Yes I was. In fact, I once thought about asking Dopers about it. As a kid, I would pick up Charlie Brown movies at the library. As an adult, I was almost sure I saw a story where Brown got a chance to really try and kick the football. Now, (thanks to you), I remember seeing that one. 
I have never seen that before and it’s awesome. I am now in a better mood.
In the strip the movie was based on, Charlie Brown screws up on an even easier word. He’s asked to spell MAZE.
Baseball fan Charlie Brown spelled it MAYS.
Poor little guy.
Robot Arm writes:
> True, but the best sports fiction goes against type. Rocky loses the big fight.
Yeah, but remember that I wrote:
> 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.
The movie Rocky is an example of the second sentence. Rocky Balboa at the beginning of the movie is someone who was a good fighter ten years before but who never reached his potential. He’s reduced to collecting debts for a loan shark. He’s thirty years old and has no wife or girlfriend. At the end he nearly beats the world champion. He has a girlfriend. He is much better off than he was at the beginning. (The sequels to Rocky are junk that throw away all the good points of the first one.)
Robot Arm writes:
> 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.
Another example of my second sentence. In the beginning, the Bad News Bears are so poor at baseball that they can’t even manage to finish a game without the score passing the maximum difference allowed so that they have to end the game early. At the end the team narrowly loses the local championship, and they only lose it because the coach decides to make sure that everybody on the team gets to play. They get to drink the beer because the coach wants to show them that he’s proud of their improvement and that it’s not necessary to be the champions to be happy with how well they play. The members of the team learn that even if they are misfits and oddballs they can be proud of themselves. The message is pretty similar to that of Rocky. (The sequels to The Bad News Bears are also junk that throw away anything interesting from the first movie.)
Are they any examples of your first sentence, though? My point was that the really great sports fiction always goes against type. The hero loses at the end. (There’s also The Hustler; a tragedy where the hero wins.) Are there any great sports stories where the hero wins?
And I think you miss half the message of The Bad News Bears. It isn’t just that the Bears can be proud of what they’ve done; it’s that they can look at the Yankees, the assholes who made fun of them earlier, and spit in their eye and tell them they don’t give a flying fuck what they think of them.
O.K., let’s look at a list of the greatest sports movies. Here’s one example of such a list:
(Please note that I am not agreeing with the ranking in this list. I’m just using it because it was the only list of great sports sports I could find in a quick search. So, everyone, please restrain your snideness and don’t tell me I’m an idiot for thinking that these are great movies.)
Jerry Maguire: The hero wins the girl. The athlete he represents turns out to be a first-rate player.
Talladega Nights: I think this is about a winner who remains at the top of his field, but I haven’t seen it and don’t know for sure.
Rudy: This is apparently about an underdog who succeeds at the end, but I haven’t seen it and don’t know for sure.
Heaven Can Wait: The hero apparently will get the girl. He wins the game. The villains get arrested for murder.
Brian’s Song: There isn’t actually much said about sports in this film. Everybody learns to be tolerant. The hero dies bravely. I haven’t seen this.
Remember the Titans: The team wins the championship. I haven’t seen this.
The Longest Yard: They win the game. The villain is exposed as a jerk.
Miracle: They win the gold medal. I haven’t seen this.
The Bad News Bears: Already discussed.
The Pride of the Yankees: There isn’t actually much said about sports in this film. The hero dies bravely. I haven’t seen this.
Eight Men Out: Cheating will get you thrown out of the sport.
Chariots of Fire: Underdog heroes win the gold medal.
Hoop Dreams: The heroes make it into college.
The Hustler: Already discussed. I haven’t seen this.
A League of Their Own: The heroines make it as professional athletes. The coach learns to be a decent person.
Field of Dreams: This isn’t really about sports. The hero gets a chance to reconnect with his father.
Major League: Underdogs win (I think). I haven’t seen this film.
Breaking Away: Underdogs win.
Caddyshack: Underdogs win.
The Natural: The hero gets a chance to show how great he could have been if he hadn’t lost his chance when younger.
Bull Durham: The hero learns that he eventually has to move on from playing baseball to coaching it and that he will never get his chance to play major-league baseball. He wins the girl.
Slap Shot: The underdogs win the game, although they know that the team will be broken up.
Rocky: Already discussed.
Hoosiers: Underdogs win the state championship. The hero wins the girl and becomes a decent person.
Raging Bull: Probably the closest to a downbeat film. The hero is briefly the champion. He screws up everything. At the end he’s learning to be a decent person though.
None of these is as deeply unhappy as Charlie Brown’s life in Peanuts. He loves baseball, but he is never even an acceptable Little League player.
O.K., I’ve just gone out of my way to give examples. If you’re going to disagree with me, please provide examples.
None of these is as unhappy? I suggest you see Hoop Dreams again. It’s dire. (In a great way.) Yeah, the kids go to college, but their lives are pretty depressing and they don’t succeed in basketball and various members of their families die…
What I wrote was “None of these is as deeply unhappy as Charlie Brown’s life in Peanuts.” Notice the word “deeply.” Charlie Brown’s life is worse in some ways even than the two basketball players whose lives are shown in the movie Hoop Dreams. They make it to college. They don’t become professional basketball players, but how is that a terrible thing? Yeah, the guys in Hoop Dreams have miserable home lives, but they succeed despite it. And Hoop Dreams is probably the second most depressing movie in the list after Raging Bull. I think I’ve shown with this list that there are a lot of sports movies where the hero wins in the end (and usually gets the girl too). Charlie Brown never wins a game at all and never gets the girl.
And, for what it’s worth, Hoop Dreams didn’t choose for its subjects some of the worst victims of the whole business of good but not great high school basketball players trying in vain to play college ball and make it in the pros. If it really wanted to do that, it could show somebody who spent all his childhood trying to be a great basketball player, despite the fact that it should have been clear that he didn’t quite have what it took. It would show him doing O.K. but not good enough in high school games so that it was clear that he couldn’t make it in college ball. He would spend so much time on basketball practice that he would flunk all his courses. Having given up on basketball and desperate for any job after dropping out, he would then become a drug dealer. The movie would end with him dead after a shoot-out with the police. That’s the sort of real-life happiness that is virtually never seen in a movie.
Sir, you have insulted an American icon. I demand satisfaction!
I wrote:
> . . . real-life happiness . . .
I meant:
> . . . real-life unhappiness . . .
And this is why it’s necessary to proofread carefully.
I’ve always found the Peanuts strip amusing. That doesn’t diminish my opinion that Schulz was completely fucked in the head. The “woe is me” personality of Charlie Brown is depressing as are the strange & mean spirited traits of most of the other characters.
Check THIS out.
The beauty of the Charlie Brown baseball sequences isn’t that Charlie’s team always loses. It’s the interpersonal dynamic among the players.
Lucy is lazy, apathetic, and stupid, and spends her time in the outfield gossiping with her girlfriends. That doesn’t stop her from pouring scorn on Charlie’s limited leadership and pitching skills, at every opportunity.
None of the other players have any confidence in Charlie Brown at all; in every situation, they expect him to fail (and comment loudly on the fact), and he always does. And yet, none of them ever make a move to take over as pitcher or manager. That would be too much work, and too much risk. Without being told, we know that if Charlie failed to organize the team one spring, it would cease to exist.
Often this dynamic is seen in life itself.
Snoopy is the figurative Ewok of Peanuts.
Stranger
Actually that’s not quite true. The team had at least four other managers and/or pitchers. At different times, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty and even Snoopy subbed for Charlie Brown.
When Linus took over as pitcher (I believe that was when CB had “little leaguer’s elbow” and wasn’t physically able to pitch), the team went on a winning streak.
Lucy pitched for a little while, something Schroeder despised because she kept calling him up for meetings on the mound, ending with a kiss.
Snoopy was manager at one time – I don’t remember how that came about, but I think it was connected to his being a “superstar” – and his style of managing was pretty harsh. (Whenever someone screwed up, he’d kick 'em.) Eventually he got crabbier and crabbier, and CB offered to take over again, resulting in Snoopy’s delighted hug.
(Peppermint Patty took over at one point, too, but I don’t remember the circumstances.)
Not that your main point isn’t correct. I’m just being a pedantic Peanuts fan.
Shortly after she was introduced into the strip, Peppermint Patty joined Charlie Brown’s team as a pitcher to help them out. She ended up quitting in frustration after she pitched a no-hitter but still lost because the rest of the team gave up 37 unearned runs.
Yeah, I’m another pedantic Peanuts fan (I had most of the strip collections as a kid.)
Ha! Yes, of course, I can’t believe I forgot about that. Actually I was talking about her as manager – didn’t she run the team at some point? Maybe when Charlie Brown ran away (and started to manage that team of teeny tiny kids)?
Or maybe I really am confusing that with the time she pitched that no-hitter. Is that when she brought along Jose Peterson? I know she did some bossing around at that point – even providing her own chatter.
Then there was the time Charlie Brown was so enamored of winning that he traded his own dog, much to everyone’s horror.
Me too! I have most of the Fawcett paperbacks printed in the mid-sixties/early seventies with strips dating back to some of the earliest, when Lucy was a few years younger than Charlie Brown, Patty & Shermy, and Linus and Schroeder were toddlers. And then the strips where Sally was born – love those.
Hm. This makes me ponder their ages. Not that Peanuts had very good continuity on that score. Schroeder and Lucy seem to have been aged up at some point, because weren’t they sometimes shown in the same class as Charlie Brown, Patty and the rest? Sally sure caught up with her brother quickly, too – Linus once calculates that she’s five years younger than he is (when he briefly contemplates whether it’d be okay to date her later in the far-off future – Sally thinks “I’LL WAIT!!!”), but there’s no way she stayed that much younger. Not that I even know how old CB’s crowd should be. Maybe 10?
Charlie Brown is 8. He was younger in the early strips, but then Schultz stabilized his age at 8.
For fucks sake, get OVER it. It’s a comic strip. And to be perfectly blunt, yes, some of them are – or at least they use that as an excuse.
The football – I remember reading somewhere that Shultz thought it would be a cheap shot to do so for the last strip. Later, however, he said he regretted it.
I don’t think this can be defended at all.