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The second Pee-wee Herman big screen adventure grossed almost identically what the first one had three years prior in its opening weekend ($4.62 million to $4.54 million) but had none of the legs, lasting only two weeks in the top ten and finishing with $15 million, while its predecessor spent eight weeks in the top five, and wound up with a final gross just shy of $40 million.

Here are the three things I find (most) puzzling about Big Top Pee-wee:

1) The success of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure opened the door for the live action Pee-wee’s Playhouse series (after an initial pass at an animated effort was a non-starter) which ran for four years and 45 episodes. Big Top Pee-wee was conceived and filmed in the midst of the show’s success and Reubens co-wrote the screenplay with George McGrath, a co-writer on all of the first and second season episodes and the voice for several of the Playhouse characters. It is surprising (to me) that Big Top Pee-wee bears little to no trace of any influence from Playhouse. It is doubly surprising that Big Top Pee-wee has nothing to do as well with Big Adventure.

It neither continues the story nor makes any attempt to replicate it (via, say, another road journey), except perhaps in the bare bones of its structure. Pee-wee is simply set loose again, in a different milieu. In a very, very tenuous “squint and maybe you’ll agree” manner, this reminds me of Jacques Tati’s creation Monsieur Hulot, a character he played and guided through several decades and many films and all manners of modern French life (including a final film set within a circus).

2) The first film benefits from someone already possessed with a clear directorial vision (an affinity for emotionally arrested male lead characters at sea in worlds that exists somewhere between magical realism and full-fledged grotesqueries). Big Adventure may be Tim Burton’s sunniest film in several respects, but it was a fortuitous pairing with Paul Reubens’ vision. Randall Kleiser’s career began with episodic TV and tele-movies but his big-screen efforts - then as now - have mostly balanced family and/or kid friendly entertainment (Grease, White Fang, Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, Lovewrecked) with tales of sexual awakenings of all sort (The Blue Lagoon, Summer Lovers, Grandview, U.S.A., Getting it Right).

I find Big Top Pee-wee so unsettling for the lion’s share - almost an hour of its 86 minute running time - precisely because it attempts to merge these two fairly incompatible strands. The film in Kleiser’s oeuvre of which it most reminds me is, tellingly, the one just prior: 1986’s Flight of the Navigator. The first of his three films for Walt Disney Productions, Navigator is, on the surface, a tale of a boy taken on a wild (mostly off-screen) interplanetary ride by a smartass spaceship.

At heart (through adult eyes), it is a near tragedy mining the presumed loss of a child and the extended grief of a family for a moral fable about appreciating one’s relations… or else! This theme was in keeping with other G and PG-rated Disney live-action fare of the 1980s such as Watcher in the Woods, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and One Magic Christmas. Paul Mall - a.k.a. Paul Reubens - provided the voice of the spaceship and I can only speculate that some kind of vibe clicked between director and (voice) actor for them to be able to recreate the same uneasy vibe all over again. Big Top Pee-wee offers some well-intentioned bromides in the direction of finding your passion and place in life and as well as a greater acceptance of and appreciation for humanity in all its shapes and sizes. The closing five-minute musical number and Pee-wee’s “death-defying” high-wire act encompass this message beautifully and almost quell the sour taste of all that precedes it.

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