Oh, the words he knew were clearly chosen at random then. :rolleyes:
I found this movie - all the Charlie Brown movies, really - profoundly depressing as a child, when I didn’t really have the capacity to understand why.
I really don’t know how much input Schulz had in that movie, or any of the specials. The first two TV specials (A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown) contained a lot of gags from the daily strips, and are the only ones that I’ll still watch. After that, their basis in the actual strip seemed to get progressively looser, and they increasingly felt like poor imitations.
I read the biography of Charles Schulz a couple of years ago and allowing for the fact that biographies aren’t always accurate, it portrayed him as a man who was chronically depressed and whose family were almost incapable of demonstrating affection. When he came home from the army and went into his father’s barber shop, his father didn’t even stop working for a moment to shake his hand. And his mother had the tendency to undermine him anytime he felt good about an accomplishment.
So, yeah, CB was his alter ego and Schulz couldn’t even give him much happiness.
So did I. I think it’s not just the fact that CB is so desperately unhappy, it’s that the movies make it very clear that no one will ever, ever help him. The adults - who can’t even communicate intelligibly - can’t help him, Lucy won’t help him, and so on. The movies are great - but good grief, they are amazingly dark.
Though they do have lighter moments. The Peanuts theme is a great, happy tune - and Snoopy’s happy dance is great stuff. Whatever glimmers of hope exist in Peanuts come through Snoopy.
/Snoopy dance
No, it was a great strip from the 1950’s to the early 1970’s. By the end it was every bit as bad as Cathy and Garfield.
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It has been mentioned elsewhere that Christopher Shea who did the voice of Linus in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” has died.
IMHO, what the animated Peanuts did best was make kids go apeshit over Snoopy. The self absorbed ass hole of the comic strip turned into a lovable little elf perfect for merchandising.
The football? I wanted him to kick LUCY in the face!
I remember, near the end of the Peanuts strip, there was one Sunday strip in which Lucy sent Rerun out to hold the football instead of her, and she stayed inside to watch TV or something instead of going out. Afterward, Rerun came back holding the football, and the dialogue went something like this:
Lucy: So, did he kick it? Or did you pull the football away at the last second?
Rerun: You’ll never know.
Lucy: AAUGH!
Seeing as he’s described as nearly the perfect example of someone with depression, you basically just said that all depressed people are selfish jerks. And surely by now the board knows my opinion on that.
Not all depressed people. Just Charlie Brown!
Of course he is.
Life ain’t a special-ed class, kid!
I don’t know whether Charles Schulz was clinically depressed, but I think that Peanuts goes beyond merely appealing to people who are clinically depressed. It’s not true that being sad can only arise from clinical depression. Sometimes life really is depressing. The interesting thing about Charlie Brown was how the development of his character spit in the face of the character archetypes of standard American fiction.
In most romantic comedies, the hero wins the girl, although she may not be the girl of his dreams. In some tragic variants of them, he may date the girl for a while although they eventually break up or one of them may die tragically, but at least there is some brief period when they are together. Charlie Brown can’t get a date with the girl of his dreams. He can’t even manage to talk with her. That happens sometimes, and it happens more often than it’s ever portrayed in American fiction.
Similarly, most American sports fiction has the underdog winning at the end. Sometimes it merely has him getting better at his sport and making a decent showing. Charlie Brown never gets better at baseball, no matter how much he loves the sport. This is also something that happens sometimes.
Charlie Brown never learns how to fly a kite right. He never learns not to trust con artists like Lucy. He’s not even as smart and imaginative as his dog, let alone the other humans in the strip. This is why for a lot of its run Peanuts was a popular and even hip thing to read. It was one of the few items in any artistic media in the U.S. that was willing to say that life really was difficult and one can’t expect a happy ending to every story. One can’t even expect a tragic ending. Sometimes life is just difficult day after day.
The Peanuts TV specials weren’t the best forum for the ideas of the strip. They tried to stretch out the themes of the strip into a standard length for a movie, and that really doesn’t work. They either try to create a happy ending for the story or they try to build Charlie Brown’s woes into some larger tragedy. The Peanuts stories in the comic strips were about everyday unhappiness, not about tragic endings.
True, but the best sports fiction goes against type. Rocky loses the big fight. Casey strikes out. Fast Eddie beats Fats, but it’s still a tragedy. The Bad News Bears lose the championship game and get a lame apology from the winners, then they pop open some beers and tell the other team to go screw themselves. That’s how to end a sports movie.
I’ve got one word for you:
I remember watching a really out there Peanuts episode, where Charlie Brown gets turned invisible and kicks the football away from Lucy…does anyone else remember that one?
Yeah, I do. That was one of the later ones where they really strayed away from what the strip was like.
And, for the record, while some of the Peanuts TV cartoons and movies are enjoyable, they are not canon.
reading this got me all sorts of riled up; like Mighty Ducks 2 pumped up. USA! USA! USA!