Paul Reubens, the voice of RX-24, aka Rex has passed away age 70. He brought Rex to life for the original Star Tours, and then once again when Rex moved from the StarSpeeder 3000 to Oga’s Cantina when he became DJ-R3X, the house DJ. To the wider world Reubens was better known as the eternal child Pee-wee Herman, a character he played on stage, TV and film for over 40 years.
He became famous for playing an adult with a childlike spirit, and his love for acting began at a young age. He first hit the stage in the sixth grade, where he played Nick Burns in A Thousand Clowns at the Players Theatre in New York. He returned to the Players in junior high, where he appeared in The Riot Act, Camelot, and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
The acting bug continued in high school, where he was president of the drama club and starred in numerous roles. He went on to attend Boston University for a year as a theatre major, before he moved to L.A. to enroll in the acting program at California Institute of the Arts.
It was in in Los Angeles where he developed Pee-wee Herman. Following college, he joined famed improv group The Groundlings, where he debuted the character at its theater in 1981 for five months.
In the mid-1990s, he made a brief comeback with appearances out of character in films like Matilda and Mystery Men, most of which were small roles where he was simply credited as Paul Reubens. Though he received critical acclaim in the 1999 Johnny Depp movie Blow, he did not return to appearing as the character he made famous until his stage show in 2009.
“It was a show that assumed its viewers were very young but very smart. It never seemed like a kid’s show if you actually were a kid. Does that make sense?,” Reubens said. “We weren’t under the auspices of something like the Children’s Television Workshop, where a certain part of the content has to be educational, I’m guessing. We tried to disguise anything that might seem overtly like a lesson or a lecture, but we still got some important points across. It’s tough to make a kid’s show; it’s even tougher to make a kid’s show that real kids like. And I take great pride in the fact that that’s what we did.”
Reubens wrote a final note before his passing.
