Colin Moore
Among other things, 80s movies were a public service. They made the geek cool, or at least understood, in a movie kind of way. John Hughes’ nerds wore bras on their heads (“Weird Science,”) and had real feelings (“The Breakfast Club”). “Revenge of the Nerds” was very nerd-centric, all four of them. Others had nerds confronting their bullies with the help of time-traveling cars (“Back to the Future”) or just cars (“Christine”). School was a common setting. It’s where nerds excelled, where they got stuffed into lockers by jocks with names like Chuck and Troy and dreamed about the impossibility of sex, with anyone, but mostly with the girlfriends of jocks with names like Chuck and Troy. The finer points were icing on the cake ~ pocket protectors, asthma pumps and the always fastened top button.
And then there’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” a brother from another mother care of actor/writer Paul Reubens and director Tim Burton, helming his first feature. Yes, Pee-wee Herman is a nerd of an entirely different flavor, a man-child out of school and living on his own. If he’s employed we aren’t told though somehow he’s secured the income to construct an elaborate breakfast-making machine (and buy Mr. T cereal, which he talks to), litter his lawn with a colorful salmagundi of ornaments and rig a secret door behind his back hedge. The love of his life stands behind that door, but not a girl and certainly not bikeshop pal Dottie (Elizabeth Daily). A man with the neural know-how of a third-grader has more important things to think about. Like his bike. “I’m here!” Pee-wee tells it with a shy grin, polishing it up for a day on the town. Then, despite a mile of protective chain, it’s swiped. He screams, flaps his hands like a seal and passes out. Classic Pee-wee.
Until July 1985, Pee-wee Herman wasn’t a name I was familiar with, or his creator Paul Reubens, although he’d already performed Pee-wee on television’s The Dating Game, as a receptionist in “Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie” (1980) and had built a successful L.A. stage show based on the character in 1981. As the story goes, Reubens kick-started the show out of frustration after failing to make the second cast of Saturday Night Live. “I totally panicked,” said Reubens. “I thought like, I’m going to go from up-and-comer to like…nothing…and I just thought ‘You better really do something about this and take control’” (from SXSW, YouTube). The show sold out for 5 months and prompted an HBO special.
Pee-wee is desperate to find his bike. After an intimidating neighborhood meeting where he lays out his evidence of the theft (zero proof of anything) he wanders off into the night. The quest begins after a psychic directs him to the basement of the Alamo. The big adventure of the title has that early grade school vibe, very Sesame Street, where each beat introduces a new character with a “thing,” an issue that Pee-wee can react to/influence with that Pinocchio charm, that sweet lunacy. The list of encounters includes criminal tough guy Mickey, singing train-car hobo Jack and Large Marge, a trucker spirit whose face-burst is the movie’s freakiest highlight. None of Pee-wee’s pitstops from California to the Texas put him any closer to recovering his beloved 2-wheeler but do supply the lesson required from any fable ~ Love everyone and run from big bearded boyfriends. It’s an anomaly of a movie to put it mildly, the kind of film that even before Pee-wee scotch-tapes his face in front of the bathroom mirror, will split an audience into one of two camps ~ those titilated by its good-natured stupidity and those seeking to bludgeon themselves unconscious.
Surprisingly given its success, the movie is as much a rarity today. How many Hollywood comedies purposefully fill themselves with lines (“I know you are but what am I?) jokes (hitchhiking with a rubber thumb) and gags (chicken dancing in a biker bar) that in all probability shouldn’t be funny? It’s the old comedy adage in action, about funny being “how,” not “what.” Which seems to have been Reubens’ intent. While performing improv with The Groundlings comedy troupe in the late 70s, Reubens developed his now famed pinhead, a comedian so unskilled at his craft, so unfunny that he’s funny. Tim Burton discusses his attraction to extreme characters on the DVD commentary. “I get my energy still to this day about characters that, you know, that go as far as you can go and yet are really believable. All you want to do is do that justice.”
It’s almost unimaginable now to hear Burton playfully irked by the limitations of the movie’s 8 million dollar budget. Scenes like the Tour de France finale with its “cast of 35“ and the night driving sequence that sends Pee-wee and Mickey over a cliff are the result of what Burton calls the “poor man’s process.” But it would never happen quite the same way again. His next film, “Beetlejuice,” was budgeted at 15 million and his third, “Batman,” was the domestic success story of the year. Reubens of course would move onto the small screen with Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the hit Saturday morning kids show that featured characters from his stage show (Jambi the genie, Miss Yvonne) though far fewer jokes about mermaid breasts. Not bad for a couple of nerds.
