Inside Pee-Wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon by Caseen GainesMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I graduated from college, I got a job in the big city. To prove I was a grown-up, I opened a checking account in a bank in one of the tallest buildings in the world, same building I worked in. And to whom did I write the first check from that highfalutin bank? The Pee-wee Herman Fan Club. This would have been in the middle of the run of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”, one of my favorite get-away-from-it-all shows that I rarely was awake to see. For my hard-earned dollars, I received a single one-page newsletter from the fan club. Seemed a little stingy.
I got the same impression about Pee-wee from this book. He is described here as creative at all costs, especially when it comes to dealing with people. He was always firing and occasionally rehiring the people that made his show unique. But in addition to the human resources rollercoaster, you get the details of the production of the show, with plenty of additional info on Pee-wee’s movies, shows, talk show appearances, and future plans. Most interesting were the many pictures of the production of the Playhouse, the behind-the-scenes stories about the production of key pieces of the Playhouse, like the short films, and the various characters like the King of Cartoons. The plentiful pictures of the cast and crew really were an interesting glimpse into what it must have been like working on that show. The last quarter of the book is an episode guide, with some great insight into the details of the cartoons and filmed parts, the guests, and the bloopers. Overall, I enjoyed this book. I hadn’t heard most of these stories before – I guess I wasn’t as much of a fan boy as I thought.
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