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The total amount of screen time that San Antonio gets in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure amounts to just 20 seconds, but this now classic movie captured the hearts of Texans everywhere, and the imagination of the nation.
To this day, “Where’s the basement?” is the most-asked question of Alamo personnel, according to Ernesto Rodriguez, Alamo historian and senior curator at the shrine. Rodriguez spoke earlier this summer on an episode of the Stories Bigger Than Texas podcast to Emily Baucum, the Alamo’s associate director of public relations.
Baucum added that the Alamo’s two most popular social media posts are Pee-wee related, and “Almost every post gets a comment about the basement. We could post about new artifacts found in our archaeological excavations, and inevitably there’s a comment, ‘Did you find it in the basement?’”
Now, as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure celebrates its 40th anniversary of delighting audiences and confusing Alamo visitors, it’s been given a deluxe home video treatment by The Criterion Collection, with a 4K and Blu-ray release featuring audio commentaries, interviews with the production team, director Tim Burton, and Paul Reubens, Pee-wee himself.
How did this all get started?
In an archive conversation included on the new Criterion disc, Reubens said the character of Pee-wee Herman pretty much came out fully formed in the late 1970s while Reubens was a member of the influential sketch comedy group The Groundlings.
Reubens began appearing in public more and more as the character, and pretty much decided to make it his vocation. He turned Pee-wee into an underground pop culture phenomenon.
Multiple appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and a sold-out Carnegie Hall show led to a movie deal, and so in the mid-1980s, Reubens and his writing partners, Michael Varhol and Phil Hartman, were ensconced on the Warner Bros. lot and deep into a script that found man-child Pee-wee in a loose remake of Disney’s Pollyanna.
But while ambling around one day, Reubens saw actors, grips, production assistants, you name it, zipping across the Warner lot on bicycles.
Ruebens wanted one, too. He asked the studio for a two-wheeler, and they provided a spiffed-up Schwinn racer with a sign on it that said “Pee-wee Herman bike parking only.”
“We’re making the wrong movie,” Reubens thought to himself.
The epiphany led to a new idea—that Pee-wee loved his bicycle more than anything else in the world. And when one day it’s stolen … he just HAS TO GET IT BACK.
Fueled by ambition, and herbs a little stronger than oregano, the script poured out of Reubens, Hartman and Varhol.
Once the script was complete, it was time to find a director. Tim Burton had just finished a 30-minute short that apparently freaked the folks at Disney just a little bit. Frankenweenie starred Shelly Duvall, who recommended the young director to Ruebens. The match was made, and as Ruebens later shared with Interview magazine, “It was the biggest piece of luck early on in my career that I could have had.”
Burton’s skewed worldview fit well with Pee-wee. One of the reasons the movie works so well is because everything in it is played silly, yet straightforward. Not once does anyone question why Pee-wee regularly employs the mannerisms or catch phrases of an eight-year-old. We just accept the character, and identify with the love for his stolen bicycle.
Pee-wee’s quest to rescue his bike finds him crossing the country to meet an assortment of indelible characters, and of course—learn the horrifying truth about the Alamo chapel in San Antonio.
It all leads to a fantastic chase on the Warner Bros. lot that allows Burton and Reubens to cram as many cheesy movie references into the film as they can, including footage of a Godzilla film in progress, which Burton has said may have been his favorite day shooting.
When Warner Bros. saw the finished movie, they were concerned that it was too weird. Their plans were to open the movie in a few theaters and go wide later on, but a Hollywood premiere covered live by MTV helped sell the movie to teens and young adults across the country, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure became a sleeper hit, earning over $40 million at the box office, and landing on several critics' lists, even if—in the case of Roger Ebert—it may have been one of their guilty pleasures.
Today, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is not just a fantastically zany comedy, but it’s seen as both an empowerment of the individual to let their freak flag fly, and for folks like the Alamo’s Ernesto Rodriguez, a parable to “never give up,” “keep moving forward,” and “follow your dreams,” as he said in the Stories Bigger Than Texas podcast.
The movie’s popularity even led the Alamo to acquire for its permanent collection one of the screen-used bicycles from the movie. It’s a canny move for a the Shrine of Texas Liberty, as Pee-wee’s bike is sure to excite new and younger audiences.
As Rodriguez explained on the Alamo podcast, “Not everyone could relate to a gun, a knife, a sword, a saddle … but most of us grew up riding bicycles, and when you see that red Schwinn … it takes you back in time.”
PEE-WEE ON CRITERION
The new Criterion Collection release of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure includes a few deleted scenes and two audio commentaries that had been on previous Warner Bros. editions of the movie on home video. The audio track with Paul Reubens and Tim Burton in conversation is a joy to listen to as the two recall stories from the set, and Reubens points out various knick-knacks from the set that have found a place in his home—or maybe it was the other way around? Ha!
There’s a new interview with Tim Burton, an archive conversation with Paul Reubens recorded after a screening of the movie, and a 40th anniversary reunion panel that was recorded last summer, and includes E.G. Daily (Dottie), Diane Salinger (Simone), and Mark Holton (Francis).
My favorite feature is actually a new set of interviews with the production team behind the movie, including editor Billy Weber, whose previous credits included movies for Terrence Malick, plus Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs. Signed for Top Gun, Weber recalled how that movie’s producers were aghast that he was working on “a Pee-wee movie.” Then they saw the picture, and understood perfectly how special it was.
This new disc is the first release of the film in ultra high-def 4K format. It looks and sounds radical. And now, those of us that live here in South Texas can finally say that San Antonio has entered the Criterion Collection!
