: (Danny Elfman) Actor and comedian
Paul Reubens was flying high in the late 1980's, his duo of the
cinematic
and television series,
"Pee-wee's Playhouse," amusing children with its zaniness. The character
of Pee-wee Herman had long been a Reubens special, and prior to his
mainstream success, Herman was a bit more of a Borat-styled pervert.
Those inclinations finally started to shine through in the second film
for the character, 1988's
. Herman is contently
living an idyllic life on a farm, trading in his playhouse for the great
outdoors. When a traveling circus comes to town, he can't help but to
join forces with them to put on a show that the local townsfolk will
certainly have difficulty swallowing. The biggest issue with the sequel
is that the asexual innocence of the character in its prior incarnation
gave way to a highly motivated romantic alternative, Herman balancing
the attractions of multiple women and definitely interested in
copulating with them. While the change in personality more closely
aligned the character with what Reubens had always imagined for him, it
caught viewers off guard. Not long after, the actor suffered a series of
arrests for perversion-related offenses that marginalized both Reubens
and Herman for the rest of the actor's life. By the time audiences had
forgiven him, a third feature film with Herman in 2016 was largely
ignored. The character's viable lifespan had ended. Another related
problem with
was that the studio financing the
franchise switched from Warner to Paramount, which meant that some of
the intellectual property of the first movie could not contractually
extend to the second. One casualty of this switch was likely the
soundtrack. Rising composer Danny Elfman returned but found himself
largely ignoring the material he had previous written for Herman and the
concept at large. Complicating matters further was the temptation to
make
a musical; the film contained several songs
for the cast that further distinguished its personality. Though Reubens
was really a talented singer, the absence of any significant singing
role for Kris Kristofferson as the ringmaster is a monumental missed
opportunity. On the whole, it's no wonder this film was a financial
disappointment.
For Elfman's part, the general sound of
Big Top
Pee-Wee remains mostly the same as
Pee-wee's Big Adventure
but with the carnival element emphasized to a greater extent. The
romantic side is accentuated by some big band jazz moments and parody of
Golden Age film score techniques. The vocals in "Elephant Ride" strive
for the silly Edouard Khil sound (an instrumental version continues in
"Idyll"), and similar structures evolve into the massive Golden Age "The
Big Kiss" romance cue. William Ross was brought in to help arrange and
orchestrate the vocal and jazz portions because of Elfman and
orchestrator Steve Bartek's comparatively minimal experience with such
endeavors. The musical numbers are fine, but their placement makes the
whole soundtrack seem uncertain about how far to embrace those
diversions. In the score, Elfman starts with the same orchestral base as
the previous entry and uses a calliope, accordion, theremin, saxophone,
Hammond organ, electric piano, and a range of sound effects that include
a whistle (as at the start of "End Credits") and common children's
noisemakers throughout. Stylistically, given the proximity of this score
to
Beetlejuice, it's not surprising that the composer offers
passages in "Pee-wee Flies" and "The Big Storm" that are highly familiar
to the more famous work. Still, the personality of
Big Top
Pee-Wee is zany to a fault, sometimes so frenetic and ridiculous
that it defies listenability. This insanity is a direct carry-over from
the first score, but listeners will be disappointed that none of its
themes persist. Gracing the sequel are new themes for Herman himself,
the circus, the love triangle, and the ringmaster, with the song
melodies existing on the side. The Herman theme is really for the
character's antics and is the closest holdover from the prior work. It's
tough to pinpoint its melody but the underlying rhythmic formations are
easily recognizable, especially when pounded on piano. It dominates the
early, pre-circus scenes, "Happy House" and "Rise 'n Shine" exhibiting
differing shades of the melody over the same bubbly rhythms. This
material turns militaristic over banging percussion in "The Greenhouse,"
accelerates on plucked strings in "Race to School" and "Race to the
Store," and is adapted into a moderate action motif at the start of "The
Big Storm." It's translated into a sour trombone lamentation in "Sad
Drive Home" and returns in its bubbly form in "Pee-wee's Flower," but it
then disappears from the score until it follows the two circus-oriented
themes in middle of "End Credits."
The main circus theme of
Big Top Pee-Wee is a
blatant rip-off of Julius Fucik's "Entry of the Gladiators," the 1897
piece commonly known to represent the circus concept. It bursts fully
from the ensemble in "Main Title" with a lazy, noir-era interlude
sequence but doesn't return until it's given a light Arabian tilt in
"Circus in the House." The idea achieves its native calliope form in
"Happy Circus" before electric and traditional piano convey it in
"Clouds" and Elfman slows it to a crawl in "Rejection." It's everywhere
thereafter, cheery with snare and saxophone accompaniment in "Busy
Circus," enormously silly with sound effects in "Square Dance,"
informing the accordion-flavored "Winnie and the Italians," and blowing
up the love theme in "I Llove You." The main theme then immediately
proceeds into the blurting "Pee-Wee Tries/Elephant/Pee-wee Tries Again,"
where the secondary lines to the theme get some action on keyboards.
After helping guide the descending lines of "The Side Show," the theme
refuses to die in "Idea" and is slightly tentative on the carnival tones
at the outset of "Pee-wee's Big Surprise," where it surrounds a
reference to the famous "Tequila" song melody. Finally, the main theme
starts "End Credits" in frantic explosiveness, just as it opened the
score. Elfman's love theme is generic to all the involved characters, a
somewhat awkward melody consisting of three-note phrases of anonymity.
Through this tepid, shallow theme, the composer suggests that Herman
doesn't really care about these women, because there is no genuine
warmth to this music. (The fact that Reubens was lambasted for
collecting men's bodybuilding magazines in real life only makes this
music seem even more disingenuous.) There's also strangely no
contemporary instrumental element to it, a nearly mandatory inclusion
for the era. The love theme debuts in "Pee-wee to the Rescue" in a
somewhat limp state, interrupts the circus material for some redemptive
moments in "Happy Circus," and strikes an awkward position in "I Llove
You." In suite-like form, it is tentative on guitar over dreamy strings
in "Pee-wee's Love Theme" before a massive climax and serves as the slow
midsection to "End Credits" on nice string and woodwind layers.
Interestingly, its melody does not really inform the "The Big Kiss" cue,
which was meant for a scene that Herman had originally wished to show a
kiss over three minutes long that would have set a Hollywood record.
It's an impressive cue, though, the equivalent of what Conrad Pope later
provided in one massive retro-styled moment of orchestral whimsy in
2017's
The Boss Baby.
The final theme of
Big Top Pee-Wee perhaps
conveys the most potential of any that Elfman conjured for the film.
Representing Mace, the ringmaster and Highwaymen spinoff, this idea is
underdeveloped in the minor mode and could have better supplied some
darker coloration to the overall work. Best heard in the short "Mace's
Speech," this theme slithers through "Man to Man" on woodwinds, offers
some sadness on those winds in "The Show's Off," and follows the love
theme in the latter portions of "End Credits." The final collection of
themes in "End Credits" is a bit bizarre in that it rotates between each
of the score's ideas quite faithfully but doesn't wrap back to the
necessary, full statement of the main circus theme at the end, instead
opting to ride the Mace theme into a relatively quiet conclusion. It's
at moments like this that Elfman's inexperience with narratives could
still be heard. (Fortunately, he conquered this issue by the following
year's
Batman.) The final component of
Big Top Pee-Wee is
its unusual collections of songs. If anything, these musical numbers
prove that Reubens was actually one hell of a singer when not trying to
perform in some unusual character voice. He performs the old-style
lounge jazz "The Girl on the Flying Trapeze" with straight inflection,
and his rendition of the traditional "Rimprovero" number impresses as
well. (These two recordings clearly sound different from the rest of the
soundtrack, though, and not just because of the Ross orchestrations.)
The biggest musical number is "Big Top Finale" at the end of the story,
and its melody actually carries over into a few of the surrounding cues.
It first explodes fully in the cymbal-crashing "Big Top" and continues
in the latter half of "Transformation" before the ensemble cast vocal
performance in "Big Top Finale." This theme is repeated in the score
during the latter half of "Pee-Wee's Big Surprise" and follows the
circus theme as "End Credits" slows down. Don't expect the performances
in "Big Top Finale" to really shine, Kristofferson's remarkable voice
marginalized. The only other vocal in the soundtrack is for "Pee-Wee
Herman Had a Farm," and the less said about that pig-oriented source
piece, the better. Many listeners will feel that way generally about
Big Top Pee-Wee, because if you could not tolerate the music for
Pee-wee's Big Adventure, then the sequel's addition of the
carnival flavor to that sound can be maddening. The narrative is
haphazard and the songs imbalanced with the score, the entirety just too
untethered to really work, especially apart from the film. Still, the
score was released three times on progressively longer albums from 1988
to 2014, each iteration adding and combining the very short cues into
more fluid presentations. Your loved ones may hate you for listening to
any of them.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For Danny Elfman reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 92 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.27
(in 154,486 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
