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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:22):
of general interest trivia, your bow tie claude bastions of binality.
My name is Jordan run Tag, you're.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Porn theaters of petty talking points, and I'm Alex Sigel.

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

Speaker 2 (00:41):
It's the other shoe of a two part pee Wee
Hermon series.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:30):
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,

(01:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
It and and kind of horrifying.

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

Speaker 2 (02:05):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
There's just I don't really cotton onto like it's because
you love the fifties, man.

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

Speaker 2 (02:24):
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?

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Plastic flamingos, Yeah from my hometown Leminster, Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:59):
Will they shut.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Down the pink Flamingos and worster last night?

Speaker 1 (03:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
It's like like I was saying that like Judy Garland
Christmas Special Aesthetic.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
But yeah, no, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
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

(04:14):
need to check. I wrote a lot of them down. Well.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I can reassure people that Big Trouble is happening, not
the two thousands movies, Big the Masterpiece, Big Trouble, Little China.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
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

(04:45):
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

(05:05):
Wee's Playhouse growing up?

Speaker 2 (05:07):
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

(05:28):
doing like Land Before Time constantly.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
God that movie is way more unsettling and upsetting than
Pee Wee, Herm and Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, I own know. This was just not on my radar.
My parents had.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
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

(06:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
Wow, even the name sounds obscene. Sometime a playhouse pee
Wee and playhouse clubhouse would have been better? Maybe Yeah, house.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
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.

(07:20):
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

(07:40):
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,

(08:02):
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

(08:24):
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

(08:45):
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.

(09:08):
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

(09:31):
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?

Speaker 2 (09:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
That's how far back that goes? Yeah, that seemed like
some kind of like ring around the rosy like plague era.

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

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Wow, love sticks.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
She's my lade. Did they name themselves sticks and then
have come sail away as like a river sticks reference?

Speaker 2 (10:28):
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

(10:52):
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?

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah? No, no, no, no, it was he. I think
he suffocated himself with barbecue charcoal in his bedroom.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (11:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
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.

(12:17):
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

(12:38):
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

(13:00):
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

(13:21):
turnaround time for the show. That's insane. That's yeah, that's nuts.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
People should not be working on that that schedule other
spots a machine man.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
There's there's some off there's some off the cuff diss
that he does to someone.

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

Speaker 2 (14:24):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (14:59):
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

(15:19):
lake that their property went, and Kurt Russell lined the
entire dock and walkway.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Back to the house with flowers.

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

Speaker 1 (15:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
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

(16:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (16:53):
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,

(17:14):
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,

(17:34):
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,

(17:55):
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

(18:19):
how much you hated Danny Elfman until last episode.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:36):
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

(18:57):
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.

(19:18):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (19:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
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

(20:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:01):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (21:29):
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.

(21:51):
Rubens and the show's co writer John Peregrine both looked
at me and said.

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

Speaker 2 (21:58):
So?

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Wait?

Speaker 2 (21:59):
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?

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

Speaker 2 (22:21):
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.

(22:43):
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,

(23:04):
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

(23:27):
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

(23:50):
accent on it. Just it's so great.

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

Speaker 2 (24:00):
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

(24:21):
like a Bond Scott's death certificate, right, death by misadventure.

Speaker 1 (24:24):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
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

(25:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (25:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:15):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (26:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (27:05):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (27:49):
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.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (28:42):
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

(29:05):
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

(29:28):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (29:46):
And the la heat.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
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

(30:11):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (30:33):
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

(30:54):
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

(31:15):
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,

(31:38):
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,

(32:00):
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

(32:21):
was just incredible. Just the best job you can imagine,
must be nice, I just got it.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
It makes me so furious.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
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

(32:52):
allowed to be artists.

Speaker 1 (32:55):
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

(33:15):
would buck that trend? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (33:19):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (33:44):
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.

(34:06):
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

(34:27):
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.

(34:49):
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.

(35:11):
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

(35:34):
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?

Speaker 1 (35:53):
They shot this show on.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:18):
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

(36:41):
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,

(37:03):
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

(37:24):
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.

(37:45):
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

(38:08):
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,

(38:30):
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

(38:52):
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

(39:14):
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

(39:36):
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,

(39:56):
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

(40:18):
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

(40:40):
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

(41:00):
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

(41:20):
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,

(41:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
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

(42:27):
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

(42:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
So.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
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

(43:31):
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

(43:53):
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

(44:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
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?

Speaker 1 (44:41):
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

(45:02):
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

(45:23):
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

(45:46):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (45:58):
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

(46:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
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?

Speaker 1 (46:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:49):
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,

(47:12):
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

(47:34):
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,

(47:54):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (48:12):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (48:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:06):
Dream man.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
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,

(49:31):
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

(49:51):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (50:14):
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

(50:35):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (51:02):
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

(51:25):
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

(51:47):
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

(52:08):
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,

(52:29):
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,

(52:52):
Captain Kangaroo. I love you, Captain Kangaroo. Yeah, where did you?

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

Speaker 2 (52:59):
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

(53:24):
a one to two punch of criticism.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (53:34):
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

(53:54):
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

(54:17):
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

(54:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
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.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
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,

(55:26):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (55:56):
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

(56:17):
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

(56:37):
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.

(56:59):
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

(57:20):
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,

(57:42):
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,

(58:05):
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,

(58:29):
what a bizarre series of sentences.

Speaker 1 (58:32):
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

(58:54):
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

(59:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
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

(59:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:00:06):
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

(01:00:26):
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

(01:00:47):
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

(01:01:09):
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

(01:01:30):
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.

(01:01:54):
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

(01:02:17):
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

(01:02:37):
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

(01:02:59):
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

(01:03:22):
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

(01:03:42):
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

(01:04:03):
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

(01:04:24):
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

(01:04:45):
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

(01:05:06):
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

(01:05:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:06:47):
They We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.

(01:07:08):
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

(01:07:29):
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

(01:07:53):
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,

(01:08:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
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

(01:09:00):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
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

(01:09:48):
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

(01:10:10):
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.

(01:10:30):
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.

(01:10:53):
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

(01:11:14):
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.

(01:11:36):
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

(01:11:58):
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

(01:12:20):
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,

(01:12:40):
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

(01:13:01):
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,

(01:13:23):
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

(01:13:45):
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

(01:14:07):
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?

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:14:55):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:15:15):
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.

(01:15:36):
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,

(01:15:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:16:13):
Just color.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
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.

(01:17:07):
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

(01:17:28):
empty port in theater. I'm getting paid overtime for this.

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

Speaker 2 (01:17:37):
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.

(01:18:00):
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?

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

Speaker 2 (01:18:23):
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.

(01:18:43):
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

(01:19:05):
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

(01:19:26):
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,

(01:19:46):
telling The New York Times, it was stupid not to
do anything.

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

Speaker 2 (01:19:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
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

(01:20:20):
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

(01:20:40):
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

(01:21:00):
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.

(01:21:21):
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

(01:21:42):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:22:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:22:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
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

(01:23:17):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
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

(01:24:01):
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,

(01:24:23):
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

(01:24:43):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:25:06):
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

(01:25:28):
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

(01:25:48):
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

(01:26:11):
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

(01:26:33):
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,

(01:26:57):
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

(01:27:19):
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

(01:27:39):
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

(01:28:00):
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

(01:28:23):
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

(01:28:43):
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

(01:29:05):
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

(01:29:26):
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.

(01:29:48):
They mean anything to you wrestlers. I think the mises
a wrestler. Oh yeah, but I meant like, oh.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:30:08):
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.

(01:30:32):
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

(01:30:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:06):
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

(01:31:28):
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

(01:31:54):
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,

(01:32:14):
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,

(01:32:37):
Joe Manjanello.

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

Speaker 1 (01:32:42):
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

(01:33:05):
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

(01:33:26):
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,

(01:33:46):
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

(01:34:08):
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

(01:34:30):
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?

Speaker 3 (01:34:52):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:34:52):
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

(01:35:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:35:39):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:36:17):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:36:41):
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

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Pee Wee's Playhouse: Everything You Didn't Know