Is ‘Pee-wee’s Big Holiday’ A Remake Or A Sequel?

We talk a lot about the universes that movies exist in. The ones that are very grounded in our reality. The ones where Marvel superheroes descended from the sky. The ones that feel connected by style if not story, as the Coen brothers reminded us this year when Hail Caesar! inhabited the same Capitol Pictures universe as Barton Fink.

The film universe that Pee-wee Herman exists in is both intensely foreign and yet oddly familiar. It’s a world of too-pristine suburbia and a kind of joke-shop Americana that only existed on television. It’s less gothic than Tim Burton’s world (the Tim Burton of movies that aren’t Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, that is) and less vulgar than John Waters’, but that same kind of Americana-as-observed-by-outsiders. It’s a universe I didn’t even realize that I missed until Paul Reubens and Judd Apatow brought it back with Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, which premieres on Netflix today.

As with much of our entertainment today, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday gets a solid boost from nostalgia. It’s been 28 years since Big Top Pee-wee, the last theatrical Pee-wee Herman movie, and just over 30 years since Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which is about as perfect a movie as one could make. From its very title, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday feels as much like a remake of the original as it does a sequel.

There are almost too many parallels to count. The opening sequence, which we saw much of in the trailer, is another Rube Goldberg contraption to get Pee-wee through his morning routine.

Essentially, the plot of Big Holiday hinges on the notion that Pee-wee has never left the friendly confines of his hometown of Fairville. That they never say exactly that 0ut loud means you can’t call them out for breaking continuity with earlier Pee-wee films, but the entire spirit of Big Holiday depends on the sense that Pee-wee is experiencing the big outside world for the first time. We in the audience know he’s already been on a similar journey — this one heads towards New York while previously he trekked to Los Angeles — and for a similar purpose too. In Big Adventure, Pee-wee was pursuing his lost/stolen bicycle; in Big Holiday, the role of the bicycle is played, for all intents and purposes, by Joe Mangianello. And honestly? He’s every bit as worth hitchhiking across the breadth of this nation to find.

The similarities don’t stop there, though. Again there’s a collection of joke-shop curios. Again snakes are Pee-wee’s Waterloo. Diane Salinger, who played Simone in Big Adventure, shows up here as a completely different character, this one a Amelia Earhardt-by-way-of-Katharine-Hepburn pilot. Since both Big Adventure and Big Holiday are road-trip movies, both have vignette-heavy structures that let Pee-wee experience new characters (and vice-versa) every ten minutes or so. There’s no need to feel resentful towards the new movie, especially since Reubens plays Pee-wee with the same kind of open-hearted and welcoming silliness he always has, but it’s tough to make the case that any of the component parts of Big Holiday can hold a candle to the Alamo scene or the chase through the Warner Bros. studio lot or the Large Marge scenes from Big Adventure.

Still, there’s a timeless appeal to Pee-wee Herman, not just the character but the styles he lends himself to. There are a lot of references in Big Holiday, almost certainly more than I was able to recognize, but they all serve as a kind of secret handshake between Pee-wee and the audience. It’s that kind of pact-between-weirdos that has always been a cornerstone of Pee-wee’s appeal (after all, it was his Playhouse, and you were invited; you even got to know the secret word). So when you catch a visual reference to Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! or Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang, suddenly you’re in on the joke with Pee-wee himself.

Ultimately, sequel or remake, we don’t come to a Pee-wee Herman movie for plot continuity. The Pee-wee Cinematic Universe isn’t like Marvel’s, with the movies telling one cohesive story. Pee-wee’s appeal is one of jokes and pastiche. It is, to risk cliché, a state of mind. Pee-wee’s Big Holiday may not end up as memorable as Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but it’s hard to be resentful that it walks in its footsteps.

[Watch Pee-wee’s Big Holiday on Netflix]