Paul Reubens wasn’t the primary comic of his period to mine tv nostalgia to unusually earnest impact. Andy Kaufman famously interviewed Howdy-Doody with nary a touch of condescension or snark. It was a magical second, one which Reubens gleefully recreated each Saturday on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
However CBS had different concepts previous to greenlighting the present. As Reubens instructed Rolling Stone in 2014:
“I might had the stage present initially, so I used to be far more enthusiastic about doing one thing nearer to that, one thing live-action. So after they prompt doing a cartoon, I stated ‘I am probably not enthusiastic about that; let’s do an actual youngsters’ present.’ I used to be a giant Howdy-Doody freak rising up — I used to be truly on one present after I was a child, within the viewers — and was extra enthusiastic about doing one thing like that. Howdy-Doody, Captain Kangaroo, plenty of the native youngsters’ exhibits that had been on a very long time in the past — these had been the influences.”
A Pee-wee Herman cartoon would’ve minimize the viewers right down to grade schoolers and your backyard selection swirly recipient. Worse, there’d be no Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis, no Phil Hartman as Captain Carl, no Natasha Lyonne as Opal and, for heaven’s sake, no William “Blacula” Marshall because the King of Cartoons. Thank god Reubens hewed to his imaginative and prescient of “Captain Kangaroo” on mushrooms. He made the late Eighties splendidly bizarre.