"A Boy Named Charlie Brown" is One F*ed up Movie.

I just finished watching A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which I haven’t seen in a number of years.

At first, I thought it was a refreshing break from the sugary, frenetically-paced, computer gimmicked cartoon movies of today. Charlie Brown seemed to have a realistic type depression going on, and you just don’t see that in cartoons for kids anymore.

But as I watched, I realized that this movie’s message was downright disturbing.

If you remember, Charlie Brown is convinced he can’t do anything right. The girls in this show are out and out bitches who call him “failure-face”. To prove he’s not a loser, he enters the school spelling bee and wins. He’s the champ of the school, but that only means he has to compete nationally. He goes to New York, comes in second, and goes home.

Now, there are a lot of eyebrow raising things about this cartoon. New York is mysteriously deserted, there are NO grownups anywhere, and apparently Linus can take off by Greyhound bus to New York and wander around alone at night without even asking permission from his folks. So okay, no grownups was a convention of the strip, and you just have to suspend your disbelief. Fine.

But here, Charlie Brown is in the National Finals of the Spelling Bee, (which is a HUGE deal. In fact, the match is televised, and Lucy and the gang watch him from his hometown.) and Charlie gets down to the final two! Yes, the word he missed was easy, but goddamn, he won second place! If this were the Olympics, he’d be bringing home a Silver Medal.

So, he was a loser at everything, but now he’s taken the Silver in spelling in a nation-wide contest, and it is implied that he is still a loser???

The movie has him coming home, and no one is there to pick him up from the bus depot. He and Linus walk home, and Charlie Brown spends the next day in bed.

Linus comes to see him. Linus, he’s the wise one, right? So, what does he say to Charlie Brown? “You studied so hard, and you probably feel that you let everybody down, and that you made a fool out of yourself…”

WTF??? He beat every kid in the contest but one!!! How the fuck did he make a fool out of himself??? Is this movie trying to say that unless you are the absolute champion of the entire nation, all your work and effort are worthless? Is every marathon runner a loser because some guy from Kenya won again?

And then, wise Linus says, “The world didn’t come to an end.” Thank you, blanket boy. Tell your folks to put you on the milk cartons if they can’t find you next time you run off.

Charles Schultz was a strange man.

I haven’t seen this, but I looked it up on wiki. It says that all the others leave the competition–does that mean Charlie Brown was outspelling them or that they just misspelled their words before he had a chance to even spell one word? If it’s the latter, then that means that Charlie Brown only had the chance to spell one word which he lost. Also, the word was beagle (per wiki)–an easy word and also, Snoopy is a beagle, so that might explain why it was such a letdown.

Still, the fact that he even made it to the big spelling bee is a pretty big deal. I don’t know that I’d want to spend much time in the mind of Charles Schultz myself.

No, the others all misspelled words. Charlie Brown spelled two words correctly: incompetent and fussbudget. So it wasn’t like he whiffed on the first pitch.

I love all the Charlie Brown/Snoopy movies; especially the RA WA SA DA PA RAR RAR HAR HA that the teachers do…that cracks me up.

That’s about the only dialogue I pay attention to. :wink:

Okay, then I don’t really see why they were characterizing it as a failure. I mean, the fact that it was “beagle” that he lost on must have been annoying, especially when he spelled much harder words. But he certainly didn’t let everyone down if he came in second.

That sonofabitch Schultz should have let him kick that fucking football before ending the series!

Nationally televised humiliation is worse than the other kind. And Charlie Brown must get knocked around by events: it’s part of the story premise. Yet he never loses a certain dignity. The spelling bee was just a grander version of Lucy and the football.

Actually, I think Schultz permitted that once.

That was my understanding. It wasn’t like he tripped over some difficult word like “pococurante” but a ridiculously simple one like “beagle” (Snoopy was even in the front row looking right at him at the time.) This was not Rocky Balboa going toe-to-toe with Apollo Creed for 15 rounds and losing a split decision, this was Bill Buckner letting an easy ground ball roll between his legs. It wasn’t so much that he’d lost, it was how he’d lost. Basically, he choked.

.

He was of German and Norwegian descent and, speaking as someone who’s also of half Norwegian descent, I know we Scandinavians can be especially prone to gloom and pessimism (not as bad as die-hard Cub fans though).

True, but the word he couldn’t spell was such an epic failure, it negated every success he had up until then.

Success is fleeting. Failure lasts a lifetime. Just ask Oscar-winning director Michael Cimino how many movies he was hired to direct after Heaven’s Gate.

Besides…Charlie Brown was a thick-skulled moron of the highest magnitude. Just HOW many times did Lucy yank away that football at the last minute? And yet, Chuck kept trying to kick the damn thing; the hydrocephaic idiot never understood that it was an exercise in futility. Charlie Brown deserves all the misery he gets, IMO.

No one was categorizing it as a failure except Charlie Brown himself. When he came home, people weren’t lined up to make fun of him.

Happy endings are easy, usually too easy. One of the things that made Peanuts great is that Schulz never took that feel-good, cop-out approach. Watch the movie again. By the time Charlie Brown gets to the finals, people are pulling for him. When he misspelled ‘beagle’, they were disappointed. Nobody was calling him “failure face” anymore. Sometimes, that’s all the happy ending that you get.

Furthermore, the National Spelling Bee is held in Washington, not in New York:

Jesus, Washington DC stole the Rockefeller Ice Rink!

In Charlie Brown’s mind, he didn’t ‘come in second.’ By blowing it so spectacularly, he proved he was a loser, and stupid to hope for it in the first place.

Exactly like Lucy’s football, except this time in public. Or standing in a downpour, demanding that his baseball team come back and finish the game. Or the red-haired girl.

It’s not an uncommon pattern for people with negative self images.

Linus’ advice was well meant, but probably not as helpful as it could have been. But then, Linus is the product of Shultz’s imagination, too.


And no, Peppermint Patty and Marcie weren’t intended to be a ‘couple.’ They don’t even like each other. They were, however, a rare, unromanticized depiction of an ‘outsider’ friendship. Hanging around with someone, even someone annoying, was better then being alone.

I think I saw that one.

What the hell did you expect? The movie is from the USA (USA! USA!). You know, the place that comes up with ads stating that you don’t win silver, you lose gold (1996 Olympic games Nike ad). Yeah, I’ll agree with you. That’s fucked up.

Nothing to add here… except it’s Schulz.

I guess there’s a little more…

I think it’s fair to say that Peanuts was not a kid’s strip; it was Schulz’s discussion of very adult themes - depression being one on them. I think he was depressed pretty much all his life, which fueled his creativity in some ways. But think about it. Peanuts was a great strip from the 1950s to the 1990s. Look at how other long-running strips end up (Cathy, Garfield being prime examples).

It’s no secret that Schulz saw Charlie Brown as his alter ego. The imaginative, hopeful side of him, I suppose, we saw in Snoopy. He was Joe Cool, a World War I flying ace, and almost broke Babe Ruth’s home run record before Hank Aaron.

I loved Peanuts as a kid, but man, as an adult, it’s deeeeep.

But Charlie Brown is a passive agressive jerk. He constantly whinges about having no friends when it’s clear he had lots of them. He constanlty fouls up baseball games yet the kids like him enough to let him play. Yet he fails to see that as a good thing but rather bitches about not being a great baseball player, instead of being grateful the other kids, let him play at all.

Several times, Linus, Lucy and Schroeder respond to his his questino, “What would you do if you felt no one liked you,” by saying “I hate that answer” when they all tell him, “I’d examine myself and change what is wrong.”

He’s selfish and unfeeling, he constantly whines about that “Little Red Haired Girl” doesn’t even know he exists, while ignoring both Pepperming Patty and Marcie, and driving them to probably lesbian :slight_smile:

And the whole point of the story was that you do things for the sake of doing them and in the end you will see win or lose the world didn’t end and you were richer for the experience.

I mean we do glorify winners, somewhat ridiculously, look at Michael Phelps, who spent pretty much his entire life traing to be able to swim form one side of the pool to the other faster than anyone else.

That’s ludicrous when you think of it, but that’s how society is. And that is the point, real achivement and growth doesn’t come form a ridiculous exercise of memorizing a word you can just as easily look up in a dictionary.

But as you can tell, I never found Charlie Brown to be a very sympathetic character

Dunno if you were serious, but there was a long sequence with CB in the hospital (paralleling Schulz’s RL heart problems) during which Lucy broke down crying and vowed that if CB recovered, she’d never pull the football away again. So he showed up on her doorstep, holding a football and purring, “I heard something about a promiiiiiiiiise…”

So Lucy held the football in place, and CB kicked her hand. “Next time you’re in the hospital, STAY THERE!”

And there was also an early strip in which Shermy (or possibly Schroeder; whoever it was had a helmet on) held a football and CB kicked it with ease. The focus of that particular strip was Snoopy not understanding football, though. (This was also before Snoopy was awesome at everything.)

Schulz had very severe chronic depression and it really came through in his characters. What I enjoyed as a child about Peanuts, the kids having kid problems and insecurities, if find impossibly cruel as an adult. Schulz hated Charlie Brown (his alter ego), Lucy was a narcissistic bitch, Linus an educated moron and Patty was just dumb. Charlie Brown got the worst of it.