Created during Paul Reubens’s time with the improv troupe the Groundlings, Pee-wee Herman became perhaps the first great cult phenomenon of the 1980s. Pee-wee was a literal man-child whose cherubic mannerisms masked, in his original iteration, a darker side of selfishness and emotional fragility. Given the chance to bring the character to the big screen, Reubens softened that sinister, more adult element, reconfiguring Pee-wee as a puckish figure who unleashes chaos not from a place of malice, but from a place of aberrant naïveté.
Reubens concocted a humble farce about Pee-wee setting out to find his beloved bike after it’s stolen, and to direct it, he approached a young filmmaker with only two idiosyncratic shorts under his belt named Tim Burton. If Pee-wee Herman himself is a difficult character to explain, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure defies any description more specific than “comedy.” Like Jerry Lewis’s The Bellboy, the film’s minimal plot is simply a pretext to stage a series of vignettes in which the protagonist is placed in different situations and watch as his energy seemingly alters reality around him.
Think of the film as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves shot through with the Atomic Age radium kitsch of the B-52’s. The bold primary colors of Pee-wee’s home and its clutter of Rube Goldberg devices do as much to establish the director’s visual trademarks as his pending use of stark monochrome patterns. And with each scene operating almost as its own self-contained film, Burton gets to experiment with genres and tones, all while using touches like wide-angle lenses and expressionistic lighting to link everything with an overriding oneiric strangeness.
Even the most naturalistic settings seen on Pee-wee’s quest have some element—vividly colored lighting, off-kilter framings—that makes them feel like an extension of the protagonist’s bizarre perspective of the world. Burton threads together a fantasia that links roadside attractions, Hollywood backlots, and the entire state of Texas as places forged in real time alongside their mythologies and subject to being whatever the people who traverse them wish them to be.
The depiction of Pee-wee making hostile environments a little kinder is all the more endearing for the goofy and slightly surreal flights of fancy that characterize the film. A biker gang that first gazes upon this strange man as fresh meat to be tenderized by fists and blunt objects ends up jovially joining him in a singalong, and a diner waitress (Diane Salinger) in the middle of nowhere decides to pursue her dream of moving to Paris thanks to his encouragement.
Reubens’s first draft of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was effectively a remake of Polyanna. Even with the restructuring around the quest for Pee-wee’s vintage Schwinn DX, that element of the hero leaving every place a bit better than he found it is retained and is as crucial to the appeal of this cult comedy as its off-the-wall quotable dialogue and singular look.
Image/Sound
The explosive colors of the film’s cinematography and production design really pop across the Criterion Collection’s 4K transfer. Reds, blues, and greens practically radiate off the screen, while black levels in darker scenes are consistently deep and stable. In both close-ups and medium shots, you can make out the thin layer of powder makeup on Paul Reubens’s face that’s such a crucial element of the subliminally uncanny aspect of the Pee-wee character, and none of the exaggeratedly over-lit scenes suffer from washing out or loss of definition. The original stereo track is included alongside a 5.1 mix, and both are exceptionally clear, rendering Danny Elfman’s cartoony score in all its madcap intricacy while keeping dialogue legible.
Extras
Criterion ports over two commentaries from a 2005 video release of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, one a chat between Reubens and director Tim Burton and the other a solo track by Elfman. The former stands out for Reubens and Burton pointing out all the ways they saved money during the shoot, be it using oddities they owned as props or scaling back planned sequences. Elfman looks back on one of his earliest film scores and the one that really launched his second career, breaking down his working method and unpacking the cartoony sound of the score.
In a newly recorded conversation with Burton, comedian and filmmaker Richard Ayoade can scarcely contain his enthusiasm for the film as he asks Burton about his early career and how he came to direct the project. Another new interview brings together producer Richard Abramson production designer David L. Snyder, cowriter Michael Varhol, and editor Billy Weber, who delve into, among other things, how they were drawn to the project. A 2005 episode of Hollywood’s Master Storytellers with Reubens traces Pee-wee’s evolution from his initially dark conception through to the more upbeat and kid-friendly version of character seen in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and the subsequent television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
The disc also comes with a series of deleted scenes and excerpts from a 40th-anniversary event for the film presented by Nostalgic Nebula and moderated by stand-up comic and actor Dana Gould. The roundtable, featuring various members of the cast and crew, is a chummy and incredibly funny affair, though the absence of the late Reubens casts an inevitable pall over the lighthearted sharing of memories. A booklet essay by critic and comedian Jesse Thorn situates Pee-wee’s Big Adventure within the careers of Reubens and Burton.
Overall
One of the great cult comedies of the 1980s receives a flawless transfer from Criterion.
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