a support of editorial, and a special Entertainment Weekly poll revealed that an overwhelmingly high percentage of people felt that the actor had been mistreated by both the law and the media. Spokesman for the syndicated TV program A Current Affair said the show had received tens of thousands of responses to a Peewee telephone survey on July thirty first, and that the callers supported Rubens nine to one, with messages like we have suns his age and these things happen. True. Celebrities voice their support publicly as well. One of these, unfortunately at this stage in history, was Bill Cosby. He issued a public statement of support that read, in part, whatever, oh boy, whatever Rubens has done, this is being blown all out of proportion.

01:16:13
Speaker 1: Just color.

01:16:15
Speaker 2: In less scummy celebrities. Annette Funicello, my beloved voister, support for Rubens, as did Cindy Lauper, who slammed the charge as a victimless occurrence.

01:16:28
Speaker 1: True. E. G.

01:16:29
Speaker 2: Daily, his love interest in Pee's Big Adventure, told Entertainment Weekly, this could be a blessing in disguise for him. Maybe it will make people see him as a normal sexual human being.

01:16:39
Speaker 1: I'm reading that in Tommy Pickle's voice, because she's progress.

01:16:45
Speaker 2: In addition, many also wondered why the Sarasota Police Department was spending so much time in an adult theater anyway. Sheriff Jeff mong claimed that the South Trail Cinema was targeted only once every three or four months, but theater employees claimed this was more like twice a month, and that the police, in groups of three to six, would spend up to six hours at a stretch in the theater. In fact, they claimed sometimes they would sit in the theater while it was completely empty for up to an hour waiting for people. Surprisingly, Rubens even had the support of the members of the local law enforcement community. Captain Terry Lewis of the Sarasota Sheriff's Department Tody w I sure hope things work out for old Peewee. Now, if you excuse me, it's time for my shift at the empty port in theater. I'm getting paid overtime for this.

01:17:33
Speaker 1: Time and a half for working after after six.

01:17:37
Speaker 2: God Rubens maintained his innocence but pleaded no contest to a charge of indecent exposure in exchange for seventy five hours of community service, a fifty dollars fine, and eighty five dollars and seventy five cents in court costs. He spent a month or so wondering the pastoral grounds of Doris Duke's estate like a scrawning Charles Foster Caine turn way. Most visitors, save for his lawyers and Cindy Lauper oh beat Skill Cosby. He tried to laugh off the arrest publicly two months after the fact, when he appeared at the MTV Video Music Awards in his pee we get up and asked the audience heard any good jokes lately?

01:18:15
Speaker 1: That was masterful, that was cool, good bit. The response was an epic standing ovation.

01:18:23
Speaker 2: But despite this, Rubens did not get over the trauma that easily. He was heartbroken that his life's work was at risk, telling Paper Magazine, it was really sad to me that there was any kind of tarnish on pee wee Herman. Me put whatever tarnish you want on me. But headlines all over the world were like, pee wee Herman arrested. Pe wee Herman wasn't arrested. I was arrested. He elaborated a vanity fair that even one parent would say, well, I'm not going to let my kid watch that show anymore. Was really painful because I just took it so seriously the show. I took my responsibility to kids really seriously. He was especially aggrieved when People magazine made him one of the twenty five most Intriguing People of the year in the wake of the arrest. I thought, God, the amount of time and energy and work that I put into entertaining kids, fighting the good fight, and I've become an intriguing person for this. He more or less stepped back from public life for a number of years. He performed as Peewee at a nineteen ninety two tribute to Minnie Pearl at the Grand Ole Opry, but other than that, he abandoned the character for the better part of a decade. MTV made an offer to revive the show, but he shut it down, saying I didn't feel like it was the right time, certainly not right after, and there wasn't any real money in it. I had worked so hard. I didn't want to put it back on TV just for the sake of putting it on TV. Rubens became something of a recluse, refusing to attend premieres with friends for fear of having to field questions from the press about his arrest, and he would later regret this approach, telling The New York Times, it was stupid not to do anything.

01:19:50
Speaker 1: I never spoke out. I just went and hid.

01:19:52
Speaker 2: If I had to do it all over again, I would figure out a way to get out there, talk about it, take control of it.

01:19:57
Speaker 1: But then, slowly but surely, he started to reemerge. Around this time, he was linked to the actress Debbie Maser, who Ruben cited as helping him overcome his depression. It's unclear if they were friends or more than friends. Maser, for her part, has claimed that their relationship was not consummated, so your mileage may ferry. Rubens had cameos in the nineteen ninety two films Batman Returns and voiceover work in A Nightmare Before Christmas, both directed by his friend Tim Burton, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as bit parts in Dunstan checks In and Buddy, both of which are movies about primates. In nineteen ninety five, he took a recurring role on Murphy Brown as the annoying toady nephew of the fictional station owner, which I remember this very well. This was the moment when you're a kid when you learn that actors play multiple roles, you know what I mean. I remember seeing him Murphy Brown be like, wait, that's peewee. What you watched Murphy Brown as a child. My parents did, and then I wandered in and would see him. He was also the host of the short lived ABC game show You Don't Know Jack, based on the video game series of the same name, but it was canceled after only six episodes due to low ratings. He tried to make a TV pilot for NBC called Meet the Muckles, which was about a family of performers, with himself in the patriarch and host of the show within a show. It was going to be kind of like I think it was the movie You Can't Take It with You. I think it was based on that, but it was like a all I can think of is the Aristocrats family. I don't think it was like that, but it was, yeah, a family of like circus performers, I believe. But his perfectionist streak took over as he demanded complicated production numbers and a very elaborate set that included building an ornate Victorian home above the NBC studios. I don't fully understand that after three years and two production companies, it was deemed too expensive and set adrift in development. Hell In definitely, But he did get cast in your beloved nineteen ninety nine's Mystery Men as Spleen.

01:22:05
Speaker 2: I think was the character the Spleen because he had targeted incredibly powerful farts.

01:22:12
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, flatulence man, yes, as Vanity Fair wrote, Please read this. This is a beautiful description. You love this movie, so I want you to.

01:22:22
Speaker 2: I really do love mister Man. I think it's a great movie and was curiously Mitchell in it too. Yeah, curiously ahead of its time in kind of spoofing superhero stuff.

01:22:33
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but this description of Paul Rubin's character in Vanity Fair is beautiful. Please share it with us.

01:22:40
Speaker 2: On screen, it's clear he was enjoying himself, playing the film's most outrey character and staging some of the more elaborate fart jokes in movie history with an obvious gusto. It would have been great if Variety had done it and called it buffo.

01:22:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, Paul Rubins would also turn into critically praise performance in two thousand and one's Blow, which is probably his most famous non pee wee role, when after he died. That was kind of the thing that I saw making the rounds the cops are gone by. Maybe I'll punch that sound in for the horn bust description. The only other thing I could think of was his role as the Royal Austrian Prince whose name I can ever pronounce like Gernhardt, measurement, Ramsteime von happ my notes tell me yes.

01:23:33
Speaker 2: An incredible performance, like really from yeah, one of the best.

01:23:40
Speaker 1: So just as he was starting to get his career on track in the early two thousands, there was another bust. This one I completely missed when it happened. I didn't know about this until researching him. It occurred in November two thousand and two when Rubens was filming the music video for Elton John's This Train Don't Stop There Anymore, which is a great video. It's the one it's like done in one shot and Timberlake eerily transforms into Elton John. I mean, I know, like the weird hair plug stuff helped, but like he's very good. And then Paul Rubbins, this is like a great song tearing. Yeah, that is a great song. That was like the last great Elton John album songs from the West Coast, I think what's called Yeah. But while he was on the set filming this video, Paul learned that the police were at his home with a search warrant investigating what's been described as his private erotica collection. This is where his kitch collections really that interest didn't pay off. As a guy who collects kitchy things, I can say I know I have a good sense of what might help you out down the road for an investment purposes and what might cause legal issues. This. Yeah, this is not a good This is not a good one. Uh. This is where it gets a little fuzzy. Paul Rubins was a self described collector of kitchi vintage erotica, which were like old muscle magazines and vintage homosexual material.

01:25:00
Speaker 2: And the City's attorney office claimed to homosexual material I could watch that band.

01:25:06
Speaker 1: That was my Wikipedia phrazed it. The City Attorney's office claimed that he had over seventy thousand items of kitch memorabilia, putting my collection to shame. Two grainy videotapes and dozens of photographs that they characterized as quote child pornography. I'd like to clarify I don't have seventy thousand items of child pornography. I should have placed that better. Not with that attitude. You don't. This is somehow like the shaggiest episode we've ever done. Sure is yep? Kelly Bush, Ruben's personal representative at the time, denied this assertion that he had child pornography and stated that the objects in question were Rob Lowe's sex videotape and a few thirty to one hundred year old Kitch collectible images. Rubens turned himself into the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department and was charged with misdemeanor possession of obscene material improperly depicting a child under the age of eighteen in sexual conduct. The explanation that seemed to satisfy everyone at the time was that Paul Rubins was a collector who bought vintage porn in bulk, and one of his vintage magazine dealers declared there was quote no way he could have known the content of each page of the publications that he bought. Furthermore, he recalled Rubens asking for quote physique magazines and vintage sixties material, but nothing featuring kids. In March two thousand and four, child pornography charges were dropped in exchange for rubens guilty plea to a lesser misdemeanor obscenity charge, and for the next three years he was required to register his address with the Sheriff's office and he could not be in a company of minors without the permission of their parent or legal guardian. So that's troubling. That must have been a real blow to him. Oh yeah, Weirdly, not many people know this. A pre fame Paul Paul Rubins was also arrested during Christmas nineteen eighty three at an adult bookstore in Florida. Details of this bust are unknown, but his name and address were printed in the paper at the time. But Paul Rubins eventually found his way back to pee Wee in two thousand and seven, maybe not coincidentally, the year that he no longer had to register as a sex offender and was allowed to be in the company of minors again. He appeared in character for the first time in fifteen years at Check's Notes. Spike TV's Guy's Choice Awards for some reason. Yeah, in his latter years he trotted out the pee Wee character rarely, but when he did he was usually at hyper masculine events like WrestleMania. I don't really understand that, but that's interesting. He spent much of the early two thousands working on a pair of pee Wee movies that unfortunately would never see the light of day. One was meant for kids and one that was a little more adult. The latter was a black comedy to be called The pee Wee Herman Story, which depicted the rise and fall of pee Wee. Talking to MTV dot Com, he said, it's basically the story of Peewee Herman becoming a famous singer. He has a hit single and gets brought out to Hollywood to make musical movies, kind of like they did with Elvis. It all kind of goes downhill from there for pee Wee. He turns into a monster. He does everything wrong, It becomes a big jerk. He would go on to say that it was heavily inspired by my beloved Camp classic Valley of the Dolls, with some scenes directly lifted from that film wholesale, which is funny. The family friendly movie was to be called pee Wee's Playhouse. The movie and followed pee Weee and his playhouse friends leaving the house for the first time to explore the world of puppet Land. And he would say that this movie was a blend of hr Puff and Stuff and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In interviews, he claimed to have approached Peewee's Big Adventure director Tim Burton with one of the scripts and talked to Johnny Depp about the possibility of having him portray pee Wee. I'm guessing that's the adult one, but Burton was too busy and Johnny Depp gave it the old let me think about it, and none of those projects ever happened. In twenty ten, Rubens announced the return to the stage with a relaunch of The Pee Wee Herman Show, which was the original vehicle that brought them prominence thirty years earlier. He intended the show to act as a way to quote introduce pee Weee to a new generation that didn't know about him, and also lay the groundwork for a feature film. This theatrical production made a brief run on Broadwayiams taped for an HBO special just like his original one back in nineteen eighty one, and to promote the Broadway show Pee Wee guest starred at the WWE raw at the Nassau Coliseum, participating in backstage antics and even having an in ring confrontation with The Miz and Alex Riley. None of those names mean anything to me. They mean anything to you wrestlers. I think the mises a wrestler. Oh yeah, but I meant like, oh.

01:29:55
Speaker 2: Like good wrestlers or like iconic wrestlers. No, I have no idea, Okay, good.

01:30:00
Speaker 1: Then he returned to WWE at WrestleMania seven in a segment with The Rock and Gene Underland.

01:30:08
Speaker 2: Gene Okerland, Mean Gene, Come on, get your together, the Rock and Mean Gene. That's my era of wrestling that I like, is like the late nineties attitude erat Attitude. No, it's literally what it's called the Attitude era. Why because they sort of pivoted from like the you know, Heigel. They sort of pivoted from the Hulk Hogan like sting, brightly colored Ultimate Warrior like dayglo neon stuff, to becoming like Edgy. That's when you get like the Undertaker, like burying people alive and like crucifying Vince McMahon and mankind like Mick Foley. That's when I mean, that's the era that Stone Cold came up in, you know, throwing the throwing the bird and drinking beers. Yeah, it's literally called the attitude era. I am not making that up.

01:31:06
Speaker 1: That's very funny. During this episode with the Rock and Me and Jane, pee Wee admitted to being John Cena's number one fan. Oh yeah, that same year. What year was that, Let's just say twenty ten. I think it was, Yes, it was. Rubens appeared as pee Weee in a Funnier Die sketch it was actually pretty good, in which he brings a new iPad home to the playhouse. This is just after they've been released, and all the characters just talk about what a piece of garbage it is. Conky points out its flaws by saying that it looks like a giant iPhone, and then in the ends, Pee Wee uses the iPad as a serving tray a hold glasses of milk and lemonade throwback at a party at the playhouse. So check that out. That's pretty funny. No, okay, the year twenty ten was really a banner year for pee Wee fans, because that same year, it was announced that Paul Rubins was developing a new pee Wee movie produced by real life friend of the Pod Judd Apatow. Judd Apatow tweeted our Freaking Geeks episode out and it did nothing for us. I know, I know, I know this movie would see the light of day in twenty sixteen, as the Netflix released pee Wee's Big Holiday, which I completely missed. I don't remember this at all, despite the fact that it was the first pee Wee movie in twenty eight years. I got nothing for you. Netflix summarized the plot thus a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger played by Joe Mangel Joe Mamma, jujem, I can't say it, Joe Manjanello.

01:32:38
Speaker 2: He's the big beefcake guy from Uh.

01:32:42
Speaker 1: He's married to Sophia Vargarar was, Yeah it is on. He's in Magic and True Blood. Yeah, oh yeah that guy. Uh. He's the mysterious stranger in this new pee Wee movie. And this mysterious stranger points pee Wee towards his death Stinny, according to the Netflix summary, and his first ever holiday Rubens told Mental Flaws shortly after the movie was announced, it's a road picture. I've never heard anyone after nineteen fifty refer to their movies as a picture. It's a road picture, and it's an adventure story. It's similar in tone and structured to Peewe's Big Adventure. And that it's a road picture. I'm trying to get somewhere. I live in a real little small town and I don't get much excitement. I guess a chance meeting with Joe Manchinello will do that. When asked if he was nervous at reprising his role, the then sixty four year old Paul Rubens told Mental Flaws not really, not since I found out about digital retouching. The time scene's right. As I've watched all these things from the eighties come back, I thought, Okay, it's Pee Wee's term. It is, Yeah, it was. I don't really want to end this three hour deep dive into one of the most unique characters in pop culture history with a Netflix movie, but in a way it's perfectly appropriate because we're all beholden to Netflix and the streamers. Did we talk about this early in this episode? I think we did. That was the last time that Paul Rubins played the character of pee Wee Herman before his death earlier this year. But let's give the final word to a top of his game. Paul Rubens talking to Rolling Stone in nineteen eighty seven, when discussing his life's work, he said, I'm just trying to illustrate that it's okay to be different, not that it's good, not that it's bad, but that it's all right. I'm trying to tell kids to have a good time and to encourage them to be creative and question things. This sounds so preachy, but I think it's real important to be able to share, to be a good person. That's what my work is about heart, before adding I'm like starting to gag at myself hearing this go on. You can do it? Is it the laugh? You want? The laugh?

01:34:52
Speaker 3: No?

01:34:52
Speaker 1: I it was. That was good. I need to give me something to say, because there's two There's that, there's that yeah, and then there's the like the kind of like you have to you have to make your throat real small for the laugh, and then you need to make your mouth real small for the like, Yeah, can you can you say for a million dollars. Oh that's really good. Can you do jet fuel can't melt steel beams? Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Jambie, I can't.

01:35:27
Speaker 2: Believe after you prompting me for such a myriad of impression. Wee wee Herman, we got the one. We got to use pee wee Herman. Incredible stuff that was. That's I've never done it before. Oh man, but we'll see if i'll keep that.

01:35:39
Speaker 1: Well. Well, folks, this has been too much information. I know you usually say that, but it's a it's a topsy it's a topsy tip.

01:35:50
Speaker 2: And now I lost it that you're like this is just gonna haunt you, like be fine, like being able to really die.

01:35:57
Speaker 1: I know I can do it, Like I'm just trying to figure out, like how to make my mouth to do it.

01:36:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're just going to fade out on you trying to keep doing all these Well, folks, this has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and you're not. And yeah, and I don't know, stay out of Sarasota theaters, man.

01:36:17
Speaker 1: Or please bring a paper and I'm Jordan run tag We'll catch you next time. Too much information was a production of iHeartRadio.

01:36:30
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk.

01:36:34
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder. June.

01:36:37
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Heigel.

01:36:41
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A track pass now conta