“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” premiered on CBS in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, which means I was probably too old for it. Or maybe too young. (Among them was a young Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis, wielding an animated lasso.) The overstuffed set, with its midcentury candy palette and zigzag angles, looked like a B-52s album you could live inside. Pee-wee the character was a parody — a high-on-Pixy-Stix exaggeration of the clean-cut kids’ hosts of the 1950s, a Howdy Doody who brought himself to life.

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Persons: ”, Herman, Paul Reubens, Laurence Fishburne, Cowboy Curtis, Howdy Doody Organizations: CBS