Pee Wee's Playhouse Coming to Blu-Ray

http://www.allmediarights.com/#!media/c170d

A short video about the transfer.

 

Hmmm. Looking at the boxes, I noticed they say 16mm. So I guess 16mm was the film stock they used.

On the original master tapes of the episodes, the movement was very similar to The Wonder Years.

 

Nothing started a young boy's Saturday off better than seeing Miss Yvonne visit Pee Wee's crib. She was a hottie. At least she was when I was 10.

 

Nothing started a young boy's Saturday off better than seeing Miss Yvonne visit Pee Wee's crib. She was a hottie. At least she was when I was 10.

 

https://www.facebook.com/PeeweeHerm....149547.55264489055/10153223924974056/?type=1

I'm impressed by the image improvements.

 

I was sure this was shot on videotape? I distinctly remember years ago when Comedy Central were playing it and I remember the promo's they made, and the clips were defintaley videotape, with the 29 frames per second frame rate.

Maybe it was another Pee-Wee Herman special?

EDIT: I think it was the HBO special I remember.

 

Every past incarnation of this show was from videotape masters. This new Blu-ray was rebuilt from scratch with all the film reels kept by Paul.

 

Yes, they did all the rescans, conforming, restoration, and color-correction over at Illuminate in North Hollywood near Universal. Very nice people over there -- my old pal Mikey Volland is one of the staff technicians involved with it (guy with the beard in the short). I agree, the show never, ever looked this good in the 1980s/1990s. I'm always glad when they can spend the money to take an old film show and restore it to HD in much, much better quality than it was in before and give it new life.

 

I was pretty impressed with how the intro looks in the clip that Shout posted on YouTube. I always remember the show having a fuzzy/orangey-pink tint to it,
so it's nice seeing it look so crisp. I believe Shout Factory is streaming an episode or two live online via their website at 10am EST this morning.

 

Free samples running this morning:

https://www.shoutfactory.com/editorials/pee-wee-s-playhouse-saturday-morning-live-stream

 

My memory is that it was all on 16mm negative, but they could have been filming at 30fps, which was popular for a little while in the 1980s and early 1990s. What's interesting is that in the scanning, they show some 35mm being scanned. It's possible they shot both 16 and 35, using 35 for the complicated VFX scenes. I can recall this was a very complicated and expensive show for Saturday morning, with tons of visual effects. It was all edited over at Laser-Pacific in Hollywood, which was a busy place in those days.

 

Yeah, I saw Pee Wee on a recent episode of The Blacklist, and said, "wow! He's updated his toupee for 2014!"

 

I think it's great for old TV shows to be restored in HD from original film elements, but something feels wrong to me about seeing Pee Wee's Playhouse without the the fuzzy, pink-ish look to it.

 

In its original "film-on-videotape look", I thought the first season looked the best in terms of picture quality. I don't know how it suddenly got a pinkish tint. The show was a New York production in 1986, and then a Los Angeles production from 1987 to 1990. Did they get new videotape equipment with the move to L.A.?

Maybe Vidiot would know...

 

I know what you mean . Look forward to taking a look at one of these though.

 

It's deliberately bad. One of the characters even commented on how bad it looked.

 

All shot on film. I casually knew Claire deWitt, who was the post supervisor on the show, and she was a very capable woman who did good work. She sweated blood getting those shows done.

 

Anyone else get this? My copy arrived earlier this week and I finally got around to watching all of the bonus features (and there are many of them) as well as a few episodes. As expected, the picture quality is much improved. The various documentaries were all interesting. The only real disappointments are the lack of Paul Reubens' presence in any of the documentaries and the omission of any mention of many of the regular cast members in the documentary devoted to the cast. I understand only taking a couple of minutes to mention the various guest stars who only appeared in one episode, but they failed to even mention any of the following notable actors:

Shirley Stoler (Mrs. Steve in the first season)
Suzanne Kent (Mrs. Renee, second to fifth seasons)
Roland Rodriguez (Tito, the lifeguard in the first season)
Vic Trevino (Ricardo, the soccer player in the second through fifth seasons)
Gilbert Lewis (The King of Cartoons, first season)
William H. Marshall (The King of Cartoons, second through fifth seasons)
Johann Carlo (Dixie, the taxi driver who announced The King Of Cartoons during the first season).

The documentary makes it clear that there were many changes at the end of the first season and maybe the various cast changes were simply due to the show's production moving from New York to Los Angeles, but it still would have been interesting to have heard a little bit about the cast changes.

 

Even though Mrs. Steve was only in one season, I definitely prefer that character over Mrs. Rene. But it's more difficult to choose between Roland (Tito) versus Vic (Ricardo). I'd probably go with Tito since he almost always had his shirt off.

 

He's playing a character. It was a script choice. It's part of the plot line.

 

I do not want to sway people from buying the Blu-Rays, but it doesn't seem like Paul Ruebens kept all of the 16mm elements. The first scene from one of the two episodes of Season 3 is still missing.

Why did Reubens throw away the negative for this scene? Does Reubens know about the missing scene?

 

Is it a missing scene? I remember it being included during the 1998 reruns on Fox Family(Now ABC Family). I'm guessing Paul doesn't care for it very much, so he nixed it. Similar to David Bowie dropping "Too Dizzy" from subsequent issues of "Never Let Me Down".

 

Yes. It is a missing scene. It was also on the mid-1990's VHS releases from MGM/UA.

The one seen at the start of season 5's "Something to Do", however, is still there.

 

The later episodes were much better looking picture wise, than the first season. The 1989-90 season must have had a really high budget.