Pee Wee's Big Adventure

I am a child of the 80s. I had a mullet, I wore fluorescent colored socks, I took jazz dancing and I can tell you exactly where I was when the Challenger blew up. Fortunately for me, I also had parents who were quite socially liberal and let me watch whatever I wanted on TV provided I didn't repeat the language I'd heard in Police Academy or Stripes the night before. So my introduction to Pee Wee Herman was an HBO special aimed at adults during which, among other gags, the handless genie in the box orders hands through the mail because "there's something he's been wanting to do for a long time" and a puppet hypnotizes an audience member and makes her take off her clothes. It was also a hilarious parody of 50s children's programming. The educational film about Mr. Bungle, anyone? So nobody was more surprised than me when Pee Wee turned up on an actual Saturday morning kids' show, and no one was less surprised when he was arrested in Sarasota doing something he'd been wanting to do for a long time.

In between the horrible show with the talking chair and the talking globe, and the unfortunate event in the XXX theater, there was this amazing, whimsical, colorful, frightening, hilarious, nonsensical film called Pee Wee's Big Adventure. We all know the ridiculous plot: Pee Wee, a man child in an ill-fitting suit, loses his bicycle and goes on a cross country search for it. Every kid who was in elementary school in the 80s was scared to death by Large Marge, the ghost of a truck driver who gave Pee Wee a ride. We all wanted a Rube-Goldberg breakfast making machine (and didn't it piss you off when, after all that rigamarole, Pee Wee took one bite of cereal and left the house?) and who wouldn't kill to have a swimming pool sized tub like Francis had?

But when I rewatched the film in the mid 90s as an "adult," I realized there were so many things going on I'd never noticed as a ten year old. Like the way Mickey, the escaped con, leers at Pee Wee when he's dressed up like a woman. Or the reason why Pee Wee doggedly fends off the sexual advances of hottie E.G. Daily, who you may also recognize as the fine girl in the silver dress singing the title song at the school dance in Better Off Dead. And having realized over the years that I was a fan of the auteur Burton, I can go back and see the signs in this, his first feature, of the lovely darkness that would later become the forefront in movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. I mean, how many kids' movies feature a corrupt fortune teller or a lumberjack named Andy who wants to kill the main character for asking about his girlfriend's "big but(t)?"

In many ways Pee Wee's Big Adventure shaped my sense of humor. I am now a big fan of WTF absurd moments in film, and it all started with Francis and his dad, Amazing Larry, the people in Texas who would join in on their state song (they probably actually do that, but I don't know cause I try not to mess with Texas) and the king of WTF moments in this movie, Pee Wee saving his own ass from the biker gang by putting on some white platforms and dancing on the bar to "Tequila." And I haven't even mentioned the music. Would you believe I was in a Ripley's Believe it Or Not museum in St. Augustine, FL and went into a hallway where the walls were spinning to give you the illusion that the (stationary) wooden bridge was wildly swinging and the instrumental theme from Pee Wee's Big Adventure was playing non-stop? Believe it. It was art imitating life imitating art.

Overall, I thank God that Warner Bros. put up the money for this film, because we might not have so many Tim Burton movies to enjoy without the cult success of Pee Wee's Big Adventure. I just wish people had been a little less judgemental of Paul Reubens. There's a real person inside every children's entertainer. Unfortunately, while poking gentle fun at sanitized American 50s entertainment in his art, Reubens fell victim to the same outdated Puritanical sensibilities in his life. But for me and millions of other cult film enthusiasts, nothing can ruin this movie. It takes me back to my childhood in the 80s, when you lived to ride your bike, the world was brightly colored, and people with some sense like my parents didn't set out to make their kids naive as hell.