One other thing about the end of Pee-wee's Playhouse. You may recall that, around the end of 1988, Ralph Nader went on a Boston-based radio program to complain about a pay raise that Congress was about to vote itself. Somehow, the suggestion emerged that, in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, irate citizens should protest this action by mailing a tea bag to their representatives. The concept made the rounds of talk radio programs and before long, Congresspeople were waist-high in orange pekoe. In February of 1989, Congress voted down that increase, and the radio hosts crowed about their supposed power. (There was some question as to whether the bill would have been defeated anyway, but The Great Teabag Protest went into the history books and has not been repeated. Matter of fact, I don't recall hearing a peep when subsequent raises were adopted.)
Not long after l'affaire teabag, Paul Reubens had his much-joked-about arrest and word got around — erroneously — that CBS had dropped his show because of it. A talk radio host in San Francisco decided this was a major injustice and launched a similar protest. For this one, folks were urged to register their outrage by mailing CBS a pink bow-tie since (I guess) Pee-wee wore pink bow-ties.
When you think about it, this is a really dumb idea — several really dumb ideas, actually. Even if the show hadn't already stopped production, even if Reubens had unfairly lost a series he wanted to continue…there have to be more shameful injustices in the world. Plus, if you want to inundate the offending party with mail, you ought to pick something easy for the protesters to send…like, say, a teabag. Almost everyone has a teabag around the house and they cost around six cents apiece. How many of you have a spare pink bow-tie handy? How many of you, assuming you cared about Pee-wee's Playhouse, would go out and purchase one for a couple of bucks and mail it to CBS?
Anyway, I was over at CBS, visiting the Childrens Programming Department a few weeks after this particular crusade was announced. Posted on one wall was an article about the radio host and the movement he had spawned. In the piece, he reported on the dozens of other radio shows that had picked up the cause and urged viewers to mail their pink bow-ties to CBS, along with irate letters and threats to boycott the Columbia Broadcasting System. The campaign had been, he said, a smashing success. An inside source had told him that the network was swimming in angry mail and pink bow-ties.
And posted next to this in the CBS office were all six protest letters they'd received, along with the one pink bow-tie.