Well, not entirely new, as it came out on DVD earlier this year, but “Happiness Is A Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown” will air on Fox Thursday night at 8:30 PM EST.
Grandma Van Pelt is arriving for a visit and intends to rid Linus of his security blanket. Lucy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the gang try to help him give it up before Grandma’s visit. The story was co-written by Charles Schulz’s son Craig and Scott Pastis, creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine.
I’m looking forward to it. The Peanuts gang is always welcome in my house. And I thought I’d alert other Dopers in plenty of time to catch it.
It will depend on what it’s drawing from. If it draws from the old strips it should be OK.
If not, well?
Charles Schulz lost all his good stuff as his kids grew up. He said, he used his children for inspiration for the comics. And reading the old Peanuts books, it’s clear as the kids got older the strip lost it
I don’t know but I hope she doesn’t have a speaking role. The absence of the adult voice and appearance in Peanuts was a rule for Schulz. At least for the majority of his output. I remember an off-camera parent speaking at least once in an early strip. And I recall seeing the legs of some adults, in a Sunday strip, during a golf game in which one of the kids (or maybe Snoopy?) was participating. That also would have been in the earlier days of the strip. After that, I don’t think we ever saw any more physical representations of grown-ups in Peanuts.
There were some animated shows produced that had the kids traveling back in time and interacting with historical figures like the Wright brothers, but that seemed so wrong to me that it’s not canon as far as I’m concerned.
I started a thread about this recently: Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe appeared alongside Snoopy in a Veterans’ Day panel towards the end of the strip’s run.
Sorry, you’re right. I had a brain fart. Or maybe I got him confuzzled with Scott Adams. Pearls Before Swine is one of my favorite strips, so I should have known better.
There were two. She buried it in 1961. In 1962, she made a kite out of it and it blew out to sea. I don’t know whether Charlie Brown was envious of her kite-making skills.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the point–Fox wanting to combat the original. Though I have to admit I don’t even remember the Thanksgiving one, just Halloween and Christmas.
I think it was Lucy and not their grandmother that buried the blanket and later made a kite out of it. Linus’ grandmother didn’t like his blanket but even she wouldn’t have been that mean.
