Remembering Paul Reubens: 15 unforgettable moments from a remarkable career

Pee-wee hit the big time in 1985 with his first feature film, . It was also the debut of an up-and-coming young director named Tim Burton. The film retained many of the offbeat and childlike qualities of the stage show (you can’t have a Pee-wee film without the “big shoe dance”), while toning down the racier material to make it more palatable for a PG audience. It became an instant cult classic and thrust Pee-wee into the national spotlight.

Building on the success of the film, Reubens brought Pee-wee to television for , a live-action series airing on Saturday mornings on CBS beginning in 1986. It had more in common with the stage show than the film, minus the mature content, and featured many of the same cast members, plus a young Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis. The show became a favorite of both younger and older viewers, and ran for five seasons before concluding in 1990, with a total of 45 episodes plus a Christmas special.

While filming Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Reubens somehow found the time to provide the voice for fan favorite RX-24, or “Rex,” the quirky StarSpeeder pilot droid who steered guests throughout the Star Wars universe on the Star Tours attraction, which opened in 1987. His role initially was uncredited, but it’s not hard to recognize Reubens’ signature inflections and laugh. After the attraction was redesigned in 2011 and C-3PO stepped in as the new pilot, Rex was moved to the cantina in Galaxy’s Edge, where he currently serves as the house DJ. He even popped up in an episode of the animated series Star Wars Rebels.

Ironically, it took his arrest for indecent exposure at an adult theater in Florida for Reubens to finally make a clean break from Pee-wee, but not before he infamously made a brief comeback appearance at the 1991 MTV Video Music awards just a couple months after the incident. Reubens, in his Pee-wee persona, received a standing ovation from the audience and was visibly moved by the warm reception. After laying low for a while, Reubens would go on to appear in major studio films like in 1999 and in 2001 and started doing more interviews out of character as himself.

In one of his more notable post-scandal projects, Reubens played a supporting role as Amilyn, a loyal vampire servant of the powerful Lothos (played by Rutger Hauer), in the original film. Sporting a goatee, frizzy hair, and heavy makeup, there’s no trace of Pee-wee in his menacing performance. He does get to do a bit of physical comedy, though, in his overly dramatic and prolonged death scene. He even returns in a post-credits scene to prolong it a little while longer.

Reubens earned his only Emmy nomination for a role that wasn’t Pee-wee Herman in 1995 for a recurring guest role on Murphy Brown. He played Andrew J. Lansing III, the unhinged nephew of network president Stan Lansing (Garry Marshall). Reubens’ Andrew is first introduced as one of Murphy’s (Candice Bergen) doomed assistants (it was a running gag that she’d get a new one each week, only to fire them by the end of the episode), but rather than being fired, he’s promoted to network executive. He later pops up as a mail boy, a producer, and a network vice president. Reubens appeared in a total of six episodes between 1995 and 1997.