Pee Wee’s Big Comeback
Actors of color dominated the cast, among them Laurence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson. ‘‘The King of Cartoons was black!’’ Reubens says. ‘‘Not just anybody. The king! That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.’’
..One of the greatest achievements of ‘‘Playhouse’’ was that it created a place where desires are not policed, otherness is not demonized, gender roles are juggled and erotic energies attach where they will: Pterri the Pterodactyl ogles Miss Yvonne’s breasts, Conky the robot enjoys a robot-nudie magazine, Pee-wee play-acts a date with Cowboy Curtis. In one ‘‘Playhouse’’ episode, a monster named Roger appears, scaring the Playhouse dwellers; Pee-wee fixes him a snack and strikes up a friendship. In another, Pee-wee loves a fruit salad so much he marries it, ceremony and all. Reubens told me, ‘‘I’ve had so much feedback from people saying, ‘I was so confused as a kid, and your show helped.’ ’’
..from the start, Pee-wee offered Reubens a way to transform into, and armor himself within, his own ventriloquist dummy; when Pee-wee grew popular enough to attract interviewers, Reubens often insisted on receiving them in character, and in the credits for Pee-wee projects the character was listed as played by ‘‘Himself.’’
..‘‘Part of the reason why I wanted to come back,’’ he says, ‘‘is that I didn’t have a real good ending to my career.’’
..For Reubens, plots are excuses to pile up gags and set pieces. In his most famous moment, from ‘‘Big Adventure,’’ Pee-wee, in platform shoes, dances with manic verve to ‘‘Tequila’’ in a motorcycle bar.
.. Reubens called digital retouching ‘‘a huge secret in Hollywood. People aren’t really aware that stars have secret riders in their contracts’’ stipulating that money will be devoted to preserving their youthful appearances with computers.
.. His parents, Milton and Judy Rubenfeld, owned a lamp shop; Milton was one of five founding members of the Israeli Air Force. ‘‘My dad was real swaggery, like a Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones kind of guy,’’ Reubens says.
.. The sensibility of stoned 20-somethings at midnight, he realized — marked by an unreasonable love of repetition, absurdity, narrative disjuncture and jokes that either last way too long or flit by in a short-attention-span-accommodating blink — had significant overlap with that of little kids in pajamas, laughing themselves silly over breakfast cereal. ‘‘Those are the times of the day when there aren’t rules,’’ Reubens said of morning and night, standing as they do in idiosyncratic opposition to the more conventional prerogatives of the prime-time dial. ‘‘Rules are for the other times.’’