Exciting news for fans of daft humour: Pee-wee Herman is coming back in a new movie. And there’ll be no need to head to the cinema to see it as Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday will be appearing on Netflix on the 18th March.
The character’s first film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, appeared way back in 1985 and remains a brilliantly silly slice of celluloid entertainment. It was also, co-incidentally, Tim Burton’s first film in the director’s chair and if you haven’t seen it you should really track it down and give it a good watch.
That movie is full of childish glee, silly visual gags and the kinds of household contraptions which would make Wallace and Gromit jealous with their bodged over-complicated construction – all of it scored by another first timer – the composer Danny Elfman. Elfman’s music is just perfect.
Pee-wee Herman is the alter-ego of comedy actor/ writer Paul Reubens and was developed as a character in the late seventies, first appearing on screen in an HBO TV special in 1981. Essentially he is a timeless kid – a boy who never grew up. After the popular appeal with children of the first movie the character continued in the incredibly silly children’s show Pee-wee’s Playhouse on CBS.
Pee-wee Scandal
The sequel Big Top Pee-Wee arrived in 1988 but was less well received, and in 1991, after Reubens was involved in a scandal when he was reportedly caught in a compromising situation in an adult cinema, the character was put on the shelf for several years.
But that’s all forgotten now! And just 31 short years after Pee-wee went on his journey across America to find his lost bike, he’s back in Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. This time he’s travelling across America in a blue original Fiat 500 and the Pee-wee cinematic universe has forgotten that he ever left his home town.
And why not?
And now over thirty years later and with Reubens in his sixties Pee-wee, rather astonishingly, doesn’t really look like he’s aged a day. Check out the trailer below.
Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is part of a raft of original Netflix programming showing in March, including season 4 of House of Cards (which begins on the 4th March) and season 2 of Marvel’s Daredevil which launches on the same day.
Pee-wee’s Big Holiday does look like it will be the most daft fun of the lot though and we’ll have a write up of what we think as soon as possible on the day.