It’s a common joke on what used to be Twitter anytime a countercultural icon dies, but in this case it’s the literal truth: Pee-wee Herman did teach me it’s okay to be weird. 

Emerging from the seminal L.A. improv troupe The Groundlings (Phil Hartman was a frequent collaborator), aided and abetted by brilliant visual talents like the young filmmaker Tim Burton (who directed his first feature film) and the punk cartoonist Gary Panter (who designed the sets for his TV show), scored by new-wave nerd-rock weirdos Mark Mothersbaugh (Devo) and Danny Elfman (Oingo Boingo) the gray-suited freak otherwise known as Paul Reubens injected a genuine dose of the odd and underground into the ruthlessly commercial world of ‘80s children’s entertainment. 

Pee-wee wasn’t there to sell you a line of action figures before meeting minimal educational-progamming standards with a minute-long epilogue about how it’s bad to talk to strangers or play with the pilot light on your parents’ stove. The only thing he was selling was the fantastical idea that somewhere out there, there was an adult whose antics were as strange, silly, surreal, and ultimately funny as your most outlandish childhood playtime adventures. From Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Pee-wee’s Playhouse and beyond, he turned the world into one big combination backyard and basement where anything could happen, as long as it mildly irritated your parents while entertaining the bejesus out of you and your friends. 

But any artist this talented and perceptive when it came to entertaining children was bound to recognize that there’s a darker side to the imagination of youngsters — a shadowy world of fears both real and illusory. Reubens’ exploration of these fears is the not-so-secret sauce that makes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure a masterpiece of kids’ cinema.

The obvious starting point here is, of course, Large Marge. This spectral truck driver picks up Pee-wee on his cross-country journey to locate his stolen bicycle, slowly and solemnly telling the story of a horrific highway accident before revealing her terrifying true face; she, of course, was the victim of the wreck all those years ago, yet she keeps on truckin’, a Flying Dutchman of the blacktop. 

There are many authors of this incredible scene, frequently cited in lists of the scariest moments from non-horror movies. There’s actor Alice Nunn, who deploys every word of her monologue like a sniper lining up a shot. There’s the writing of that monologue, by Reubens and Hartman and Michael Varhol, as suspenseful and dread-tinged as Marion Crane eating sandwiches in Norman Bates’s office. There’s Elfman’s ominous score and Burton’s unpredictable direction, many years before he both became bogged down in Hot Topic kitsch. And there’s the big face reveal, courtesy of claymation by analog SFX gurus the Chiodo Brothers. There’s not just one reason this scene sticks in the memory of every child who’s seen it — there’s like eight. It’s that layered and that effective.

And for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Once I got past the shock of that Large Marge jump scare, I recall mostly being delighted by the ghost trucker with every subsequent rewatch. The same cannot be said of the “clown dream” sequence, in which a troupe of mute, grimacing clowns in nurse and doctor uniforms effectively torture Pee-wee’s bike to death. Years before “clowns frighten me” joined “I hate the word ‘moist’” and “Die Hard is a Christmas movie” among the internet’s most played-out statements, these clowns were absolutely terrifying, in the way I’d imagine the Joker or Pennywise from It might actually come across to those who encounter them in their respective worlds. (No shade to Nicholson, Ledger, Curry, or Skarsgård, but these anonymous malevolent merrymakers beat them all at their own game.) Presided over by a surgeon who pulls off his mask to reveal a painted-on rictus grin and a gleefully Satanic incarnation of Francis (Mark Holton), the envious rich kid who orchestrated the bike’s theft, it remained disturbing every time I watched it.

But in addition to cackling ghosts and demonic clowns, Pee-wee spoke to fears that were closer to home for the film’s young audience. The entire movie is predicated on the theft of Pee-wee’s beautiful and beloved bicycle; his reaction to its disappearance, while played for laughs (as is everything in the movie in the end), reflects the genuine panic and grief that sets in when your favorite toy goes missing or gets broken. It’s a fear so vivid for viewers of a young age that the idea of Pee-wee leaving his Rube Goldberg contraption of a home in order to hitch-hike across the country and track the bike down again felt as natural and logical as brushing your teeth or going to bed when your mom and dad tell you to. He had to do it, he had to, since what could possibly be worse? Reubens’s performance — which if we’re being real is as fully embodied a comedic turn as anything since Chaplin’s Little Tramp — treats this fear seriously, making Pee-wee’s dismay our own.

Time and again, Reubens and company picked up on the kinds of incidents that would haunt little minds well into adulthood. Think about it: However old you are now, do you not remember suffering a humiliation as mortifying as a whole crowd of tourists laughing at you because “There’s no basement at the Alamo”? I sure do! In my case, it involved mistaking a “Chinese yo-yo” on a Memorial Day fair prize table for a bottle rocket, only for an adult I didn’t know to sneer “Firecrackers are illegal!” at me, Jan Hooks–style. God, how I hated that for Pee-wee! How I wanted there to be a basement at the Alamo after all!

Indeed, the entire movie is basically my worst childhood nightmare come to life: constantly being the odd man out, the fish out of water, the one of these things which just doesn’t belong. Cowboys, bikers, escaped convicts, enraged boyfriends, crooked fortune tellers, rich studio executives, a Twisted Sister video — over and over, Pee-wee finds himself surrounded by people a world apart from the comforting community of strange but endearing friends with whom he starts the movie. (“Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?!?”) If you, like me, lived in low-grade terror of accidentally walking into a room full of adults where You’re Not Supposed to Be, this was all as anxiety-inducing as getting lost in the woods outside Burkitsville, Maryland while filming a documentary about the Blair Witch.

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All of this, I think, comfortably places Pee-wee in the pantheon of barely-for-kids kids’ movies that stretches from Ghostbusters to Barbie, and hopefully beyond. But Reubens really did want to create something children would love, which meant softening the edges he sharpened elsewhere in the film. For every harrowing Large Marge sequence, there’s a scene where Pee-wee rides his bike through the set of a Godzilla moving, revealing the endearingly hokey artifice behind movie monsters from the Big G to Large Marge herself. Dinosaurs, those enduring figures of childhood fascination that (prior to Jurassic Park anyway) evoked the size, strangeness, and ferocity of monsters while remaining safely in the past and thus leaching them of much of their menace, pop up too.

And the film’s climax, in which a fleeing Pee-wee abandons his attempt to evade the law in order to save animals from a burning pet store — yes, even snakes, which scare him so bad he passes out mid-rescue — is a very literal depiction of a (man-)child overcoming his fears. It’s a cinematic escape valve, a message that the fears you’ve experienced can be defeated, a premonition of George R.R. Martin’s maxim that only when we are afraid can we be brave at all.

That, in the end, is also what Paul Reubens taught me — not only through his work as a writer and performer in Big Adventure and elsewhere while I was a kid, but ultimately through his personal story, where he persevered through completely undeserved public humiliation to regain the recognition he deserved and earned. (That’s a very adult fear, but he handled it with as much grace and bravery as the snakes in the pet shop.) Pee-wee Herman was an overgrown child in a world of grown-ups. That world is a dark and scary place, yes. But if he could overcome its many terrors, from Large Marge to laughing Alamo tour guides, any kid could, and many kids did.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.