As we remember Paul Reubens’ iconic creations, the animation on Pee-wee’s Playhouse deserves a shout-out. The show’s first season was directed by the late Stephen R. Johnson and produced by Broadcast Arts Productions, founded by Steve Oakes (later to startup Curious Pictures).
“At first, Paul wasn’t interested in doing a kids’ show,” remembers Oakes. “He thought of his character as being mainstream. When CBS offered to give him a show on Saturday morning, he said, ‘Okay but I don’t want to spend too much time on it. Let’s work with an animation company that will do most of the work, and I will just make little cameo appearances.’”
Oakes had graduated Hampshire College in 1977 and moved to Washington, DC to animate for Stowmar Enterprises, the studio which produced the ill-fated stop-motion film I Go Pogo (1980). When Stowmar folded thereafter, Oakes bought its equipment, and in 1981 founded Broadcast Arts. Using connections supplied by Peter Rosenthal, the fledgling studio started using clay and mixed-media to animate stylized MTV network IDs. With this successful calling card, they relocated to downtown Manhattan.
Then they landed their first show — Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “When he started getting involved in pre-production, Paul got very excited and was really into it and basically said, ‘Okay, it’s going to be all about me,’” says Oakes. “And he decided he was going to interact with the animation throughout the whole show.”
It was on the show’s first season that its style exploded into the zeitgeist. Credit is due to the art designers Gary Panter, Rick Heitzman and Wayne White, but also to the many animated sequences by future stars of the industry.
Prudence Fenton was the animation and effects producer for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, hiring its artists and animators. There were several key animated sequences in the show, most of which were stop-motion. “That first year, we stayed until 10 p.m. every night,” says Fenton. “Working that show was like getting paid to eat ice cream. Making the characters and seeing the puppets was so cool and unusual.”
The “Ant Farm” sequence used cut-out silhouettes with a multi-plane setup, similar to the method of pioneer Lotte Reiniger. Experimental animator David Daniels had used multi-plane for a student film and was hired as a motion-control camera operator on the sequence. Today, he is the pioneer of strata-cut clay animation and hosts Strata Ganza (Google it!) The “Ant Farm” lasted only one season, but Daniels’ strata-cut animation infiltrated later seasons.
The “Life in the Fridge” sequence showed stop-motion foodstuffs whenever Pee-wee opened his refrigerator door. Bizarre antics ensued. “Mutant Toys” occupied Pee-wee’s display shelf and were stop-motion puppets of haphazardly assembled toys (think Sid’s monstrosities from 1995’s Toy Story). But these sequences played backup to the more significant animation, like the “Dinosaur Family.”
On set, Pee-wee’s journey into Magic Screen was a daily highlight, and a rare showcase of 2D computer animation. “We subcontracted that to a post-production house, Caesar Video, which had one of the first breakthroughs in digital animation, called a Paint Box,” says Oakes. “It was a stand-alone proprietary computer made to manipulate video, and it was state of the art for several years.” Future Oscar-winner John Canemaker handled the drawn characters that sometimes interacted with Pee-wee in the Magic Screen during the premiere season, such as a cat, dog, bird or connect-the-dots man. “I enjoyed working on the show, which was, in my opinion, one of the most imaginative, creative shows on television,” says Canemaker. “I tried to put in as many animation principles — anticipations, squash & stretch, arcs — as possible.”
Future Aardman giants Nick Park and Richard “Golly” Goleszowski (now Starzak) animated the first nine episodes of the down-shooter clay animated sequence, “Penny.” Says Oakes, “At the time. we were negotiating them to close up shop and merge with Broadcast Arts. They were between things, they saw us as the up-and-coming whippersnappers in New York, and they were ready to move to New York and join forces. That fell through, but look at what they’ve done since!” Other in-house animators completed the remaining three “Penny” cartoons of season one. When the show relocated to Los Angeles, Craig Bartlett (Hey Arnold! showrunner) handled the “Penny” cartoons for season two.
Perhaps most famous of all is the Intro, an immersive stop-motion tour-de force, making good use of the motion-control camera, with Emmy-winning direction by Phil Trumbo. “It took me 19 different tests,” says Trumbo. “At one point I had trouble getting Pauls’ vision. So I gave him a camcorder and asked him to show me what he wanted. He referred to it as an endless hell of revisions. The final work print for the Intro was completed the week before it went on the air.”
For its second season, the show moved to Hollywood Center studios in Los Angeles, and then later to Culver Studios. Some of the staff changed, including luminaries like Kim Blanchette, Tom Gasek, John Lindauer, Steve Segal, and many others. But Prudence Fenton, who shares in the Emmy wins for the show, remained the program’s producer of animation and effects for its entire run. “Working with Paul was wonderful,” she says, pointing out Reubens’ keen eye. “He always had suggestions that made it better.”
Jake S. Friedman is an author and animation historian. His latest book, The Disney Revolt, is available in paperback September 12.
