We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.In the opening of the 1986 Saturday morning children’s show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a stop-motion animated beaver casually chewed through a tree somewhere out in the middle of the woods.
On the tree was an arrow pointing to the location of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, located somewhere deep within the fauna-infested biome.
The tree falls, and the arrow points up to the sky.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse is now symbolically located above.
It is a state of mind.
The camera pushes through the woods while Mark Mothersbaugh-composed music — evoking the Exotica-inflected strains of Martin Denny or Les Baxter — serenades the audience.
The camera pans up a cliffside and there, like Shelley’s Ozymandias, stands the Playhouse, a curious, multi-leveled edifice that escaped from the skull of a sugared-up five-year-old child, fully formed.
The benevolent lord of this manor, Pee-Wee, appears briefly to chuckle –…
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