Flashback: Pee-wee Herman Dances for His Life in ‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’
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You piss off a bar full of surly bikers by telling them to shut up so you can make a phone call and then knock over about a dozen over their motorcycles? If you’re Pee-wee Herman, the perpetual man-child character created by the late Paul Reubens, who died Sunday at age 70 after a private battle with cancer, you dance.
In Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the 1985 Tim Burton movie that made Reubens a superstar, Herman asks for a last request before the bikers kill him: a chance to cue up a song on the jukebox and try on the platform shoes of the bar’s cook. And that’s when the fun begins. As the jukebox plays “Tequila,” the Champs’ 1958 Number One instrumental hit, Herman starts duckwalking and, well, pointing at his crotch and his butt. The bikers aren’t buying the dance until he hops over to the bar and starts smashing drinks, then they start digging his tiptoeing “pee-pee, poopie dance.” When it ends, everybody shouts “Tequila!” and Herman becomes their hero.
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As The New York Times once pointed out, the scene “serves zero narrative function” in the picture, which is ostensibly about Herman retrieving his stolen bicycle from a richer, more spoiled man-child, but it didn’t have to. It’s the funniest scene in the movie and one of the most memorable moments in Reubens’ career. It was so popular that trading cards contained a lenticular, moving image of Herman doing the dance, and Arsenio Hall even asked him to do it on his talk show. In 2010, he even attended a motorcycle rally where fans attempted to set a Guinness World Record of the most people doing the dance.
That same year, Reubens said he was proud of the dance’s legacy. “I’ve been to hundreds if not thousands of places where, once my presence is known, somebody puts ‘Tequila’ on the loud speaker,” he told Vanity Fair. “And everyone looks to me like, ‘Come on, do it!’ But it’s never felt like, ‘Oh, god, if I hear that song one more time … ‘ That’s just not me. It happens infrequently enough that I get a positive charge out of it.”
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