Pee-wee's Big Adventure

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2016

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Even though it had been ages since any of us had seen Pee-wee's Big Adventure, our memories from numerous viewings of it as children meant there weren't too many surprises during this rewatch. We could still recall nearly every scene and punchline with pretty impressive clarity.

Which is not to say we had the same experience with the film that we did as kids. A lot of this still works, but there were certain aspects of the vignette-heavy story structure and with Pee-wee as a character that left us a little bit conflicted.

Topics include: the origins of the Pee-wee Herman persona and the alternate scripts that were developed for this movie, our initial confusion over all the differences between this and Pee-wee's Playhouse, the one important detail that makes the biker bar sequence more successful than just about any other scene in the movie, the enduring legacy of Large Marge, how a ridiculous scandal robbed us of ten good years worth of material from Paul Reubens, a debate about the right time to brush your teeth, the time Chris tried to learn how to read minds, which member of the HDYR gang still doesn't know how to ride a bike, and much much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Peewee's Big Adventure?
0:07.0	Hello and welcome, Hey, do you remember Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.6	I'm Chris.
0:32.3	I'm Donna.
0:33.0	And I'm Carlos.
0:33.9	And today we're revisiting Pee We's Big Adventure.
0:53.3	Yeah. Carlos. And today we're revisiting Pewee's Big Adventure. Many of us were probably first introduced to Pee Wee Herman through the Saturday morning show,
0:57.8	Pee Wee's Playhouse, a staple of children's programming that helped make the titular character
1:02.1	and his creator Paul Rubens inseparable from one another. But only six years prior to the series
1:07.4	debut, Rubens was an aspiring comedian using an early version of the
1:10.9	Pewee persona as part of his S&L audition. He didn't make it into the cast, but the experience
1:16.2	inspired him to start developing the Pee We Herman Show, a stage show that was originally
1:20.7	a lot more salacious and risque than the schick we associate the character with now. But as the tone of
1:26.4	the show shifted from Nightclub Act to more
1:28.7	of an all-ages affair, its popularity continued to rise. And during a sold-out run of shows at LA's
1:34.4	historic Roxy Theater, HBO filmed one of the performances, and that broadcast helped catapult
1:39.8	Pee Wee into the mainstream. From there, Rubens, always in character, began making guest appearances
1:45.4	on popular sitcoms and working the late-night circuit. HBO's parent company, Werner Brothers, took notice,
1:51.3	and before long, Rubens had an office on the lot, where he began writing a pee-wee movie with his
1:56.0	old pal Phil Hartman and screenwriter Michael Varhal. Originally, the concept for the film was more in line
2:02.0	with the stage show and by extension the TV series it would later inspire, but a second script was
2:06.8	being developed simultaneously, one whose story took inspiration from Pollyanna of all places. There
	...

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