The film stars Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, along with E.G. Daily, Mark Holton, Diane Salinger and Judd Omen.

Impressed with Burton's work on the short films Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984), the producers and Reubens hired him to direct.

Pee-wee Herman, a childlike man in a grey suit with a red bow-tie, has a dream where he wins the Tour De France.

That evening, Pee-wee holds an unsuccessful evidentiary meeting of friends and neighbors to find the bike, then rejects offers of help.

He then visits a phony psychic who misleads Pee-wee into believing his bike is in the basement of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio and steals his wallet.

Pee-wee hitchhikes to Texas, getting rides from a fugitive convict named Mickey, and from Large Marge, the ghost of a truck driver.

As they watch the sun rise from within a roadside dinosaur statue, he encourages her to follow her dreams, but Simone tells him about her boyfriend, Andy, who disapproves.

He wins them over by dancing to the song "Tequila" in a pair of platform shoes, and they give him a motorcycle for his journey, which he crashes immediately.

In the film, presented as a James Bond parody, the characters must retrieve their stolen motorbike – which contains an important microfilm – from the Soviets, after the US President telephones P.W.

[4] Veteran comedy star Milton Berle also has an uncredited cameo, entering the Warner Bros. lot and telling jokes to his entourage as Pee-wee sneaks in with them.

His original concept was a remake of Pollyanna (1960), Reubens's favorite film, with Pee-wee Herman in the Hayley Mills role.

When Reubens and the producers of Pee-wee's Big Adventure saw Burton's work on Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie, they decided to hire him.

[25] Burton then recruited Danny Elfman, the lead singer/songwriter of Oingo Boingo (who had also composed the music for 1982's Forbidden Zone), to score Pee-wee's Big Adventure.

[citation needed] In 1988, record label Varèse Sarabande released an album featuring cues from Pee-wee's Big Adventure and those from another Elfman-scored film, Back to School (1986).

[31][30] Elfman went on to score nearly all of Burton's films,[32] excluding Ed Wood (1994), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016).

In 2010, both the original score sessions and re-recordings were released by Warner Bros. Records as part of The Danny Elfman & Tim Burton 25th Anniversary Music Box.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure received generally positive reviews on its release before eventually becoming a cult film.

[37] In a review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington wrote, "The wrong crowd will find these antics infantile and offensive.

Together they've conspired to make a true original—a live-action cartoon brash enough to appeal to little kids and yet so knee-deep in irony that its faux naivete looks as chic as the latest retrofashions.

"[45] Burton was offered the opportunity to direct the sequel, Big Top Pee-wee,[46] but was not interested and was already working on his own pet project, Beetlejuice (1988).

Positive reviews for Beetlejuice and the financial success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure prompted Warner Bros. to hire Burton to direct Batman.

[47] Reviewing the film for its 2000 DVD release, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com explained, "Everything about Pee-wee's Big Adventure, from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyper-animated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind is pure pleasure.

[51] Warner Home Video released Pee-wee's Big Adventure on DVD in May 2000, with audio commentary by Burton, Reubens and Elfman (the latter on a separate track, alongside an isolated score) and some deleted scenes.