Freaky and Geeky: The 60 Year-Old Pee-vert

What do you get when you cross a fit of nostalgia with WTF? Judd Apatow producing the next Pee-Wee movie.

I've got strong opinions about that. Unfortunately, those opinions oppose each other, much like Pee-Wee and the Door-to-Door Salesman (though they both have hyphenated names). As fun as it is to make-believe and pretend, it's not that hard to forget 1991. The first thing that seemed wrong to me was that Pee-Wee's Playhouse, the staple of my Saturday mornings for much of my childhood, was canceled. Out of sheer embarrassment, I never really heard why from my parents. Then not long after that, my friends told me that Pee-Wee showed his privates in a movie theater in Florida and got arrested. Dang. Fast forward a few years...Jeffrey Jones, the principal from Ferris Bueller gets busted for kiddy porn. PORN! PORN! PORN! SCREAM!!!! (That was today's Secret Word, btw). Guess who gets busted with him? Pee-Wee!

As in real life, I'm not sure I'd wanna go to someone's playhouse that had been wrapped up in all that. Just not my speed.

Then, on lazy afternoons when I'm just flipping through movie channels, I see Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is on and I watch it. I laugh. I cry. I hide behind the couch when Pee-Wee has the dream about the clown doctors. I laugh again. I rock out to Danny Elfman's end credits. That's some entertainment, folks. It also makes me feel like a kid again. The kid that didn't know anything about the thing in Florida or the thing with Ed Rooney.

So I don't think I really care about how wrong Pee-Wee is. It's still fun. Say what you will about the innuendos, the bike and scooter were cool. The scooter helmet with the big eyeball was cool. Conky 2000 was cool. Having stop-motion food that played in the refrigerator was cool. The picturephone was years ahead of its time. The firehouse poll that dressed you was cool. Mr. T's cereal was cool. Talking breakfast was cool. The breakfast machine (that doesn't shoot you) was cool. Pee-Wee at the circus was---not that cool. But everything aside from that was cool. Where was I? Oh right...I don't care. Even if people said that it's suggestive and I watched it as a kid. Some people make it seem like it's wall-to-wall innuendo. I fail to see that. Maybe it's denial, ignorance, or just having too much damn fun connecting the dots after all these years.

Judd Apatow producing the next Pee-Wee movie is cool. I like this for two reasons...he probably will keep it fun and he'll bring the potty humor down to my level, so I can enjoy it as an overgrown kid and an immature adult. A lot of people are probably thinking Judd's lost his mind or he just treasures the old Pee-Wee too much to let Paul Reubens embarrass himself. I mean the Pee-Wee bit is 30 years old. Paul Reubens is pushing 60 and he's been out of the spotlight so long that people are afraid to see what he's been doing with himself lately. Hopefully Judd's brand of morality will clean up his image a little so we can enjoy the movie with a clear conscience...before we laugh at the potty jokes. Oh, the puerility!