One of the most subversive and original figures in 1980s popular culture was a whey-faced, cherry-lipped, matchstick-thin child-man who wore a red bow tie, white tasselled loafers and a shrunken grey suit, and lived in a giant playhouse with sentient furniture and a floating head. This was Pee-wee Herman, created and played by the actor Paul Reubens, who has died aged 70 of cancer.
The character appeared on stage in The Pee-wee Herman Show during the early 1980s but did not become known internationally until the release of the film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which marked the doolally debut of the director Tim Burton. US cinema in the Reagan era drew heavily on the iconography of the 50s and early 60s, whether for purposes sweet (Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married) or unsavoury (Blue Velvet, Parents); this big-screen outing for Pee-wee, who was already suffused with the spirit of bygone children’s shows such as Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo, fell somewhere in between. As with the stage and TV incarnations, the film’s undercurrent of kinkiness and innuendo never contaminated its air of gleeful innocence.
