When you’re ten years old, it’s the funniest movie you’ve ever seen. When you’re an adult, you mostly appreciate how Pee Wee Herman is one of the creepiest characters ever sold to children, bless him.
This film roughly marks the transition between Paul Reubens taking his iconic character out of nightclubs and into Saturday mornings, where his totally bonkers Pee Wee’s Playhouse gave grade schoolers of the 1980s, such as myself, their first taste of what drugs might be like. Smack in the middle of that was this film, where Pee Wee has a certain sinister edge to him as he travels the country by hook and crook to find his stolen bicycle. He’s in the fine comedy tradition of mad man-children, such as Harpo Marx and The Three Stooges. The big difference: Pee Wee’s not part of a team. He’s all alone, like most real psychos. He loves animals, which, I guess, means that he has a good heart, but he’s also a champion liar, a vindictive sly dog and has a heavyweight ego stuffed into his slight frame. The same fashion sense as a ventriloquist’s dummy and an unsettling compulsive giggle are no points in his favor, either (he laughs like babies laugh, at the simplest things). Lucky for him, the world around him is equally bizarre and cartoonish, full of ghost truck drivers and weird roadside attractions.
To direct, they got the perfect guy for the job: Tim Burton, a gawky former animator with a taste for the absurd, making his first feature. It’s a film that exists in that strange dimension between children’s story and adult innuendo. The budget is a little low, but that just means more freedom. Burton gets to indulge here in eye-popping color, a brief animated scene, some stop-motion action and a crazed chase through the Warner Bros. studio lot, where anomalous beach party and Japanese monster movies are being filmed.
There’s always something happening in this movie. It has no slow parts. It’s a frantic ride straight into Weirdsville. Mr. Rogers and Big Bird are bores by comparison.