Big Top Pee Wee
Picture: B- Sound: B- Extras: D Film: D
Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was a surprise hit since many TV shows have a hard
time adapting to the big screen, and the career of director Tim Burton was not
yet established at this point in time, but something about this film worked and
it was a success. The career of Burton
soared over the next few years, but the career of Pee Wee Herman went awry as
he was in the newspapers for a certain ‘incident’ we won’t go into details
about. By the time that Big ‘Flop’ Pee Wee hit, people just
didn’t care that much and Burton was replaced by Randal Kleiser, yes the guy
that did Grease!
The first film mostly
worked because the wacky world of Pee Wee was captured by Burton, who has a
knack for created a surreal expressionistic world, but that was pretty much
abandoned altogether for Big Top Pee Wee
and with a storyline as pathetic as this one, the film was doomed from the
beginning. Pee Wee lives on a farm now,
which is rather strange, and during a storm ends up with a circus in his front
yard. He ends up helping the circus
folk and becomes infatuated with the trapeze girl Gina, but his fiancée Winnie
and causes a dent in the love triangle as Pee Wee must choose and maintain his
new friends that will be staying around for a while.
This sounds like a short
little show, but unfortunately its dragged on for 85 excruciating minutes and
lacks all the goofy charm that Pee Wee may or may not have had to begin
with. The DVD for the film is pretty much
standard with no extras at all and a 5.1 Dolby Digital mix and 1.85 X 1
anamorphic transfer. Paramount did not
bother going the extra mile on this title, which is probably for the best
anyway. Warner Brothers owns the rights
to the first film, which is also on DVD and contains quite a bit of
extras. The presentation here is ok and
the Dolby 5.1 mix rarely kicks in, even for Danny Elfman’s tired music
track. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy
Elfman, but even he could not score this dud.
Image quality is decent with a bit of grain and over saturation from
time to time as colors almost bleed, but I doubt many will care.
Pee Wee fans will snatch
this title up, but it offers very little for anyone that is just ‘curious’, so
lets let the real fans indulge in all their glory on this one and save your
dollars for something with a little more substance.
- Nate Goss
