Pee-wee's America

Things are not going well for Pee-wee Herman when he stumbles into the Apache Bar, a roadside dive that happens to be a private club for a motorcycle gang that calls itself “The Satan’s Helpers.” After a long and eventful journey to San Antonio, Texas—riding shotgun with an escaped convict, hitching a lift from an ominous Big Rig driver known as “Large Marge,” sharing a boxcar with a folk song-screeching hobo—Pee-wee has discovered that his beloved bicycle, a red Schwinn tricked out with design flourishes and James Bond gizmos, is not in the basement at the Alamo, as a fortune teller suggested. In fact, there’s no basement in the Alamo at all, a notion that made him the laughingstock of the best group his gum-chomping tour guide (Jan Hooks) had ever had. Now he’s back to square one, broke and untold hundreds of miles from home. He needs to make a call, but can’t hear above the din. 

“Shhhhh…,” he hisses at the roughnecks. “I’m trying to use the phone!” 

So begins the most famous sequence in Tim Burton’s debut feature Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a modest hit in 1985 that’s finally gotten the Criterion treatment, an honor befitting one of the greatest comedies ever made. To the extent that the film penetrated the culture during the summer of Rambo: First Blood Part II, The Goonies, Cocoon, and Back to the Future, audiences would remember Pee-wee’s last request from the Satan’s Helpers, who didn’t take kindly to being shushed and certainly didn’t take kindly to this man-child in the gray suit and red bowtie accidentally knocking their parked motorcycles over like dominos. Pee-wee drops a quarter in the jukebox, borrows a pair of white platform shoes, and opts to spend his final moments on earth on top of the bar, dancing to the 1958 Latin-inspired instrumental “Tequila” by The Champs. 

It is a quintessential moment for Pee-wee, the character first developed by Paul Reubens for the L.A. improv troupe The Groundlings in the late ’70s and cycled through appearances on The Dating Game, late-night talk shows, HBO specials, three feature films, and a Saturday morning variety show. The formula is simple enough: Pee-wee has to take a bar full of people who want to kill him (or rather, stomp him, then tattoo him, then hang him, then kill him) and turn them around. And it’s a special kind of magic that he’ll do it mostly by being himself, though he does smash a few glasses to play to the crowd. We’ve seen the model of The Satan’s Helpers in movies before, specifically the Roger Corman biker pictures that popped up in the mid- to late-‘60s. But in Pee-wee’s hands, these snarling hooligans are quickly and utterly disarmed, as if converts to the Church of Whimsy. 

That’s the power of Pee-wee Herman and that’s the magic of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a road movie that transforms the American road into a cartoon landscape of his own imagination. For Reubens, playing Pee-wee must have felt like a career-long metafiction in which he constantly faced Satan’s Helpers types and labored to turn them around, to varying degrees of success. Pee-wee was certainly a challenge to traditional notions of masculinity and adulthood—and, let’s face it, sexuality—and there was never a time in which he would be in fashion, at least as an imitable figure in pop culture. And so Reubens had to slip on those platform shoes, crank up the jukebox and hope that another in a long line of tough crowds might come around to his way of seeing things. Whatever melancholy he must have felt having to do it is never once betrayed by PW: He is optimism personified. 

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is the rare Hollywood production where all the stars aligned at exactly the right time: Reubens had refined the character over the better part of a decade, and Burton, a gifted young animator and filmmaker, would prove to have the perfect sensibility for the material. With minimal interference from Warner Bros.—and maximal access to the studio lot—Burton embraced Pee-wee as the first in a series of heroic outsiders, from Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood, whose offbeat appearance and bold artistic vision set them apart from the conformists who belittle and isolate them. Only Pee-wee is never the type to stew in isolation. When he tells the plucky clerk (E.G. Daily) at Chuck’s Bike-O-Rama, “I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” it doesn’t mean he’s chosen the lonely road for himself. His gift is to convert every space into Pee-wee’s playhouse and make friends out of everyone he encounters. 

It’s always been a balm watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure over the years, especially at times when America’s darker forces have held sway and Satan’s Helpers types have looked more like the swastika-bearing edgelords in Corman’s The Wild Angels. When Pee-wee’s bike gets stolen and he hits the open road to find it, Reubens and Burton offer up a vision of the country that’s full of familiar signposts: Roadside bars and truck stops, kitschy tourist attractions, pop-up carnivals and rodeos and drive-in movie theaters. And along with these destinations are the colorful figures who populate them, from outlaws like Mickey (Judd Omen), who’s so hot-tempered he cut the “Do Not Remove” tag off a mattress, to dreamers like Simone (Diane Salinger), a waitress who wants to go to Paris if she can escape her jealous galoot of a boyfriend. Burton and Reubens focus on iconography that’s specific to the country and render it with an affection that’s constant and irrepressible. 

It’s all a candy-colored fantasy, of course, but it’s still rooted in real places and traditions. The Alamo exists, along with guided tours and related gift-shop tchotchkes. The Cabazon Dinosaurs remain a tourist attraction along Interstate 10 in southern California. The notion of a studio lot teeming with costumed performers, matte paintings, multiple productions on various soundstages is what the Dream Factory is like, at least in the popular imagination. (The ’80s lot may well have accommodated a Twisted Sister video shoot, but credit Burton and company for the retro delights of beach party films and Japanese monster movies still getting the green light.) Reubens and Burton are merely giving them Scissorhands-esque makeover. 

There’s never a point at which Pee-wee modifies his behavior to fit into wherever goes, only a weird guess at whatever each situation needs from him. He’s great at disguises that disguise nothing yet fool everyone, like dressing as Mickey’s fetching wife in order to give the cop at a roadblock the slip or going incognito as a rodeo cowboy in a cow-print chaps and a 20-gallon white hat. But most of the time, he’s sowing allegiances and persuading any doubters by being himself, which remains a positive message for a film like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (and a show like Pee-wee’s Playhouse) to send to Reubens’ imagined younger audience. If you don’t check your hostilities at the door, Pee-wee will do his damnedest to dance them out of you. 

If Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was an example of a blessed coalescence of the right talent at the right time, then it was perhaps inevitable for the future screen incarnations of the character to come crashing back to earth. Yet the decision-making that led to 1988’s Big Top Pee-wee—and Reubens’ subsequent scuttling from his office at Paramount Pictures—are head-scratching to the extreme, even with Reubens’ hand in the script. There’s no continuity whatsoever between Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Big Top Pee-wee, which sounds strange enough until you consider that its producer, the legendary Debra Hill, also worked on Halloween III: The Season of the Witch, a standalone sequel to two Michael Myers slasher movies that features neither slashing nor Michael Myers. Not even Pee-wee’s trusty (if irascible) canine companion Speck survives the transition. 

Perhaps the most significant break between the two movies is Pee-wee’s transition from a sexless man-child who resists Dottie’s wholesome advances to the randy center of a love triangle between Penelope Ann Miller and Valeria Golino. It’s like a version of the popular tweet where Elliott Gould and Grover appeared on the cover of TV Week. (“You get those photos of Elliott Gould and Grover?” “Sure did boss, real fuckin’ sexy just like you asked.”) Maybe Reubens wanted to seek an older audience, but the appeal (and the limitation) of Pee-wee is that he’s ageless and not the sort of person who’s going to evolve, physically or emotionally, over time like the rest of us. For whatever reason, Randal Kleiser struck someone as the  right studio hand to make Big Top Pee-wee and the Kleiser who directed The Blue Lagoon is the one that guided this production. It’s not like anyone could have suppressed Golino’s molten radiance at the time, but Kleiser was temperamentally disinclined to try. 

Still, you can squint a little and see the vision for Big Top Pee-wee, which places PW among the misfit entertainers of an old-fashioned traveling circus. Once again, the America of this Pee-wee movie bears only a cartoony resemblance to the real thing, with our hero having settled down on a farm near a rural town where the locals tend toward the aged and close-minded. As the film opens, Pee-wee lives alone on a farm where his closest companion is a talking pig named Vance, who trails him as he tends to his vegetable garden, his mildly anthropomorphized animals (they sleep in beds in the barn), and the super-secret greenhouse lab where he’s developing an organic growth serum. When a Wizard of Oz-like storm blows through and deposits a traveling circus on his lawn, Pee-wee welcomes these friendly strangers, led by the avuncular Mace Montana (Kris Kristofferson), whose wife Midge (Susan Tyrell) is a teacup-sized marvel. 

To have Pee-wee torn between Winnie (Miller), a prim schoolteacher who keeps making him egg salad sandwiches, and Gina (Golina), a trapeze artist who oozes sensuality, is a conceptual misstep the film never comes close to redeeming, despite a few sweet moments between Reubens and Golina. (A running gag where Pee-wee’s hand twitches uncontrollably as he fetishes Winnie and Gina’s hair is a particularly bad idea.) But there’s something to the idea of Pee-wee joining the circus, because it celebrates oddballs and eccentrics like him, even if he doesn’t have any one talent that might make him an attraction. What little comic mileage Big Top Pee-wee gets comes from his feckless efforts to find a place in Mace’s revamped version of the show. When all else fails, they try to fold him into the freak show, but he’s a letdown next to the hermaphrodite and the bearded lady. 

Yet in keeping the Reubens’ values, Big Top Pee-wee offers an explicit plea for tolerance that’s only implicit in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. Foes like the doughy Francis or Simone’s raging Andy in the earlier film are silly and harmless figures of fun, but the townspeople in Big Top are a hostile and discriminatory lot who want Pee-wee and the circus out of their sight, despite Mace’s idea to dedicate the new show to “The American Farm.” For once, Pee-wee doesn’t have the ability to turn people around through sheer force of charisma so he turns to a chemical solution involving a serum that miniaturizes hot dogs into magical cocktail wieners. It gets the job done, but it’s no replacement for all-natural eccentric charm. 

By 2015, when producer Judd Apatow and his team, led by co-writer Paul Rust, revived the character for Netflix’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, Reubens and Pee-wee Herman had become rightly revered as comedy legends, which creates its own series of potential pitfalls. At a minimum, the film understands the core appeal of the Pee-wee character and labors slavishly to bring him back to proper life, starting with a morning montage sequence that revives the Rube Goldberg device of his breakfast machine in Burton’s film. (An opening dream where Pee-wee tearfully bids “arrivederci” to a pizza-loving E.T. type with six nostrils also promises a funnier movie than Holiday turns out to be.) But the flip side of the film’s obvious affection for this character is that Pee-wee’s Big Holiday turns into a hollow nostalgia piece, like a victory lap for an athlete that’s conspicuously lost a step or two. 

Though Herman and Rust are anxious to have him hit the road again, the film is more assured when Pee-wee stays home in Fairsville, an idyllic small town that seems to have constructed itself around him. When a local travel agent suggests a vacation to Mexico or Morocco, Pee-wee brushes him away, preferring to keep his job as a fry cook at the diner, play the flutophone in his garage band, and read the latest in a series of books about the underwater adventures of “Scuba Cop.” Fate intervenes, however, when he meets a new best friend in Joe Manganiello, who appears as himself, a hunky movie and TV star from New York City who wants Pee-wee to come to his birthday party. Thus begins Pee-wee’s new adventure, which is intended to evoke the big adventure of old. 

In essence, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is less a proper revival of Herman’s signature character than a hollow marker of Apatow-branded improvisational comedy as it sputtered into the 2010s. The once-fruitful process that led to blockbusters like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up yields a kind of plucked-from-the-ether randomness that’s missing the conceptual punch of the ’85 comedy, which targeted a richer and broader range of American archetypes. Here, Pee-wee stumbles across the fitfully funny likes of a switchblade-sister heist trio, a traveling salesman who pushes novelty items (shades of Mario’s Magic Shop from the original), a farmer with nine flirtatious daughters, and a wealthy woman with a flying car. (Though she’s played by Diane Salinger, who’s instantly recognizable as Simone from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, it’s a totally different character. Like Big Top Pee-wee, this film rejects any such continuity.) 

Though there’s an undeniable sweetness to Pee-wee and Joe Manganiello’s instant and profound friendship, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday proves that there’s something elusive about making the Pee-wee character work in film. The hermetic wonderland of Pee-wee’s Playhouse—and, presumably, the stages that hosted The Groundlings—seems more controllable than the conventions of a story, which are sometimes beyond his ability to affect. Without a creative force like Burton to complement Reubens visually and tonally at all times, Pee-wee Herman looks more like an ordinary fish out of water. In Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, he owned the whole pond.