Pee-wee Had One of Comedy’s Greatest Adventures
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is one of cinema’s great debuts, both for its director Tim Burton and for its late star Paul Reubens. Pee-wee Herman—a man-child with closely cropped hair, a nasally voice, and eccentric barking laugh, and a trademark uniform consisting of a gray suit, red bowtie and white sneakers—emerged into the mainstream as a genuine, fully formed original. There was simply no one like Pee-wee and nothing like his maiden big-screen outing, which came across as a delirious expression of his idiosyncratic personality and paved the way for a Saturday morning television series that played like a similar manifestation of his quirky soul.
He was, in his own way, perfect, and so too was his big adventure.
Reubens, who passed away Sunday at age 70 following a private bout with cancer, began developing his one-of-a-kind character in the early ’80s, with his stage production The Pee-wee Herman Show as well as via regular appearances on Late Night with David Letterman. Still, from the moment it arrived in theaters in 1985, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was something quite obviously and thrillingly new.