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Pee-wee Herman's beloved bicycle is stolen. He sets out across America to find it. In Tim Burton's feature debut, a children's film made with the surreal conviction of an art film, every stranger encountered is strange, every landscape slightly wrong, and the hero is possessed of a certainty about his own importance that the world keeps quietly refusing to share. It is genuinely, inexplicably one of the strangest studio pictures ever made.
Jesse Thorn is the founder of Maximum Fun and host of Bullseye, distributed by NPR. He has spent two decades championing the earnest, the offbeat, and the deeply sincere in American pop culture — which makes him the ideal guide to Pee-wee Herman.
Spoiler-free context and starting points.