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.