Pee-wee's Big Adventure
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!