Paul Reubens challenged TV to be weird with Pee-wee’s Playhouse

polygon.com:

The world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse was a realm of kinetic fantasies. A home where your imaginary friends might live. Claymation dinosaurs resided in the walls. All the furniture was alive and chatty. There was an in-house band of puppet beatniks. The exterior of the Playhouse, a lush and ornamented brush that yearned to be explored, sat snowmen next to sphinxes.

In reality, Pee-wee’s Playhouse was a converted loft below a garment sweatshop at Bleecker and Broadway, around the corner from CBGB. The show, which ran on Saturday mornings on CBS, clearly drew from the surrounding scenes. Sets and props were designed by underground cartoonist Gary Panter. Music was composed by Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh with an uncredited Cyndi Lauper on vocals. Young Rob Zombie and John Singleton happened to be PAs. CBS gavePee-wee Hermancreator Paul Reubens near unlimited creative control, albeit no TV studio. The result was a one-of-a-kind kids’ show that didn’t seek to subvert as much as awaken a greater appetite for outsider art and idiosyncrasies. It would echo for generations.

In Reagan’s reactionary America, politics and pop culture hewed to a certain vision: aspiring to a tidy, 1950s-style inverse to the perceived degeneracy and decadence of the decades since, as if to say that the root of Western decay was a lack of heteronormative single-income families and lawn care. It was an easy target for underground and emerging artists, who remembered a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Sexual Revolution era as hardly idyllic. This tone became the default for most American countercultures. John Waters, David Lynch, The B-52’s, The Cramps, the Church of the SubGenius, and Tim Burton all investigated these themes. Reubens was no different. His