This past Christmas my wife and I sat down to watch the Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special. Netflix just added it and since we both watched Pee-Wee as kids and hadn't seen it in a good twenty-some years, we thought we might indulge in a bit of nostalgia and holiday merriment.
Have you seen this show as an adult? Because holy crap, it is batshit crazy. I lost count of how many times my wife wondered aloud about the drugs involved or feeling like she was on some herself. Its manic and frantic and obnoxious. Every piece of furniture has a face, there are puppets literally coming out of the woodwork, there are tiny dinosaurs, a talking cow, a giant talking hand with a face painted on it, Laurence Fishburne's a cowboy, Pee-Wee can jump in and out of a computer screen...it's ADHD and LSD and glitter and screaming...just all kinds of madness. And that's just what the basic show is like, this one you've got to throw the Christmas theme over top of all that. So while Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon are making a thousand Christmas cards at Pee-Wee's request, the hyper-active man-child is eagerly anticipating Santa Claus' arrival with all his gifts. And of course, in this world, Santa Claus is totally real.
So you go through a good half an hour of zany antics and celebrity cameos and general Christmas-ness and eventually Ol' Saint Nick arrives.
And then it happens:
"The true meaning of Christmas," is mentioned.
Pee-Wee makes a turn toward the camera to give us a thirty second explanation, complete with footage of what looks like a school play enacting the events, of the story of how Jesus Christ was born in a manger to save mankind.
And then it takes a sharp turn right back into the wackiness. My wife and I both questioned if what we just saw actually happened. This brief aside was rather jarring. It felt unconnected with everything else, almost like it was an afterthought, like they'd written the whole script and were about to start filming when somebody said, "Oh shit! We forgot about Jesus! Quick, cram him in there somewhere!" Here is this show, less than an hour, full of off the wall goofiness and energy and the furthest thing from anything remotely serious beyond the moral of the story (don't be a greedy dick, Pee-Wee!) and then out of nowhere, WHAMMO! Quick jab of serious Jesus business. And before you can even process it, it's over and there's a talking pterodactyl drinking eggnog with a shirtless lifeguard who's only there to be a handsome chunk of man-steak while everyone chants along with the genie head in a box to turn the whole thing into a luau. It's like if The Terminator stopped in the middle of trying to gun down T-1000 to do a brief bit of tap-dancing before unloading another shotgun blast or Big Bird stopped singing the alphabet to momentarily remind us of the inevitable finality of death constantly looming over us before getting back to Q through Z.
If it hadn't stuck out like a sore thumb and had been melded into the goings-on a little more, I might not have given it nearly as much thought. But that thumb jabbed me in the eyeball and got my gears turning. Truth be told, they'd already shown that the tiny dinosaurs who live in the wall are Jewish and celebrating Hanukkah. That already raised a few questions in my mind but it was not so heavy-handed. A little odd but kind of cute. But then they came out of left field and resoundingly underlined that God and Jesus exist and matter in this living cartoon. And that's pretty weird if you think about it.
Jesus was God in human form, so God would know and understand our mortal existence but does he know what it's like to be Chairry? Does he know what it's like to have a rambunctious twerp regularly sit on your face? Does he know what its like to be farted on by a boisterous man-boy? Does he understand the suffering of being a piece of furniture? Maybe he should have come to earth as a La-Z-Boy.
If there are living, breathing, sentient clocks and globes and floorboards, do they have souls? Will Magic Screen go to heaven when he dies? Or will he be damned for his ungodly Magic? People might say my cat won't go to heaven but what if my cat is anthropomorphic and plays the bongos? On which day did God create the living furniture? Or are these man-made abominations? Is this whole house actually the devil's work?
In this world, Santa Claus is real, singing flowers are real, a giant joke-telling hand with a face is real, and Our Lord God in Christ Jesus is real because any logic you might use to conclude that none of that stuff makes sense and defies reason is completely out the window in Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Logic does not exist here. But then what about other gods? Same logic applies...er, doesn't apply. So, they must all exist there, too? In that case, I don't know about you, but I'd pay good money to see Thor drop by...actual Norse Thor or sexy movie Thor, I'd be fine with either for fairly different reasons.
[I can almost smell the smouldering crater already]
Anyway, in conclusion, yeah, I might over-think things. Especially God-related things. But for a very long time I was afraid to question and think too hard about those things so now I do and I sometimes do with a vengeance. Call it making up for lost efforts or something. Maybe this is all a stupid waste of time but thinking and questioning are good things, you can't really do it too much. It's good to stretch your mind, even if you are just wondering about some bullshit on a kid's show. I'm not saying they shouldn't have mentioned this stuff on this show, I'm just saying it was a really weird place for God.
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