Synopsis
Everything in Pee-Wee’s life is fun and adventure, especially his bike. One day while going to retrieve a bike part, his lovely red two-wheeler is stolen and his big adventure to retrieve it begins. Pee-Wee has to go against bikers, greedy kids, a ghost name ‘Large Marge’ and various other obstacles before he can possibly be reunited with his lovely bike.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice were the two films that introduced me to Tim Burton’s talent. He takes such pleasure into getting a kid-themed story and warping it just slightly (see The Nightmare Before Christmas for details). He does well with bringing his dark comedy motif into Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and doesn’t shy away from slightly adult themes (see Judd Omen’s Mickey for a wonderful example — though very humorous).
Of course, Burton’s direction is only one piece of the puzzle, though very important. Writers Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee himself), Michael Varhol and the late Phil Hartman collaborated to put together one gigantic story that surrounds a simple object; a bike. Their methods to create such a scenario of Pee-Wee losing his wheels, allowed for them to structure pretty much anything they wanted around this silly issue of a stolen bicycle. So in actuality, you’re getting these little segmented stories that, from a distance, have nothing to do with each other. You have Pee-Wee going from a diner, to the Alamo, to a biker’s bar and finally to Warner Brothers’ backlot. If you look at all these locations you can pretty much figure out they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They’re more like sketch comedy featuring Pee-Wee Herman, rather than one gigantic storyline that flows. And guess what? That works just fine in the long run. The character and the premise are ridiculous from the get-go, so all of these various scenarios that were dreamed up by the trio of writers were very much just matching what was already established with Pee-Wee’s world.
What I’m trying to get at is that this movie is enormously silly, unbelievable, and, most of all, entertaining for both parents and kids. It’s a well written, well acted and very well directed piece that still entertains. Heck, my kids watched this twice before I started writing this review. My oldest is 9-years old and she never questioned anything about the film, rather she just enjoyed it. That says a lot about Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
Fun film and fun adventure.
As for the Blu-ray side of things, the visuals were good, but not great. When the shots were lit well the colors were clean and crisp. When the movie moved into darker shaded areas that’s when things started to get a bit grainy. For example, when Pee-Wee is going from set to set on the Warner Brother’s lot the video gets really quite grainy. You can see specs inside the darker parts of the video and it’s generally just less than pretty to look at. As soon as he hits the outside the video instantly cleans up. I know movies vary between light and dark sometimes, in terms of HD quality, so it’s not shocking to see this happen. Thankfully, most of the film is spent with sunshine or on very well lit sets, so you get some good quality in the HD. Thankfully, no color banding.
As for the audio, it comes to you in 5.1 DTS-HD and it sounds superb! I love me some Danny Elfman music, so it was quite nice to see his score mastered so well. Excellent job on the audio portion of the film.
Finally, as for features, here’s what you’re looking at:
– Commentary by Paul Reubens and Tim Burton
– Additional Scenes
– Production Sketches and Storyboards
– Music-Only Track with Commentary by Danny Elfman
– Theatrical Trailer
While you’ve probably seen some of these before, it’s still nice to get this list with the Blu-ray. The commentary form Reubens, Burton and Elfman are superb. The music-only feature is breathtaking, if your ears could breathe. The additional scenes are nice, and everything else is simply an add-on. Really good features for this Blu-ray, though sadly no HD features.