I did too. If I see a rerun of that show I feel like a kid again. That had a huge impression on me. My first pet that I ever had as a kid (that was just mine, not a family pet) was a mouse named Pee Wee.
Also, you had to love Morpheus as a cowboy.
I also really enjoyed Pee Wee’s Big Aventure. I can remember most of the dialog from that film.
He’ll be missed. A lot of people grew up with him as part of their lives. Even after his public disgrace, that did nothing to diminish what he had done. And even afterward, he still had some success now and then in non-Pee Wee (more adult) roles, and I thought Paul Reubens was great as other characters.
May your spirit rest forever in the basement of the Alamo.
Just jumping off from this… When Reubens first started playing Pee-Wee Herman I was too young to realize he was just a character being played by an actor. As a child I did believe Pee-Wee was an actual person. The fact that Reubens often made public appearances in character as Pee-Wee probably didn’t help.
Agreeing that he should not have received so much trouble for what he did. But, his major character persona was that of a grown-up child on a TV show directed at kids, and og-forbid any performer not have as wholesome and sterile life as that of his/her character. Imagine the uproar these days.
Even though I was in my twenties I always got up on Saturday morning to watch Pee-Wee. The origin of my user name is members of the puppet band calling him “P-man”. I have a nickname that begins with that letter, so some of my friends started referring to me as “P-man” as well.
Taking these two quotes together kind of makes my point: he was arrested for a victimless crime, he was (in effect) incognito, and it only caused him a real problem when the incident became more widely known.
“…he should not have received so much trouble for what he did” should be “he should not have received any trouble for what he did, because he did nothing wrong,” and there should be no “but” after that.
My brother and I were kids and our parents let us watch the tape while they went out one night. We watched the entire movie twice and we did the Large Marge scare scene frame by frame a few times.
I lost it at “I’ll say; I’m going to start a paper route right now!” — which, yes, is off-the-wall silliness, but which somehow also manages to be straightforward and simple to the point where of course everybody just stands around for a moment while the sheer damn appropriateness of it plays out.
I’m not the only one, then! Yeah, I knew where it was going almost immediately, because it’s a classic ghost story that I had heard before. “Oh, of course, she was the driver, and now…WHAAAAAAA?” I thought I knew where it was going, but I got got!
Yeah, I think Paul Reubens was just a really nice and quirky guy. Not all that strange or weird or anything. Just a nice guy who was really funny and talented.
Washington Post has some nice coverage of his influence. Something I didn’t know that when Joan Rivers kicked off her ill-fated late night talk show, competing with Carson, the guests on her first episode were:
Elton John,
Cher, and
Pee Wee Herman
Like everyone else, I could easily quote many lines from Big Adventure, and since our kids were young at the time, we watched almost every episode of Playhouse. I got Time magazine at the time, and they listed it as not-to-miss, but hard to describe.
Large Marge scared the hell out of me as an adult!
I laughed my ass off when I saw Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure back in the '80s, but I had to force my teenaged daughter to sit down and watch it with me 20 years later. Her snooty attitude disappeared when she saw it was a Tim Burton movie. (The same thing happened with Pulp Fiction, but in that case it was Tim Roth who changed her mind.)
I laughed out loud back in February '21, when Reubens was on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune. He got the song title “U Can’t Touch That!” right off the bat.
