It must be real this time, huh?

Maybe I’m a skeptic. Maybe I am wrong to have this wait-and-see attitude. But you know, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me half a dozen or more times, shame on me.”

When asked about a possible new Pee-Wee Herman movie, Paul Reubens sat across from Jimmy Fallon and said with a straight face:

“There is going to be one and I was hoping I could make this huge announcement tonight but it’s a week away from being announced. But yeah, Judd Apatow is producing it. This was all leaked three years ago, so a little bit is known…We’ve hired a director; I can’t say yet. But we’re going to start in February.”

This is a lot like what Reubens told Rolling Stone recently:

“There’s going to be a big announcement any minute now,. It’s been months and months of being right on the verge of being announced… I thought something was going to go public yesterday, actually, and that you’d be the first person I’d be talking about this with. But I’m thinking there will be something made public very soon. It’s going to get made shortly after the new year. I wish I could tell you about it right now, because…I mean, it’s amazing. It’s going to be amazing. It think it first got leaked four years ago or so that the movie was going to be made, and ever since then it’s just been stalling and stalling. So I’m really ready for this to happen. But I’m not kidding: It’s very imminent.”

Here’s the problem. Reubens lies! Who knows why he does it? But he admits that he does. Back in 2007, he told Jimmy Kimmel:

“Well, here’s the thing. I totally, during interviews, a lot of the time, lie. I make stuff up. The first time it ever happened, someone said ‘What are you doing next?’ And I said, ‘I’m building Pee-Wee Land.’ And it got printed and I started getting phone calls from investors. I made up on your show, and in a couple of other interviews, I was doing a Pee-Wee movie. So now everyone’s going, ‘When’s the movie coming out?’ And there’s isn’t a movie. It’s a little bit awkward.”

So, it’s really anybody’s guess as to whether and when there will be a new Pee-Wee movie. Maybe Reubens is pumping this in interviews and on shows, using his recently bumped invitation cred to get the chance to push Apatow into confirming or denying the project.

The rumors about Apatow are actually four years old. But no Pee-Wee project is listed for Apatow on IMDB.

Still, hope springs eternal.