The 5 best moments from Netflix's 'Pee-wee's Big Holiday' explained by the screenwriter

One of the best scenes in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" involves a giant Rube Goldberg machine Pee-wee uses to prepare breakfast. For "Big Holiday," Reubens and Rust thought it would be fun to make Pee-wee the ball in the Rube Goldberg machine. This leads to Pee-wee doing everything from flying from his roof on skis to driving a mini-car to picking up an old lady while riding a skateboard on his trip to work.

And one of the big jokes in the sequence is actually Rust's go-to line in real life. Pee-wee asks the old lady, "Have you heard about those new corduroy pillows?" She answers no, and Pee-wee replies, "I'm surprised, because they're making head lines."

"I heard that joke at camp in eighth grade and whenever I have to tell a joke, that's my favorite one to use," Rust said. "So now I can't do it anymore or people are going to think I ripped it off a Pee-wee movie."

While taking his first-ever holiday, Pee-wee hitches a ride with a traveling salesman who takes him to a snake farm. Pee-wee hates snakes (fans of "Big Adventure" know this all too well), but is convinced to see "the monster" exhibit. He walks into a dark room and gives out a very loud scream when confronted with a giant cobra.

While screening the film at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, Rust was pleasantly surprised by the reaction the sequence got.

"That got a bigger response than I thought it would," he said. "Paul and I both really love crummy roadside attractions. I grew up in Iowa and would go to cheesy places like that as a kid who had never been to Disney Land yet. It was a very poor substitute. Paul growing up in Florida, there were a lot of snake farms and gator farms and stuff like that. So that was the inspiration."

While hanging out with an Amish community, Pee-wee is asked what he does for fun. He pulls a balloon from his pocket and blows it up, then has the balloon make noises as the air is released from it. The scene is funny because of the length of time Pee-wee takes to release the air from the balloon. Rust said he saw the balloon gag originally at the live Pee-wee show Reubens did in 2010.

"When I first saw it live, it made me laugh so hard," he said. "We were trying to think of something he could do in the Amish community and so we thought that would be good. The thing that I like about it is if you ran 'Big Adventure' and 'Big Holiday' simultaneously, that balloon part would be happening at about the same time as the dance in the biker bar [in 'Big Adventure']."

When Pee-wee arrives in New York, he breaks into a song-and-dance number about the city. The idea came from a movie Reubens watched while the script was being written.

"Paul was watching a movie with his mother, 'How to Marry a Millionaire.' It's a Marilyn Monroe movie and it starts off with this musical number about New York, and Paul told me, 'You have to check it out,'" Rust said. "I watched it and it was perfect. So the Netflix legal department worked it out with 20th Century Fox and we got that song. Then we added our own lyrics, like the chorus about the Empire State Building, 'The tallest building in the world.' We loved that, too. We were like, 'What year is this where the Empire State Building is still the largest building?'"