If you’re a child of the '80s then you remember Pee-Wee Herman. The man-child played by Paul Reubens had a not-for-children TV special, a couple of ridiculous movies and a Saturday morning kids show back in the day when Saturday morning kids shows were actually a thing. Well, Pee-Wee has gotten older, but it doesn’t appear he’s changed much. The first teaser has been released for his upcoming Netflix movie Pee Wee’s Big Holiday and it looks pretty much like you would expect it to look. Check it out.
The Rube-Goldberg device that apparently gets Pee-Wee Herman out of bed every morning is just the sort of thing you would have seen on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse back in the late 1980s. As a child you would have just let it go by, but as an adult you have to wonder, does he reset that piano every day so that it drops down from the ceiling every morning? That seems like a lot of work. How much practice did he have to do to learn how to change clothes like that? This doesn’t make any sense. Then, you remember that you’re complaining about Pee-Wee Herman not making sense, and you just let it go.
The grey suit and bowtie are back and while a comparison between classic Pee-Wee and this clip does show that this Pee-Wee is older, it isn’t by much. He looks remarkably like the Pee-Wee of old. He appears to have traded in his Playhouse for a more traditional home in the suburbs. The name of the town is apparently Fairville, according to some of the items hanging on the wall in his house. His living room looks like he looted an Applebee’s, but then what else would you expect from Pee-Wee’s house?
The title of the film, Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday, combined with the clip at the end of the teaser, gives the distinct impression that this movie will follow in the footsteps of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure which followed a very sheltered Pee-Wee Herman as he ventured out into the world. We’d call this a sort of reboot, but the fact is, there was never anything approaching continuity between the different iterations of the character. Pee-Wee was just an excuse to be silly. If you need a refresher, or an education, here’s what the opening of his Saturday morning show looked like.
Yeah, children’s show openings were once over two minutes long. That happened.
While we have no clue what to expect from this movie, other than Joe Manganiello, we have to admit we’re curious to see what age, wisdom, and an arrest record, will bring to the character.
