New 'Pee-wee's Big Holiday' hits close enough

John Lee's new Netflix feature "Pee-wee's Big Holiday" tries so hard to emulate the mood, music and mirth of Tim Burton's great first film "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" that it almost bursts a comic spleen.

We haven't seen Pee-wee Herman in a feature since 1988's "Pee-wee Big Top," and the wiry man-child still looks and acts fairly spry, considering 63-year-old Paul Reubens plays him (with a canny combo of makeup, tape to tighten facial skin and digital enhancements out the yin-yang).

Pee-wee's small hometown world gets rocked by the arrival of a real hog-riding macho man named Joe. (The actor's name has been withheld at the request of Mr. Herman himself. Seriously. I have the email.) They bond on a primal level. Then they have to split.

As he did in "Big Adventure," Pee-wee hits the road, and it hits back hard with an episodic series of trials he must survive like a chirping, fidgety adolescent Ulysses trying to find home, or Joe.

Missing is Burton's truly weird cartoonish imagination and Danny Elfman's superbly nutty score, here emulated by Mark Mothersbaugh's similarly sounding music.

Still, even with lots of misses (especially the farmer's nine daughters), Lee and Pee-wee hit enough comic notes and tread so lightly on the innocently sexless relationships that we want to do the Big Shoe Dance one more time.