Following the success of The Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981, Reubens was hired by the Warner Bros. film studio and began writing the script for Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Impressed with Burton's work on the short films Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984), the producers and Reubens hired him to direct. Filming took place in California and Texas. The film was scored by Danny Elfman, marking his first among many collaborations with Burton.
Pee-wee's Big Adventure was released on August 9, 1985, grossing over $40 million in North America. It became a cult film and continued to accumulate positive feedback. It was nominated for a Young Artist Award and was followed by two standalone sequels, Big Top Pee-wee (1988) and Pee-wee's Big Holiday (2016). Its financial success, followed by Burton's equally successful Beetlejuice in 1988, prompted Warner Bros. to hire Burton to direct the 1989 film Batman.
Plot
Pee-wee Herman has a heavily accessorized bicycle that he cherishes. His neighbor and enemy, Francis Buxton, wants the bicycle. Dottie is a bike shop employee who has a crush on Pee-wee, but he does not reciprocate, claiming that he leads far too dangerous and incomprehensible of a lifestyle for her. As Pee-wee goes on a shopping spree, his bike is stolen, but the police are not overly concerned with the theft. Pee-wee assumes Francis took it, and confronts him, but Francis' father convinces Pee-wee that Francis was not responsible. Pee-wee offers a $10,000 reward for the bike. Francis, who did indeed pay to have someone steal the bike, is disturbed by Pee-wee's relentlessness and pays to have the bike sent away. That evening, Pee-wee holds an unsuccessful evidentiary meeting of friends and neighbors to find the bike, then rejects offers of help. He then visits a phony psychic who misleads Pee-wee into believing his bike is in the basement of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio and steals his wallet.
Pee-wee hitchhikes to Texas, getting rides from a fugitive convict named Mickey, and from Large Marge, the ghost of a truck driver. At a truck stop, Pee-wee finds his wallet is missing, and pays for his meal by washing dishes. He befriends Simone, a waitress who dreams of visiting Paris. As they watch the sun rise from within a roadside dinosaur statue, he encourages her to follow her dreams, but Simone tells him about her boyfriend, Andy, who disapproves. Andy appears and tries to attack Pee-wee, who escapes onto a moving train. Pee-wee arrives at the Alamo, but learns at the end of a guided tour that the building does not have a basement.
At a bus station, Pee-wee encounters Simone, who tells him she broke up with Andy and is on her way to Paris. She tells Pee-wee not to give up searching for his bike. Pee-wee calls Dottie and apologizes for his behavior. Andy spots Pee-wee and resumes chasing him. Pee-wee evades Andy at a rodeo by disguising himself as a bull rider. Forced to ride a bull, Pee-wee nearly sets a world record, but is knocked out. He visits a biker bar to make a phone call, and a biker gang threatens to kill him after he accidentally knocks over their motorcycles. He wins them over by dancing to the song "Tequila" in a pair of platform shoes, and they give him a motorcycle for his journey, which he crashes immediately.
He awakens in a hospital and sees on television that his bike is being used as a prop in a film. Pee-wee sneaks into Warner Bros. Studios with Milton Berle in Burbank and grabs the bike. Security guards chase him across the studio lot and through several active sets before he escapes. Pee-wee then discovers a burning pet shop and rescues the animals. The firefighters declare Pee-wee a hero, but the police arrest Pee-wee for his intrusion at the studio. They return Pee-wee to the studio to face Warner Bros. president Terry Hawthorne. After Pee-wee pleads his case that the bike belongs to him, Hawthorne decides to drop the charges and return Pee-wee's bike in exchange for the rights to adapt his story into a film starring James Brolin as "P.W. Herman" and Morgan Fairchild as Dottie. In the film, presented as a James Bond parody, the characters must retrieve their stolen motorbike – which contains an important microfilm – from the Soviets, after the US President telephones P.W. to let him know of the bike's importance to national security. Pee-wee has a cameo role as a hotel bellhop, though his voice has been dubbed.
Seeing the film at a drive-in theater, Pee-wee gives refreshments to the different people he met along his journey. He also encounters Francis, who tells reporters he is Pee-wee's best friend and that he taught Pee-wee how to ride. Francis claims to be knowledgeable about Pee-wee's bike, but sets off one of the bicycle's gadgets, catapulting himself into the air. Ultimately, Pee-wee decides to depart with Dottie, claiming to have already "lived" the adventure on screen.
Judd Omen as Mickey Morelli, an escaped convict who claims he was incarcerated for cutting a tag off a mattress. Referred to only as "Mickey" for most of his scenes, his surname can be briefly heard on the radio.
Selected supporting players, in order of appearance
Monte Landis as Mario, the owner of a magic shop where Pee-wee purchases several tricks and gadgets that become plot devices.
Daryl Roach as Chuck, the owner of a bike shop where Pee-wee purchases accoutrements for his bike.
Director Tim Burton has an uncredited cameo appearance as the street thug who confronts Pee-wee in a rainy back alley.[4] Veteran comedy star Milton Berle also has an uncredited cameo, entering the Warner Bros. lot and telling jokes to his entourage as Pee-wee sneaks in with them.[5]
Production
One of the prop bicycles used in the film on display at Bicycle Heaven
The success of The Pee-wee Herman Show prompted Warner Bros. to hire Paul Reubens to write a script for a full-length Pee-wee Herman film. His original concept was a remake of Pollyanna (1960), Reubens's favorite film, with Pee-wee Herman in the Hayley Mills role. While writing the script, Reubens noticed that many at Warner Bros. rode bicycles around the backlot and requested one of his own. This inspired Reubens to start a new script.[6]
Having left Walt Disney Productions and with Frankenweenie (1984) receiving positive reviews within film studios, Tim Burton was seeking a full-length film to direct. When Reubens and the producers of Pee-wee's Big Adventure saw Burton's work on Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie, they decided to hire him.[7] Burton felt that he connected with Reubens's personality and the humor of the Pee-wee Herman Show.[8] After hiring Burton, Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol revised the script.[9] They read Syd Field's 1979 book Screenplay and wrote the script according to the book's advice. "It's a 90-minute film, it's a 90-page script," Reubens explained. "On page 30 I lose my bike, on page 60 I find it. It's literally exactly what they said to do in the book...There should be like a MacGuffin kind of a thing, something you're looking for, and I was like, 'Okay, my bike.'"[10] The film has been described as a "parody" or "farce version" of the 1948 Italian classic Bicycle Thieves.[11][12]
The film features several of Reubens' fellow cast members from the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings who had previously appeared in The Pee-wee Herman Show, namely Hartman, Lynne Marie Stewart, John Paragon and John Moody.[20] Hartman, Stewart and Paragon would also later appear on Reubens' TV series Pee-wee's Playhouse.[21]Jan Hooks was also a fellow Groundling, and both she and Hartman would go on to become cast members of Saturday Night Live in 1986.[22]
Reubens initially approached Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh to score the film, but Mothersbaugh was unavailable, due to a scheduling conflict.[24] However, he would later compose the theme song and other episodic music for Reubens' television series Pee-wee's Playhouse.[25]
Burton then recruited Danny Elfman, the lead singer/songwriter of Oingo Boingo (who had also composed the music for 1982's Forbidden Zone), to score Pee-wee's Big Adventure.[26] Elfman was hesitant at first, given his lack of scoring experience,[27] but had written the main title theme by the time that he signed on.[28]
In 1988, record label Varèse Sarabande released an album featuring cues from Pee-wee's Big Adventure and those from another Elfman-scored film, Back to School (1986).[30] While the scores for both films were recorded in Hollywood, the album was recorded in London and performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by John Coleman.[31][30]
In 2010, both the original score sessions and re-recordings were released by Warner Bros. Records as part of The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box. The album also included additional cues, alternate versions and a restored "Studio Chase" sequence.[30]
The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Box (Disc 1)
Pee-wee's Big Adventure opened on August 9, 1985, in the United States in 829 theaters, accumulating $4,545,847 over its opening weekend, and went on to gross $40,940,662 domestically.[3] The film was followed by two standalone sequels: Big Top Pee-wee (1988) and Pee-wee's Big Holiday (2016).
Reception
Pee-wee's Big Adventure received generally positive reviews on its release before eventually becoming a cult film.[35] Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of 53 critics gave it a positive review, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The critical consensus reads: "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure brings Paul Reubens' famous character to the big screen intact, along with enough inspired silliness to dazzle children of all ages."[36]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 14 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[37]
In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington wrote, "The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive. The right one will have a howling good time."[38]David Ansen of Newsweek described the film as "Mattel Surrealism, a toy-store fantasia in primary colors and '50s decor. Whoever proposed teaming up Pee-wee (a.k.a. Paul Reubens) with 26-year-old director Tim Burton knew what they were doing ... Together they've conspired to make a true original—a live-action cartoon brash enough to appeal to little kids and yet so knee-deep in irony that its faux naivete looks as chic as the latest retrofashions."[39]Variety compared Paul Reubens to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.[40]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times did not review Pee-wee's Big Adventure upon its original release. However, in 1987, the film topped his Guilty Pleasures list, with Ebert saying he was impressed by "how innocent, how playful and how truly eccentric" the film was, and how the film created "a whole fairy-tale universe" comparable to Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings.[41] Ebert also mentioned Big Adventure in his review of Big Top Pee-wee (1988), explaining how moving away from the "zany weirdness" of the first Pee-wee Herman film led to a sequel that was "not as magical".[42]
A more negative assessment came from Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune, who gave Pee-wee's Big Adventure a rare zero-star rating in his print review, writing that he had enjoyed Herman's guest spots on Late Night with David Letterman but "[o]bviously, Pee-Wee is tolerable only in Pee-Wee doses ... You have to be a lot funnier on the big screen than on the tube to sustain a feature-length story."[43] Siskel included the film in his unranked year-end list of the worst movies of 1985.[44]Vincent Canby of The New York Times was also negative, writing that, apart from a few scenes, it was "the most barren comedy I've seen in years, maybe ever."[45]
Burton was offered the opportunity to direct the sequel, Big Top Pee-wee,[46] but was not interested and was already working on his own pet project, Beetlejuice (1988). Positive reviews for Beetlejuice and the financial success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure prompted Warner Bros. to hire Burton to direct Batman.[47]
Reviewing the film for its 2000 DVD release, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com explained, "Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyper-animated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind is pure pleasure."[48] In a retrospective review in 2005, Christopher Null gave positive feedback, calling it "Burton's strangest film".[49]Empire called the film "a one-off comic masterpiece" and "a dazzling debut" for Burton.[50]
The film was nominated for a Young Artist Award for Best Family Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical).[51]
Home video
Warner Home Video released Pee-wee's Big Adventure on DVD in May 2000, with audio commentary by Burton, Reubens and Elfman (the latter on a separate track, alongside an isolated score) and some deleted scenes.[52] The film was released on Blu-ray disc in 2011.[53]
↑ "As for the Herrmann touch, Elfman was able to draw from that reservoir in some of the film's more inspired dream sequences. 'There was some strange and wonderful music of Herrmann's that influenced me, in particular, Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and Mysterious Island.'"[27]
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↑ Collette, Olivia (July 6, 2015). "Danny Elfman Tells the Stories Behind 8 of His Classic Scores". Vulture. New York. Archived from the original on September 25, 2019. Retrieved September 24, 2019. 'I really went heavily into a Nino Rota inspiration for Pee-wee's Big Adventure, so if you heard something circuslike, I can only imagine that it came from that place,' Elfman said.
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