Pee-wee’s Playhouse at 40: Saturday Mornings Were Never the Same

AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!! You just screamed, didn’t you? That’s because somebody said the secret word.

And this year’s secret word is forty.

On September 13, 1986, Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiered on Saturday morning television, and an entire generation of kids, plus, let’s be honest, an entire generation of teenagers and adults who claimed they were “just watching it ironically”, never recovered. We’ve already gone deep on Pee-wee himself and what Paul Reubens built, but the Playhouse anniversary deserves its own party. Playhouses usually do.

Try to explain this show to someone who wasn’t there. Go ahead, we’ll wait. There’s a talking chair named Chairry. There’s a genie head in a jeweled box who grants wishes. There’s a pterodactyl, a talking globe, ants who do musical numbers, and the King of Cartoons, who arrives, with zero explanation, to show an actual vintage cartoon. A young Laurence Fishburne is there, as a cowboy. None of this is a fever dream. It was on network television, Saturday mornings, for four years, and it won a pile of Emmys because it was that good.

Here’s what we understood even then, sitting there in 1986: this wasn’t a kids’ show that adults tolerated. This was one of the most creative things on all of television, hiding in plain sight between the cartoons. The set design alone was somebody’s entire art career happening at 10 a.m. on a Saturday.

The Playhouse ran until November of 1990, and nothing has ever replaced it. Plenty of shows have been weird on purpose since then. But nobody has ever again been weird with that much love, every frame of that show was made by people having the time of their lives, and you could feel it right through the screen, right next to your cereal bowl.

Forty years later, we’d still take the Picture Phone over a smartphone. Connect the dots, la la la-la.

The honest bottom line

Some Saturday morning stuff from the 80s survives on pure nostalgia, and we cover enough of it to know the difference. This is not that. Put an episode on cold today and the design, the pace and the jokes still work with no childhood required. The only thing that dates it is everything around it.

FAQ

When did Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiere?
Pee-wee’s Playhouse premiered on Saturday morning, September 13, 1986, and ran until November 17, 1990.

What was the secret word on Pee-wee’s Playhouse?
It changed every episode, and whenever anybody said it, everybody screamed. Real ones screamed at home too.

Why was Pee-wee’s Playhouse important?
Beneath the chaos it was one of the most inventive shows of the decade, groundbreaking set design, animation, a diverse cast, and multiple Emmy awards.

Playhouse premiered the same year our own TV run was in full swing.