Director: Randal Kleiser
Cast: Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Susan Tyrrell, Valeria Golino
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes. It was certainly on a less frequent rotation than Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), and I think my copy was actually recorded off of HBO, but only started several minutes into the movie. I have very little memory of the film before the storm comes to blow the circus folk into town.
Did I Like It: I think we all (including the filmmakers, one would imagine) remember this as the inferior Pee-Wee movie. In all honesty I may have never felt the temptation to watch it again if it weren’t for the fact that I just got of a months-long binge of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and needed a fix to wind me down.
I’m happy to report that it isn’t terrible. There’s a goodly amount of whimsy on display, more than a few funny moments, and a concerted display of the ethos which made Pee-Wee so special in the first place: The idea that weirdos are heroic despite themselves.
And yet, it is inferior, not only to Big Adventure, but also to my memory of the more recent Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016). Why? First, I think the whimsy and heroic weirdo quotient is turned strangely down. I’m willing to largely write that off to Tim Burton (he had <ghosts-with-the-most> and <batmen> to keep him busy) opting out of the proceedings in favor of Kleiser, a journeyman director if ever there was one. But it goes deeper than that. Pee-Wee is kind of a horndog in this one, where he’s usually written as something of an asexual imp. Even in the original The Pee-Wee Herman Show, he was only horny in as much as he was being a rascal. It was more performative because it was on HBO than anything else.
A brief return to horny Pee-Wee might have been okay if the story was a little tighter. The perfect MacGuffin of the best bike in the whole world is nowhere to be found. Instead, the circus comes to town and, wait for it, put on a circus. That might have worked for a quick segment on Playhouse, but it feels too slight for its own good taken to an hour and a half. I’d say that Reubens might have needed a little bit of a break from his most famous creation, but I think he probably would have agreed with me.