12/01/24, second post

(This was intended to go out on 12/2/24, but I wanted to really hit the ground rolling with this.)

NOTES: The musical number…Again, nice, but unworkable in still photography. Also, how to do it? I thought of an army of Star Wars Stormtroopers standing in for the Marines/UCLA glee club at the beginning to riff on the comedic way they're treated at the opening of Star Wars Rogue Squadron (the LucasArts logo) and the LEGO Star Wars games, but…Too expensive for just a few shots, and they’d be out of scale anyway. Dancing Stormtroopers are only funny when they’re dancing. (Also because there really aren't any figurines of Marines in dress uniform on the market. In fact, that's the main reason--if I could find them, I would have used them.)

So the opening number was out and the Visit from St. Nicholas parody was in. I did have the opening number in, at least in some form, with the final line. 

Since there wasn’t a figure of Cher on the market, and I wasn’t going to have one commissioned (in hindsight, Evil-Lyn from He-Man is closest to her 80s appearance), I simply moved the secret word up to the beginning of the episode. This had the benefit of demonstrating that Pee-Wee isn’t treating Christmas Eve in a very special way with any extra effort. He’s not thinking about decorating, or preparing dinner, or anything else. Just typical Playhouse fun. It also gave the Puppet Band a line and allowed me to show off a brick-wall background for their area. Look carefully, and you will notice that I even drew the little fire escape.

The final panel is a pickup shot done around mid-September or so, well after I wrapped on most of the principal photography. I can tell because you're looking at the Super Hero Pee-Wee figure, which I found later on. Most of the photobook stars the Hero Pee-Wee--you can tell them apart by the head-sculpt, the slight staining on the jacket from age, a truly awful join between head and body, and a little bit of paint on the peak of his hair having rubbed off. 

12/01/24

 

NOTES: Hello, and welcome to The Pee-Wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special Photobook. This is Nick Tosoni, the designer, writer—I take care to say the adaptor, because the honor of writing it and the characters goes to George McGrath and the late Paul Reubens and John Paragon. 

One of the ideas I had was to do a cheaper replica of the original stop-motion opening, which would entail a model forest leading to the toy of the playhouse. Then I lost my job, which gave me the time to work on this, but cut out the buying for the video sequence. You would have gone past a series of billboards with some of the opening credits, and this slide was meant to be the first billboard. 

The sequence would then have gone through a model forest, leading to the playhouse being turned the wrong way around, with the camera implied to be flying around on the wrong side. The playset, mounted on a turntable, would then whip around, as if the camera immediately corrected itself, to reveal the decorated exterior, with ornaments representing large decorations. Nice idea, but unworkable for the scales I needed.

The entire project was inspired by Eagan Tilghman's "Au revoir, Pee-Wee." It's a little video in Blender, done to look like classic Rankin-Bass stop-motion.

Before we go online...

Just a little drive-by update before we go online tonight. There are three Hallmark Magic segments in the form of embedded YouTube videos. Where are they? Well, you'll just have to wait and find out... :)

Here's how it's going to work. There will be one, sometimes two, posts per day and four on the final day, and you're intended to visit each day as if opening the panels on an advent calendar. I did it this way because the challenge was to get the posts large enough to be legible, and cramming multiple pages onto one post would render most of the text illegible. 

Along the way, you will also receive behind-the-scenes insights with production tidbits and some of the thought processes involved. 

Thank you, and I hope all of you enjoy this! 

...and counting...

Patience, patience...

 The Christmas season is near...but this project is practically begging to be cast out into the world for everyone to see. There were so many days where I wanted nothing more than to stop production and scrap the whole thing, but an impulse greater still urged me to do one more scene, one more effect, one more edit, one more dialogue revision. 

About all that's left to say is, I hope it remains true to the spirit of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. At the top of my own Christmas list is the admittedly vain hope that Lynne Stewart, Wayne White, George McGrath, and the rest of the surviving cast and crew see it and praise it for what it is.