1. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

­Pee Wee’s Big Adventure:

This is the only film I did for Tim that was never released as an original soundtrack. Varèse Sarabande did a partial re-recording of the Pee-wee’s Big Adventure score in London a year or so later and released it along with some of my score from Back To School.

For the Tim Burton music box collection, we went back and found as much of the original score from the film sessions in Los Angeles as possible, which wasn’t easy. For this disc, I assembled a film-order sequence of what might have been the Pee-wee album, had it come out in 1985, using the best performance between the original soundtrack and the re-recording   I also included some additional cues and alternate versions of the some of the pieces as bonus tracks, as well as a completely restored “Studio Chase” from the film. 

Also, just for my own pleasure, I added Paul Reubens’ improvised humming to the beginning of the “The Park Ride” because I composed that around his voice, and I thought it would be fun to hear it as I wrote it.  And besides, it just doesn’t sound correct when I listen to it without him “singing along.”

It’s really an odd experience listening to this score after so long. It feels so simple and weirdly “primitive” to me now—although, at the time, it seemed so complex. But I guess that’s how it works. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not putting it down, I just hadn’t remembered how simple the score was. I still really like it, especially the “The Breakfast Machine.” That always had a special place in my heart. I think it was the very first time that I was able to “cut loose” with music to picture—to really have fun and not give a sh*t about what anybody thought. Years later, I had the extreme pleasure of attending a Primus concert in New York. They opened their show with the recording of  “The Breakfast Machine,” and I had the incredibly weird experience of seeing a crowd of guys wildly moshing to it in front of the stage. Moshing to Pee-Wee’s “Breakfast Machine”! Wow. I never expected to see that in my lifetime.

—DE