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Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix
I woke up with the Pee-Wee’s Playhouse theme stuck in my head. On repeat. This seems crazy to me, since I haven’t watched an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in over a decade. And I still don’t know the words.
They say the only way to successfully extricate a catchy tune from your head is to listen to the song in its entirety. Let me give that a try.
That didn’t do the trick. While Pee-Wee is on the brain, here’s some Playhouse trivia:
- The theme song was performed by Cyndi Lauper (lyrics here).
- Pee-Wee’s co-stars included Phil Hartman (Captain Carl), Laurence Fishburne (Cowboy Curtis), Sandra Bernhard (Rhonda the picturephone operator), Jimmy Smits (pictured to the right; repairman Johnny Wilson fixed the Secret Word-dispensing Conky 2000) and Natasha Lyonne (Opal; Natasha played Jessica in American Pie).
- Rob Zombie was a production assistant.
- Magic Johnson (below) appeared on the 1988 Christmas special.
- The show won 22 Emmy Awards, and had an extravagant budget of $325,000 per episode.
- Last month at Spike TV’s Guys Choice Awards, for the first time in fifteen years, Paul Reubens broke out the gray suit (see a clip here).
- A film adaptation is in the works: Pee-Wee’s Playhouse: The Movie.
- Read The 25 Best Playhouse Moments from ProgressiveBoink.com.
When I worked at a video store I used to put on an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse at the end of the night to get all the stragglers out. Half the people would be gone before the end of the theme song. I should also mention that we closed at midnight and most customers there at close were in the “adult” section.
posted by Jacob on 7-2-2007 at 11:11 am
According to Paul Reuben’s interview on Jimmy Kimmel, he said he was making the story about the movie up.
posted by al on 7-2-2007 at 3:03 pm
I searched for the mp3 of the theme and found it here cyndi.8m.com/audio.html
:)
posted by Janet on 7-2-2007 at 5:19 pm
This is about getting the song stuck in your head.
I worked at a place where a competition evolved to see who get the most people humming a song. It was evil and our lives (all three of us) were constantly being threatened. The only down side to this fun endeavor was that we were often victims of “Repetitive Song Syndrome”. In order for the process to work, we had to start the song going on a regular basis throughout the day. We were victims of our own cleverness.
After several weeks of near insanity from having these songs stuck in our heads, the group discovered the cure: the end credit music from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. It’s only about 30 seconds long, it doesn’t have an easily repetitive main theme, and it abruptly ends with a crash. Somehow these elements cancel out any repeating song looping around in the noggin. Play this is in your brain and it disrupts the repeating song.
I’ve explained this to many others, and most of them have returned with positive results. This is not scientific by any means, but how does one explain Repetitive Song Syndrome in the first place?
Enjoy!
posted by Dag on 7-3-2007 at 5:08 am
So one day I had a song stuck in my head for almost the entire time it took to mow the lawn. There I am a young guy with (hippy-like)long hair, perspiration dripping from my nose and earbrow rings, and if the sound of the lawnmower had suddenly stopped you would have heard me singing “Come On-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney, a song from when my parents were kids.
“Come on-a my house, to my-yie house,
I’m-a gonna give-a you ca-an-dy.”
posted by Tdave on 7-5-2007 at 1:23 am