A Simple Breakfast

In the movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”, Pee-wee Herman uses a self made machine to make breakfast for himself and his dog Speck. All he has to do is light one candle and place it under a string. This string snaps and releases an anvil, kick starting a contraption that uses a Ferris wheel to deploy an egg into a holder where it will stay until cracked by robot chicken that was triggered along with the holders. When the egg cracks it will drop its contents onto a frying pan and the shell will be replaced. Simultaneously, two slices of bread via string are being delivered and dropped after a certain distance into toaster. While that is happening, a separate device is pouring pancake batter, by weight, into a pan held by a statue of Abe Lincoln. The Lincoln device, after a timer, will flip the pancake out of the pan and accept a new batch. In the background, a T-Rex sculpture is crushing a previously placed orange into a pitcher to produce fresh orange juice. The weight of the pitcher triggers dog food for Speck to be poured out into his food bowl. Once an audible timer goes off, the toast is launched from the toaster, and the food being prepared is put onto a plate that is lowered by a lift and ready for Pee-wee to grab and consume. This system used to prepare his breakfast is extremely convoluted. In the scene, the contraption is all connected through wires and cables going across the ceiling to power the machines that need it, and other weight and/or trigger pulls to kick start the reaction that is desired. The candle in the beginning is used to burn the string enough so that it can’t handle the tension of the force on it and snaps, releasing the anvil. The anvil triggers the Ferris Wheel through its weight hitting an object that was blocking movement. The Wheel started a chain reaction leading to the first meal being released, the egg. The egg holder was made from water guns with suction cups to hold the egg while it was cracked with a drinking bird type toy. The egg would be replaced once more. The egg being caught triggered the bread to be delivered zip line style to the toaster where it was dropped after a specif time was passed. This bread drop started the time on the toaster that would be the end signal of the machine. This also started the Abe Lincoln machine making pancakes, the third meal shown. This started the T-Rex orange squeezer where the pitcher the juice feel into was a trigger for the dog food being held by Lincoln in his other hand. The dog food would fall until there wasn’t enough left to fall from its angle. Lastly the timer goes off letting everyone know that food was ready as the machine delivered its payload onto a plate waiting for presentation. This, despite being incredibly difficult to pull off, managed to make Pee-wee a very healthy breakfast, successfully completing its task.