Pee-wee's Playhouse

Pee-wee's Playhouse was a half-hour CBS USA TV Saturday morning live-action "children's show" starring Pee-wee Herman (played by Paul Reubens) that aired from 1986 until 1991 and was enormously popular with both children and adults.

At the beginning of each show, viewers would learn the day's secret word and were instructed to "scream real loud" every time a character on the show said the word, which was given to Pee-wee by his robot friend, Conky.

The show was notorious for its campy undertones and double entendre.

As soon as it first aired, Pee-wee's Playhouse fascinated media theorists and commentators, many of whom championed the show as a postmodernist hodgepodge of queer characters and situations which appeared to soar in the face of domineering racist, sexist, and heterosexist presumptions.

"I'm just trying to illustrate that it's okay to be different--not that it's good, not that it's bad, but that it's all right. I'm trying to tell kids to have a good time and to encourage them to be creative and to question things," Reubens told an interviewer in Rolling Stone.

The music for the show was provided by artists such as Mark Mothersbaugh, Todd Rundgren, Danny Elfman and Van Dyke Parks.

The opening prelude theme is an interpolation of Martin Denny's "Quiet Village."