AllMovie

The surreal Nickelodeon sitcom The Adventures of Pete & Pete can best be described as what Leave It to Beaver would have looked like had it been written by Philip K. Dick, directed by Luis Buñuel, and photographed by Salvador Dali. The main characters are a pair of young brothers, both named Pete, with "Big" Pete Wrigley (Michael Maronna) narrating the action as seen through the eyes of younger sibling "Little" Pete (Danny Tamberelli) The boys lived in a suburban neighborhood in Wellsville, U.S.A., populated exclusively by oddballs, eccentrics, misfits, and (it was rumored) paranormals. The brothers' dad Don (Hardy Rawls) seemingly had nothing else to do in life than maintain his immaculate front lawn; mom Joyce (Judy Grafe) picked up radio signals and other aural flotsam and jetsam via the steel plate in her head; Little Pete's closest confidante was his talking tattoo Petunia; the Wrigley's neighbor Artie (Toby Huss) was a wacky inventor who fancied himself a comic book superhero (and dressed accordingly); the two Petes' girlfriends were the funky Ellen Hickle (Allison Fanelli) and the strangely prescient Nona Mecklenburg (Michelle Trachtenberg); and others in the neighborhood were portrayed by the likes of Iggy Pop, Adam West, and Patty Hearst! None of the storylines could by any stretch of the imagination be declared logical or coherent, but somehow or other everything turned out for the benefit of the two Petes before the episode was over. One of the few TV series filmed entirely on location in exotic, alluring New Jersey, The Adventures of Pete & Pete was introduced as a group of one-minute comedy sketches in 1990. Three years later -- on December 5, 1993, to be exact -- the property jelled as a weekly half hour show. Thirty-four episodes were produced over the next three years.