“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” (1985), Tim Burton’s debut feature film, is a perfect synchronization of star and filmmaker.
Burton, the wunderkind ex-Disney animator and director of striking, personal short films, and Paul Reubens, the pleasingly strange comic who became big playing Pee-Wee Herman on “Late Night with David Letterman” and the adored 1981 “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” HBO special, were an ideal match.
Together, they created a vehicle that brought out the best in both of them.
The story plays like a kindergartener’s recitation of “The Bicycle Thief” plot, with Pee-Wee’s search for his stolen bike leading him on a cross-country search. We know from the start who took his bike: the devilish Francis, a privileged, snot-nosed brat, played to the hilt by Mark Holton.
The point isn’t who did it, but where the bike ends up and how Herman can get it back.
“Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” is strange and juvenile, truly one of the silliest comedies of its decade. It’s also one of the funniest films ever made and easily among the most stylish Burton ever crafted.
I realize how goofy it is to be rehashing this story, but really, Pee-Wee’s odyssey is oddly compelling. The episodic plot takes him to the Alamo, a biker bar, the famous Wheel Inn restaurant (where the giant dinosaur still stands), on a train trip and to a Hollywood studio.
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There’s a magic to the world of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” a sort of Movie Land fairy tale setting where anything is possible. Seeing the film when I was a child, I was delighted from start to finish, though my un-cynical view of the world was in synch with the film’s.
Today, recalling when the film was made, it’s even more special, knowing that an innocent fable about a man-child in search of his bike came out during the Me Decade.
My first real introduction to his most iconic character was seeing a matinee of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” with my family in an old-fashioned, two-story movie theater in Clifton, New Jersey.
Like most children who saw the film in 1985, the famous “Large Marge” sequence is what I remember the most about my initial viewing, as the sequence startled me in a way few horror films have since. The trauma of the Chiodo Brothers’ vividly ghoulish (and hilarious) animation aside, I loved “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.”
I loved it for how hard it made me laugh, for how cool Pee-Wee’s mechanized home is, how wonderful Pee-Wee’s dance to The Champs’ “Tequila” is and how the story is also about a girl named Dottie, who is infatuated with a weird guy who always wears a suit and bow tie.
Most know the film for either its value as an offbeat American comedy or its stature as Burton’s unlikely and brilliant debut film. Coming out the same season as the enjoyable and ultra-commercial “The Goonies,” the Chevy and Danny nuke farce “Spies Like Us,” the 1950’s nostalgia-fueled “Back to the Future” and the boobs and beer sequel, “Porky’s Revenge,” Burton’s movie was totally out-of-step with every other mainstream comedy.
Looking at it today, I’m struck by how obviously low budget it is (a quality that somehow makes it more dream-like) and the ways it feels like an art movie.
Scenes of Pee-Wee frolicking around his house, utterly embracing how juvenile his existence is (do I even need to mention Reubens was 33 when he made this?) aren’t uncommon in many Adam Sandler films. In ’85, it was as refreshingly weird, so-unhip-it-was-cool and as subversively odd as David Letterman’s show was in the early going.
Pee-Wee’s home, with its Rube Goldberg-esque traps, tacky lawn furniture, pop culture relics and quasi-50’s decor, is part Fellini, part Liberace lawn sale.
The establishing scenes, a dream sequence (which is even funnier today than it was in the eighties) and the character-establishing bits are shamelessly silly and undeniably sweet.
Much like the movie itself.
Each sequence plays like a mini-classic. The screenplay, penned by Reubens, Michael Varhol and the late, great Phil Hartman, is relentlessly silly but never stupid, mean-spirited or raunchy. The onslaught of jokes is surprisingly smart, with the best gags the most surreal ones (like how everyone in Texas knows the lyrics to a certain song).
Every single character Pee-Wee encounters feels like an escapee from a B-movie, a quality the film fully embraces as the climax blurs the line between parodying a Hollywood movie and fully embracing the clichés it teases. It all works, even the bit where Pee-Wee interrupts the filming of a Twisted Sister video.
Burton makes his inaugural film a tour de force of style and tone. Burton, art director David L. Snyder and composer Danny Elfman create a film for children, about children, told by adults who are kids at heart.
The moments of “edge” (particularly the terrific, kaleidoscopically stylish dream sequences) are perfect, which balance out the cotton-candy softness at the film’s center. The closing image, of a boy and the girl he loves, riding off on their bicycles, as their shadows are projected on a drive-in screen, couldn’t be more perfect.
This movie is irresistible.