Pee-wee's Big Adventure - Cast

Cast

• Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman: A strange man who acts like a child. He sports a gray flannel suit with a red bow tie and clean-cut hair. He is very obsessive over his bicycle, traveling across America in search of it.
• Elizabeth Daily as Dottie: She helps run a bike shop and also has feelings for Pee-wee, though Pee-wee declines to go out with her.
• Mark Holton as Francis Buxton: A fellow man-child like Pee-wee, his neighbor, and rival. He is very spoiled. He offers to buy Pee-wee's bike, but Pee-wee refuses. Francis hires someone to steal the bike before it is purchased by Warner Bros.
• Diane Salinger as Simone: A waitress that Pee-wee meets in Texas. She develops a friendship with Pee-wee and yearns to live in France. Her violent boyfriend Andy flunked French in high school, and therefore dislikes France. At the end of the film, Simone is dating a French man named Pierre.
• Judd Omen as Mickey Morelli: A fugitive Pee-wee meets on his way to Texas. Mickey is an escaped convict on the run from the law because he cut off a "do not remove under the penalty of law" mattress tag. He also has a bad temper and abandons Pee-wee for his safety. However, Pee-wee ends up inviting Mickey to his movie.

Michael Varhol, who co-wrote the script with Reubens and Hartman, cameos as a photographer and director Tim Burton has an uncredited cameo as the street thug who confronts Pee-wee in the rainy back-alley. Other minor roles include Alice Nunn as Large Marge and Cassandra Peterson (aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) as Biker Mama. James Brolin portrays "P.W. Herman" and Morgan Fairchild is Dottie for the scene when Warner Bros. turns Pee-wee's life in a full-length film. Dee Snider and Twisted Sister and veteran comedy star Milton Berle cameo as themselves.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure contains numerous "conceptual continuity" links to other Tim Burton films and other productions:

• Several cast members from The Pee-Wee Herman Show (who would go on to appear in Pee-wee's Playhouse) have cameo roles in the film. In the movie studio sequence, Lynne Marie Stewart (Miss Yvonne) plays the Mother Superior and John Paragon (Jambi the Genie) plays the high-voiced studio extra in red armor whom Pee-wee asks for directions and the reporter interviewing Francis in the final scene at the drive-in is played by Phil Hartman (Cap'n Carl).
• Jan Hooks (who played the Alamo tour guide, Tina) was a fellow member of the Groundlings comedy troupe with Reubens, Hartman and Paragon, who went on to co-star in Saturday Night Live with Hartman. She also had a cameo role as a publicist in Burton's Batman Returns
• Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger (Simone) were reunited in the opening sequence of Burton's Batman Returns, in which they portrayed the parents of The Penguin.
• Supporting actors Monte Landis (Mario) and Lou Cutell (Amazing Larry), who featured together in a deleted scene in Mario's Magic Shop, had both appeared as extras in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.
• In the Warner Bros. studio chase sequence, Pee-wee rides through a set where a Japanese crew are filming a "kaiju" type monster movie with monsters closely resembling Godzilla and Ghidorah.
• The full chase sequence through Warner Bros Studios was longer than the version in the final cut of the film and showed much more of the WB backlot, including the vast storage yard where props and set pieces were stored. A full-scale prop of a Visitor shuttlecraft from the original TV miniseries V (1983) is clearly visible in the foreground in one shot. Another deleted scene in this section was filmed on the famous WB "Western town" set which has been used for innumerable film and TV productions, including the 1960s Batman TV series. Ennio Morricone's music score from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is heard in that scene.