A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition

Cell By Date

A Charlie Brown Christmas -
The Making Of A Tradition
by Lee Mendelson with reminiscences by Bill Melendez
ITBooks ISBN: 9780062272140

A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition does exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak. First published in 2000, the book is a behind the scenes treasure trove of information, photographs, animation cells and more, telling the story of how the very first Charlie Brown animated TV special came into being. But not, as I learned within its handsome dust covers, the first Charlie Brown animation... I’ll get to that in a minute.

The names Bill Mendelson and Bill Melendez will probably be familiar with anyone who’s seen a Charlie Brown cartoon in the last 55 years. They worked on them all with Mendelson producing and with, as the credits always used to put it, ‘graphic blandishments’ by Melendez. This tells the story of how the two became involved with Charlie Schulz, the man behind the Peanuts newspaper strip (you can read my review of his entire run here).

The first thing I have to say about this book is that it’s really well designed. Lots of blocks of type with very loose leading and the underlying grid of the page layout showing through (beautiful typography), with headlines big, bold and eschewing capital letters. Honestly, this book is almost like something I would design myself if I had projects as cool as this to work on (my day job is as a graphic designer) and, as an added extra touch, there is a little reproduction of running animation cells on the bottom right corner of all the pages, so you can ruffle them like an old school flicker book and see the characters come to life before your eyes.

Mendelson seems to have written the majority of the book but both he an Melendez have a lot to say. The introduction is just heartbreaking, with Mendelson telling how he was on the phone with Sparky one night (everybody close to Schulz knew him as Sparky) and he was due to meet up with him again the next day but, within hours of the phone call, Charles M. Schulz had passed away. I know too well what it’s like to be left without a sense of closure when someone close dies and this really pulled at the tear ducts, to be honest.

He then goes on to explain how ex-Disney animator Melendez, who he didn’t know at the time, had done a few minutes of Peanuts animation for Ford, in a series of quick adverts a couple of years before the TV special. When, for his newly established film production company, Mendelson set out to do a half hour documentary on Schulz (which didn’t initially sell to any network at the time, on completion) they decided they wanted a couple of minutes of animation in it and Sparky put him in touch with Melendez for the job. The rest is history, even more so when Mendelson got the idea of asking hot jazz composer Vince Guaraldi to come up with music for the documentary. The world famous Peanuts inspired jazz standard Linus & Lucy (which you could probably hum, even if you didn’t know you knew it), was written for this documentary.

So, the documentary was rejected but somebody at Coca Cola saw it and responded to the animation. So Coca Cola hired Mendelson to do a half hour slot Christmas special for TV, to an extremely short deadline which, with the help of Melendez and his crew, not to mention the best selling score provided by Guaraldi, he managed to pull off. However, the people at the TV company saw it and pretty much hated it. They agreed to still screen it because, obviously, they didn’t want to waste the money, but they said they wouldn’t repeat the experience. By chance, they showed it to a Time magazine critic a few days before it screened and, of course, he absolutely loved it and gave it a very positive write up. Not as positive as the huge audience figures and huge outpouring of love it drew when it was aired though... not to mention procuring an Emmy. The TV company realised their error and immediately ordered five more specials. Like I said... the rest is, a very long, history.

The book is set out into different sections so this is followed by a miniature biography of Schulz himself and then a Q & A session with Mendelson and Melendez. Things I’d never thought of before came to light and this was certainly an education. For instance, I didn’t realise it but it seems obvious now, that one of the unique things about this special and the subsequent TV specials was that these were pretty much the first time that kids in a cartoon were voiced by actual children. This is followed by a section on Melendez and another thing I’d not thought of is that the Schulz’ drawings of the characters, which they took straight to screen unchanged, were not great for certain aspects of animation. There are no way Charlie Brown’s arms are going to reach up to his head to scratch it for example... so Melendez said he had to cut around things so whenever Charlie Brown scratches his head, it’s done in profile with his arm coming up from behind him etc. I’d never thought about that before but it’s one of the many interesting little facts scattered around the pages here.

Another of the many mini sections of the book is a brief biography of composer Vince Guaraldi and it even reprints some of his sheet music for the show (he would go on to score the first 13 specials before dying unexpectedly at the age of 45... his musical direction would inform all the other productions, of course). And added to all this are loads of photos and reproductions of things which are probably published here for the first time. There’s a look at some of the flat shots from the 1960s Ford Falcon commercials, storyboards, background design sketches, production sheets (which I didn’t totally understand, I have to confess) and even two black and white sequential photographs of Charlie Schulz and Bill Melendez reenacting the long running Lucy/Charlie Brown football gag.

Finally, the last section of the book is the full, illustrated screenplay of A Charlie Brown Christmas and I have to say, although I wasn’t particularly expecting much from this part of the book, the script is a joy to read (especially with the animated cells next to them to remind you of the flavour of each scene) and, dare I say it, ultimately quite moving (perhaps more so than actually watching the original animation). And that’s all I’ve got on this one... A Charlie Brown Christmas - The Making Of A Tradition is a fairly quick read but it’s handsomely illustrated, nicely designed and an absolutely wonderful, very informative book on the creative process, production and reception of this great TV classic. I’d recommend this to anyone who loves the world created by Schulz and those wonderful cartoons based on them.

The Complete Peanuts

Snoopy Duper

The Complete Peanuts
Volumes 1 - 26
by Charles M Schulz

The Peanuts Dell Archive
by Schulz and Various
Charlie Brown’s sister Sally is a Harry Potter fan.

I didn’t know that but it kinda makes sense since anybody who has done a lot for getting a new generation of children into reading would surely have appealed to Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz... or Sparky, as his friends and family knew him.

The reason I didn’t know this is because I pretty much hadn’t read any of the Peanuts strips after around the mid-1980s. I’d read quite a few of them from the years before that but Schulz was knocking these things out for around 50 years, from 1950 - 2000, on a daily basis so, you know, there was a lot there I hadn’t read. So, sometime towards the end of last year, I decided to remedy that and started reading the entire run in the few spare minutes I had left over each day, getting through a year roughly every few days.

Peanuts has always been in my life in one form or another and it’s also one of the things me and my late best friend Kerry also bonded over quite often.

When I was a kid my parents had a subscription to the Sunday magazine edition of The Observer. I used to mostly only read one thing in this, the full colour Sunday edition of Peanuts which had extra panels than the usual three on the regular daily strips. Then, years later when I was in my mid to late teens at school, I discovered a weird little second hand bookshop off the beaten track about twenty minutes walk away. It was only open on a Thursday afternoon and on a Saturday morning. I used to go there almost every Thursday after school to spend my Saturday job money there (in the days when a second hand book would be priced somewhere between 20p and 30p). I read a lot of things which have stayed with me from this shop over the few years it was still open... almost the entire run of Philip K. Dick novels, around 60 or so of the original Doc Savage novels, the Bond books, the Quiller books, the Modesty Blaise novels, 60 or more Michael Moorcock novels... this shop was a magical gateway to fantasy worlds I still inhabit to this day.

And, of course, I grabbed around 40 or so of the paperback Charlie Brown/Peanuts collections from them. They reprinted the strips in chopped up vertical displays and I just adored them. And, yes, thank you... I was the kind of kid who kept a little book of lists of required titles on me to make sure I didn’t buy any doubles. I used to lend them to my friend Kerry too and my favourite Peanuts memory must be the time when I discovered some new reprint books which were slightly thinner but which were maybe an inch taller and wider than the other Peanuts books. So I took it to school the next day and showed my friend the cover of the one I’d bought the night before... Thompson Is In Trouble Charlie Brown! I knew my friend knew all the Peanuts characters as well as I did, possibly better, so I waited the second or so and then, sure enough, Kerry looked at me and said... “Thompson? Who’s Thompson?” I looked at him nonchalantly as I slowly turned the book around to reveal the back cover. This was a depiction of the character Woodstock holding up a sign and, on that sign it said... “Thompson? Who’s Thompson?” Kerry saw this, groaned to himself and started grinning. I don’t know why I still remember this incident but it was one of the few highlights of my school period.

I fondly remember our last collective run in with the Peanuts gang, as it was literally a few months before Kerry’s death. We went into London one Saturday for a big gallery show on the history of Charles Schulz and his iconic strip. We had a good time walking around those galleries and I am very grateful, in hindsight, that we took the time to go around that thing.

So The Complete Peanuts is a 26 volume collection of all of the Peanuts strips from 1950 to 2000 in chronological order, two years per tome. It also includes Schulz’s earliest versions of the characters from the Li'l Folks cartoons, both at the start and the end of the run here and, also, various comic book and advertisement appearances. These are all reprinted in black and white, as the majority of the strips were. They are handsome hardbacked volumes and each has an introduction from a different, famous personality... so Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson, Barack Obama, Garrison Keiller, Whoopi Goldberg... lots of people have been gathered to sing the praises of the man and talk about his influences on them. The Peanuts Dell Archive takes some (not all) of the various Dell Four Colour Comics from the 1950s and 60s and reproduces them in their original full colour. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t reprint just the few Schulz stories from these comics but also a huge amount of the other writers and artists who worked on these. 

From the start, Schulz’s strip had something magical and was addressing things in ways which other newspaper strip characters couldn’t even get near. Schulz’s understated stabs of humour peppered with truisms are also often quite surreal at times and have an almost world weary feel to them at others... which is interesting when you are dealing with characters who are perpetually no older than about six years of age (of course, they always seem to know what year it is too... which is hard for continuity conscious people like myself, who can’t work out why these kids don’t grow up in these panels from year to year).

Although it sets a tone with its lead character Charlie Brown (although it’s true that his dog Snoopy could also be considered the lead character too), things are mostly unchanging for him over the years. For instance, one of the very early strips has Charlie Brown walking along towards a group of kids. One of the kids says... “Here comes Charlie Brown.” Then, when he has passed them by and is out of earshot, the same kid finishes off with... “How I hate him.” So yes, the eternal misfortunes of Charlie Brown start here but, especially in the early days, he’s not always the loser he’s sometime made out to be. A lot of the first few years, for instance, regularly has a strip where Charlie Brown ‘winds up’ one of the other kids and the last panel is often of him being chased away from a scene smiling as he says something along the lines of... “I get my kicks.” Much later in the run Charlie even gets a girlfriend, of sorts and does have some good things happening to him from time to time.

In November 1951, we have the first of what would be the annual tradition of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown to kick and then pulling it away at the last moment. However, the first time this is done, it’s not Lucy who holds the ball at all but Violet...Lucy came into the strip as a toddler in early 1952. The same month as the first ball kick we get the first sighting of Snoopy’s kennel when a TV aerial is bought for it although, like pretty much all of the characters, Snoopy is drawn a little differently to the way he evolved... he’s not a million miles off from where he would later end up visually but, of all the characters, he’s probably the one who changed the most.

And then, in October of ‘52, a character breaks the fourth wall for the first time, although what with the surreal moments in the strip over the years, this is probably the least subtle it’s ever been done. After getting a stupid answer from Charlie Brown, Beethoven fanatic Schroeder walks off saying... “Sometimes I think I should put in for a transfer to a new comic strip.”

Getting back to Snoopy though, its hard to keep a track of just who owns him in the strip in the early days. It seems almost as if he lives with whichever kid seems to take Schulz’s fancy at the start. Somewhere around late 1955 though, he’s finally and positively identified as being Charlie Brown’s dog. In the early days, Snoopy’s kennel is rarely seen except for having that TV aerial installed and then, a little later, to show an air conditioning unit fitted to the side. After a while, though, we get into the iconic idea that he sleeps on top of his kennel. That being said, during his last few years working on the strip, Schulz began to depict him sleeping in bed with Charlie Brown on a number of occasions. In 1993, however, it’s revealed that Snoopy mostly sleeps on top of his kennel because he has claustrophobia... which is a shame but Peanuts does seem to get a little darker and more cynical as Schulz got older, I think. Lots of famous firsts for this character though, as the years go by including a 1964 reference to him as being a ‘Beagle’, which is something we hadn’t known for the 13 years prior to this. In March 1969 he was also ‘the first Beagle on the moon’ and I remember as a kid I used to have a Snoopy figure in his Apollo Mission outfit. At that exhibition last year, we saw a whole bunch of those in very slightly different variations from various manufacturing runs. In June 1970, as the punchline to a joke, Snoopy is seen wearing sunglasses for the first time, which would later become his Joe Cool alter ego’s signature trademark.

In an interesting use of composition and comic strip semiotics, which was something Schulz was continually experimenting with, in February 1961, Snoopy kicks his dog dish through three consecutive panels, thus exploring the idea of linear time over multiple static moments... something which is probably taken for granted in modern times. Another load of surreal turns include various gags of Snoopy interacting in various ways with the depiction of Schroeder's music, manifest in the air as notes on a set of staves but somehow also a tangible force once Snoopy is in a scene. There’s also a sequence in the strip where Snoopy is promoted to Head Beagle and it’s bizarre in that his whole inauguration is televised. And, of course, there are his various flights of fancy from the troubled First World War fighter pilot who is constantly being attacked by The Red Baron to a surreal version of the Foreign Legion as he leads a group of the bird Woodstock’s friends through the imagined desert.

Talking of Woodstock, this character was in it for quite a few years hanging out with Snoopy until he finally reveals his name in June 1970. Other firsts include the 1966 first appearance of Peppermint Patty and the August 1968 arrival of Franklin.

The strip is often whimsical and understated but it always feels right and you sometimes get the feeling that the worlds problems are being debated in this parallel universe of Schulz’s work. And, as I said, the strip does get quite surreal, quite a lot... and that’s not just used for Snoopy’s character. For instance, there’s a running joke starting in 1974, which carries on in subsequent years, of Sally developing a kind of conversational relationship with the bricks that make up the school building. Or there’s that time when Peppermint Patty is held back a year but her old desk in the other class is haunted by the sound of her snores. And, considering that the Peanuts gang were on practically every greetings card you could find in the 70s and 80s, it’s interesting that, when Snoopy wants to send The Red Baron a greetings card, he considers buying a Garfield Birthday card for him.

Another thing I like is the constant stream of movie references that make their way into the strip from time to time. There’s many a mention for Citizen Kane, for example but there are also some great throwaway lines like this one in reference to Alfred Hitchcock...”I don’t trust birds anymore since I saw that movie.”

As I read these beloved strips I realised that it was also a microcosm for the way the world has grown and the attitudes of people over the years. I mean, there’s something really jarring when you get a Harry Potter reference in a Peanuts cartoon and, frankly, realise that in 1993, Lucy is using a mobile phone. And the metatextual nature of the strips can sometimes creep up on you without you knowing it, such as the three daily strips in 1997 promoting a real life concert of Peanuts music at Carnegie Hall. And, considering my profession as a graphic designer, why did it take Schulz to clue me in with a very in-your-face reference, about Etaoin shrdlu? No... you google it the same as I had to.

The Dell Comic Archives are interesting in that they show people and artists who weren’t always 100% in step with Schulz’ style and even the one that Schulz worked on himself for the comic books were somewhat different to the meanderings of his daily strip. I don’t think it’s necessary the extended stories that brought about this change in this material... after all, Schulz had a lot of running stories going on  for a few weeks when he got into an idea... I just think that a different version of the medium for a specific audience obviously had different needs and this changes the tone somewhat.

I’d  never realised, for instance, that Schulz’ daily Peanuts newspaper strips also quite often delved into the realm of political satire like other newspaper cartoonists often do. My favourite one was a running strip in the... I think... 1970s where Charlie Brown is trying to get a dog license from his local post office for Snoopy. Each day he ends up being given the wrong thing like a fishing license until, on the last day, he gets the right one. On the last day he says something to an ‘out of frame’ Snoopy along the lines of... “No, she says you don’t need a license for that.” The last panel shows Snoopy walking out with some kind of assault rifle. I think that Schulz, who served in the Second World War, made pretty clear his sentiment on the foolish notion that anybody had the right to bear arms in his country and I’m really pleased he did this.

On February 13th 2000 a special strip appeared. The last one. Charlie Brown is seen talking on a phone with the phrase, “I think he’s writing.” Panel two is Snoopy on his kennel typing “Dear Friends...” The third panel is also him writing and a heartfelt message from Schulz which I’ll quote here fully...

“Dear Friends,

I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost 50 years.
It has been the fulfilment of my childhood ambition.

Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip, therefore I am announcing my retirement.

I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip.

Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them...

Charles M. Schulz”

Charlie Schulz passed away the day before this strip ran... and if you’ve just spent months reading his entire run, well... trust me, it’s a very moving moment.

The last volume in the series of The Complete Peanuts contains a long afterword by his widow, Jean Schulz, which talks a lot about their time together and, as you can imagine, it’s very touching. I couldn’t think of a nicer way to finish up this series and I found the whole experience both joyful and sometimes very sad. The Complete Peanuts is, as far as I am concerned, worth its weight in gold and if anyone is a budding strip cartoonist, I think you can learn a lot from reading through some of these volumes... strong lines, brevity, not over reaching but teasing out an idea... this is all good stuff. An absolute recommendation from me to anyone who wants to read something often gentle but never unswerving or dodging the bullets... a strip that tackles issues head on and with the right balance to make sure some of these insights really stab home. As well, of course, as being a whole lot of fun. I’ll aim to read through these again in my remaining lifetime, for sure.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

 

The Beagle Has Landed

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
USA 1966
Directed by Bill Melendez
Watched on YouTube

I rarely watch anything on YouTube, it has to be said. I much prefer owning the stuff I watch rather than streaming or renting from a source which can just turn around and deny me the ability to watch what I want, when I want it any time it likes. However, I thought I’d make an exception this year because Varese Sarabande has just reminded me this gem of a cartoon exists by releasing the first CD issue of the soundtrack. Now, it has to be said, I did try and order a UK DVD or Blu Ray of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, only to find that this thing seems to be totally out of print over here. Now normally in that situation I would just order the US edition but, alas, I knew that if I’d gone down that route then it was probable I wouldn’t even receive it until after Halloween this year... which kinda defeats the object. This is definitely a seasonal TV special and soundtrack and playing it past 31st October just seems like really bad luck, to me.

I remember that I never saw this one as a kid. Halloween, it has to be said, was not something that children in the UK in the 1970s or before... or even the 1980s for that matter... really participated in or knew much about. Trick or Treating was not a thing over here until maybe the mid to late 1990s and the way it’s mutated into some kind of aggressive tricksterism...as well as a totally cynical exercise in merchandising scary, seasonally appropriate merchandise to the kids and their financially challenged parents... is probably not something I should go on about at length here.

So yes, I was certainly aware of Halloween as a kid from only one source... The Observer magazine that got delivered to my parent’s door every Sunday. This used to run the Peanuts strip in colour near the back and, every October, you’d get the odd Halloween installment published. That was my only exposure to Halloween, not to mention The Great Pumpkin and so the bizarre culture shock I experienced when, in later years, I saw Halloween rise in popularity over here, spreading like a virulent celebration of destructive anarchy, made me wonder if our country had become just another state of the USA. I used to watch and love the odd Charlie Brown specials on TV as a kid (and later) as did everybody but I don’t know if this one even got shown on UK TV, truth be told. According to the IMDB it was only ever broadcast in the US and in Finland for some strange reason so... maybe it really never aired over here.

Anyway, I found myself with a spare half an hour for lunch and I found a few versions of this on YouTube. A couple were questionable in quality but I did quickly find an HD version and away I went.

It’s a little crude in style but most of those early Peanuts cartoons were and they were no worse for it. They’ve always been about the little pearls of wisdom that Charles M. Schulz used to inject into his strip and all of the ones I’ve seen (although I’ve seen nowhere near all of them) are primarily about promoting strong messages of right versus wrong. They are sometimes quite surreal (another reason to like them) and certainly very cynical at times but they always have a lot of heart in them and I suspect that’s why they’re so well loved around the world.

It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown tells the short story of what happens when the Peanuts gang go trick or treating while Linus and Sally (who has a crush on Linus, if you recall), spend all night in the ‘most sincere’ Pumpkin Patch that Linus can find, fruitlessly awaiting the appearance of this peculiar figment of Linus’ imagination. There’s not much to write home about in this one, it has to be said but... it is a slice of pleasant, heart warming Charlie Brown goodness once again and, in terms of the animated specials, it also has a couple of firsts.

For example, this is the first time an animation had been done of Charlie Brown attempting to kick a football and landing on his back after Lucy pulls it away from him. Even in this first animated manifestation, though, it’s already being treated by the characters as a running joke.

The other famous first here is that this is the first time we get to see the animated Snoopy playing around as the World War One flying ace, in pursuit of the Red Baron. Most of the classic elements of those flights of canine fancy are in place here already such as, even when he’s doing a loop the loop, you never see anything other than the top of his dog kennel standing in for his Sopwith Camel and both the flying sequence and his progress returning home behind enemy lines is done with a deft touch which carefully rides the line between Snoopy’s imagination and what’s happening in the real world. The only thing which seems a little false here is that instead of Snoopy’s inner voice narrating his adventures... you never get to hear Snoopy’s thoughts in the cartoons... we instead have the surrogate voice of Charlie Brown narrating on the soundtrack. This almost but, doesn’t quite, work and it seems a bit false. I think this was something they dropped in later shows but I’d need to watch more of them to find out how quickly this element was ditched from the franchise.

The whole show is, of course, scored by the late, great Vince Guaraldi and this is always one of the best reasons to watch the early, classic Peanuts shows. This one has some nice variations on his famous Linus And Lucy theme going through it too which, frankly, I'm really looking forward to hearing when I can get around to giving the new CD a spin. It's good jazz scoring from a truly remarkable composer.

And that’s me more or less done with It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown which, frankly, any fan of the Peanuts gang will surely love. I say more or less because there’s a little epilogue to my review here. When the end credits were rolling I noticed that the cartoon was released in 1966, which rang a little alarm bell in my head. I remembered that a couple of years ago I bought a DVD called The Peanuts 1960s Collection, which is also now sadly out of print and which I haven't had a chance to watch yet. When I looked at the box when I got home I realised that It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was on this all along. So I really needn’t have spent so much time and energy trying to get hold of this one and neither did I need to resort to YouTube to watch it. Sometimes the things you want are right on the end of your nose so, the moral to take away from this story, I think, is this. Whatever you do, don’t get as old as me... it’s no fun.

The Peanuts Movie

Peanuts Envy

Snoopy and Charlie Brown - The Peanuts Movie
2015 USA
Directed by Steve Martino
UK cinema release print.

Well this movie was an unexpected treat. I don’t know why this has been released over here as Snoopy And Charlie Brown - The Peanuts Movie instead of just The Peanuts Movie... the characters aren’t exactly unknown to us over here in the UK. However, it’s the title I’ve gone for here because I remembered that the original creator, Charles M. Schulz, never really liked the title Peanuts, which was thrust on him in the early days as a name change for the original strip.

I’ve been a fan of good ol’ Charlie Brown and the gang for pretty much my entire life. I used to love watching the TV specials on television, and grooving along to Vince Guaraldi’s amazing soundtracks for them. And for the first 20 or so years of my life, my parents used to get The Observer newspaper and magazine delivered to our door on a Sunday morning. One of the big plusses to that was that it used to run a full colour Peanuts featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown strip in full colour somewhere near the back of the mag. I would, of course, read it every Sunday and later, I started buying old second hand collections and read classic old tomes, some of them dating right back to the earliest strips in the 1950s.

I saw what I think must have been the first teaser trailer for this new movie at least a year ago on the internet. I kinda kept clear of all the later trailers because... well, that first trailer bothered me a lot. It looked like they’d got the tone wrong somehow. Now I can’t remember enough about it to work out if any of the footage from that trailer was dropped from the film but I can say that, having seen the film itself, it’s absolutely spot on in terms of being copacetic with the original strips and TV cartoons. I actually had nothing to worry about and there’s nothing out of character or too modern in this film which would detract from the spirit of the originals, I'd say.

One of the ways it tries to add dynamism to the talking head style of the humour of Schulz’ beloved characters is to have some action pieces thrown in every now and again but, honestly, they aren’t any more obtrusive than similar action pieces thrown into earlier films and these ones are mostly a completely logical extension, if logical is the right word for the inherent surrealism of the characters, of the usual Snoopy fantasy set pieces you used to get in the strip and sometimes thrown into the movies. These are a running series of pieces and concentrate on Snoopy in his familiar World War One Flying Ace guise as he tries to save the sexy Fifi from the clutches of his arch nemesis, The Red Baron.

The main story set all around this centres on Charlie Brown and it involves the long told saga of his crush on ‘the little red haired girl’ who arrives as a new character in this movie. As Charlie goes through the usual humiliating trials and tribulations in his quest to win the eye of the little red haired girl, we are treated to many touches and nods to the original strips and shows and I really can’t imagine fans of my age (and I’m probably not the intended target audience, for sure) not being happy with this. We have stuff like Lucy and her psychiatric booth, Lucy and the football (you need to wait and lurk amidst the end credits for this scene... among others), Snoopy trying to make off with Linus’ blanket, Charlie’s prowess (or lack of prowess thereof) flying a kite and all the things you could possibly want in a full length version. There are even a few scenes where the old style black and white ink drawings are used in loving homage, as Charlie thinks back to days gone by.

Christophe Beck provides a new score for a lot of the film which is often appropriate for the on screen action but, it has to be said, some of the sequences are greatly lifted when the decision is made in certain scenes to track in Vince Guaraldi’s amazing jazz compositions from the original shows... or they might be re-recorded for the movie, I’m not sure if it’s needle dropped in or not, to be honest. But the familiar music does well to set up the opening of the movie and it especially kicks in well when the famous Linus and Lucy theme is used a few times later in the film. It’s not that Beck has done a bad score... far from it... but how do you compete with the brilliance of Vince Guaraldi? The answer is, you don’t but Beck’s score comes off surprisingly well in comparison, too.

Another great thing about the movie is the voice casting. Lots of Peanuts shows and movies over the years have been spot on with their voice casting in such a way that, although it’s often a different set of actors voicing the characters in the many cartoons (kids grow up fast and their voices change accordingly), they almost always manage to get everyone sounding just like the characters did when they appeared in moving image form in that very first Christmas TV special from 1965. This new movie does exactly the same and there’s no jarring reactions to be had... everybody sounds just as they should... including Woodstock and Snoopy. In fact, in terms of these two, it’s still Bill Melendez who provided their voices in most (perhaps all?) of the cartoons. Although he died a while ago, the makers have gone to the trouble to use the old recordings and utilise them in this film... with absolutely no change of credibility in the sound quality either. The samples used match the shininess of all the rest of the sound in the movie, for sure.

My one disappointment in this one was that, although we do get to see Snoopy in his Joe Cool alter ego, we don’t get a rendition of Vince Guaraldi’s accompanying song... which is a shame but, I’m sure if there’s a sequel to this one (which there certainly deserves to be) then they’ll get around to it.

But that’s really my only complaint. If you’re a fan of Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Sally, Linus, Lucy, , Schroeder, Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Franklin, Pig Pen and all the rest, then you’re bound to have a good time with this new version of their on screen adventures. And if this is your first time with the Peanuts crowd... well my friends who I went with took their two year old along with us to see it and all I can say is... he seemed to really like it. Pointing at the screen, keeping quiet through most of it and falling asleep at the end credits. Which is a good recommendation itself, I suspect, for all of you who want to keep your little ones entertained/quiet. This is a great little movie and if I’d had seen it at the tail end of last year when it came out, I suspect it would have made its way into my top twenty of 2015 easily enough. Good grief.

It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown

Where Beagles Dare

It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown
USA 1974 
Directed by Phil Roman
Firefly Entertainment DVD Region 2

This review is almost self defeating in a way because... well what can you say about one of the classic cartoon shorts of the 20th Century? This is another in a number of “Charlie Brown Specials” which came out over the years, following on from the totally amazing A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown is definitely one of my all time favourites and, probably, the one I know the best, I think... since I try to watch it every Easter, if I can.

Sure, it’s not particularly opulent in terms of its animation, with a lot of static characters on screen sometimes while there is movement on only one person and maybe a bit of background detail coming to life... but they’re definitely not as bad as a lot of cheap 1970s TV animation and you can tell that there’s a lot of love gone into these ones. Stylistically, too, I think the static nature of some of the frames matches the genesis of the original Peanuts - featuring Good O’l Charlie Brown strip and I’ve always thought these have something over a lot of the other cartoons which were being produced in this period of television history. Also, it’s hard to get Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang wrong when they’re all based on the original writings of Charles M. Schulz, who clearly must have had a lot to do with these cartoon specials, I think.

Bearing in mind that the cartoon is only around 25 mins in length, you’ve got to admire the amount of different running jokes and follow on scenes inherent in the episode and the structure of this one is perfect. You have the main “Easter Beagle is coming” plot which is set up by Linus telling everybody about it, tying in to the famous, annual Great Pumpkin debacle of Halloween. This runs through the whole show... which is quite clever because the actual machinations to get to this event actually taking place are only revealed, and indeed only actually happen, in the scene before the actual resolution of it. That is to say, we see ‘the Easter Beagle’ acquiring his painted eggs in the scene before he makes his grand entrance and distributes them.

But, quite apart from that main narrative point, we have so many little sub stories to get through, running parallel to the main plot, that it’s a wonder the running time is so short. We have the whole thing with Woodstock’s inadequate nest and the acquisition of, not one but two, new homes for him. We have various scenes of Peppermint Patty failing, quite spectacularly in some cases, to show her friend Marcie how to boil and paint eggs for Easter. We have assorted character building with a shopping expedition to buy Sally some new shoes for Easter and a wealth of scenes not designed to move the plot forward in any way but which are absolutely fun and... it all works rather well.

Sequences like the bunny dance scene, the hat scene, the music box dance scene and so on. Really great little sketches which are inserted into the main plot strands and which mesh perfectly, establish the relationships between the characters, entertain, demonstrate the “good heart” at the centre of the whole Charlie Brown universe and, ultimately, make us laugh and smile.

And, of course, there’s Snoopy.

Snoopy is, absolutely, the Harpo Marx of the Peanuts world. His flights of fancy and various shenanigans are probably half of what keeps people watching. You know things are usually going to get very surreal when the beagle’s about and, in this era when Woodstock was also now a character, it’s the animals which give Peanuts the edge...

Little sequences like when Charlie Brown, Sally, Peppermint Patty, Marcie and Snoopy go to the local store, for example, are absolute gold. Being as it’s Easter, of course, the satire of the store already having all the Christmas goods on sale (yep, even in the 1970s and before, the shops were taking the mickey and putting on the commercial pressure to spend at the earliest opportunity) is pitch perfect but it’s when Snoopy takes the ‘down’ escalator while everybody else takes the ‘up’ escalator that the tradition of surreal sight-gag comedy takes over... with Snoopy passing the rest of the gang going down opposite on each progressive floor as Charlie and the others keep climbing up a floor at a time. This is wonderful and it’s little touches like this and Woodstock imagining he's using an invisible elevator, supported by the noise of it in the sound effects, that really make these things worth watching periodically... at least for me.

I think my favourite moment comes as much from the observations of the director/animators on this one as it does from the mind of Charlie Schulz, it might be safe to conclude. When Snoopy looks into a peep hole in an elaborate egg in the store and spies some bunnies, we enter Snoopy’s imagination with him as the bunnies come to life and he jumps right into the scene and starts dancing with them. But it’s the end of the scene which is so special, as we cut back to our main beagle still looking into the egg and see that, indeed, Snoopy is not really dancing with bunnies anywhere except in his mind’s eye... but he is so into his dream like state that his little legs are dancing along still as he looks into the egg. Anyone who’s ever owned a dog and watched them while they dream will know exactly what that little reaction is all about and it’s just so beautifully observed that it never fails to get a big grin from me every time I watch this one.

And to top it all off, we have another of jazz composer Vince Guaraldi’s awesome Charlie Brown scores. I never get tired of hearing the consistently styled musical world he creates for these things and, although it’s not my favourite of his works, there’s some really cool stuff going on in this one still, including some very casually ‘hidden’ classical music covers, rearranged in a jazz idiom and standing up as another cohesive element which make these early TV specials such a pleasure to watch and hear.

So there you have it. It’s The Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown is one of the unmissable events of any Easter and it belongs on everyone’s choice of festive television programmes to fit in between their chocolate eggs and countless viewings of Ben Hur (reviewed here). If you’ve never seen any of the original, classic Charlie Brown specials before then, well.... you really should do and this is certainly one of the better shows to start on. A simplistic surface masking an incredibly sophisticated and underrated piece of late 20th Century art, as far as I’m concerned. Don’t let the Easter Beagle pass you by.