http://411mania.com/movies/new-pee-wee-herman-movie-begins-shooting-next-year/

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Paul Reubens said that production on a new Pee Wee Herman film will begin next year. Here are highlights:

On being approached for the original Pee Wee’s Playhouse: “Yeah. I’d had the stage show originally, so I was much more interested in doing something closer to that, something live-action. So when they suggested doing a cartoon, I said ‘I’m not really interested in that; let’s do a real kid’s show.’ I was a big Howdy-Doody freak growing up — I was actually on one show when I was a kid, in the audience — and was more interested in doing something like that. Howdy-Doody, Captain Kangaroo, a lot of the local kids shows that were on a long time ago — those were the influences.”

On how the show looks on blu-ray: “What a lot of people don’t realize is, the show was shot on film. But it’s never been seen on film — we’d shoot it and immediately transfer it to tape, then we’d edit it on tape and add the effects in on tape. The whole thing is then put on a “broadcast tape,” for airing. You lose information and clarity the more you dupe, so in some cases, we’re talking six generations of loss. We’ve cleaned all that up. I’ve spent over a year in a lab helping the folks putting this out with color corrections, helping them find the right source material for some of the effects — many of which they recreated from scratch for the Blu-rays. The amount of work that went into this was huge. One of the things I always loved about the show was the amount of detail we were able to pack into the show, how great everything was made to look — and so much of that got lost because of transfers and time. Someone told me that it’s basically impossible to show Playhouse re-runs on TV over the last five years, because they would just look horrible — and he was right. But we’ve rescued these episodes now. You can see all the details and the vibrancy now. I was looking at the box of the DVD set that came out in the early 2000s, and it says something like “as you’ve never seen them before.” This is really how you’ve never seen them before. Fans are going to freak out.”

On a new movie: “There’s going to be a big announcement any minute now. Yes. It’s been months and months of being right on the verge of being announced…I thought something was going to go public yesterday, actually, and that you’d be the first person I’d be talking about this with. But I’m thinking there will be something made public very soon. It’s going to get made shortly after the new year. I wish I could tell you about it right now, because…I mean, it’s amazing. It’s going to be amazing. It think it first got leaked four years ago or so that the movie was going to be made, and ever since then it’s just been stalling and stalling. So I’m really ready for this to happen. But I’m not kidding: It’s very imminent.”