You’re right. I misremembered. Still, I think ol’ Chuck should have been envious.
Bump. Just a reminder, it’s on tonight.
I’ll never forget that Charlie Brown can give Franklin a correct soul handshake. Score one thing that Charlie Brown can do right. I guess Shultz wanted Charlie to be multicultural a bit earlier than the rest of us.
So, what did Rat’s Favorite Punching Bag Stephan Pastis write for this special? It seemed to be mostly a collection of strip plots and jokes from the 1950s & 1960s (including one of the first Peanut strips, “Good Ole Charlie Brown - How I hate him” - in Charlie Brown’s ‘Do you have insecurities’ flashback). I distinctly remember the blanket ‘Air Rescue’ plot - there was an additional joke in the original comic strip where Linus stated how great the air rescue team was because they rescued both Lieutenant Commander Carpenter and his blanket within a few weeks (some web searching indicated this rescue was in May 1962, a few years before I was born - so no, I didn’t see the original run of that joke - I read it much later in one of the paperback strip collections they used to sell years ago).
What’s funny is that I was watching the Charlie Brown thanksgiving on ABC - the one where Peppermint Patti invites herself and some friends to Charlie Brown’s house for Thanksgiving dinner and Snoopy ends up serving toast and popcorn - and then watched the first few minutes of the Charlie Brown America Mayflower crossing special (with plenty of adult characters drawn in a Peanuts style) till I remembered that I was supposed to be watching Fox for this “newish” Peanuts special, and so changed channels.
I didn’t realize ABC was going to air the original special; I assumed they had aired it earlier and that I had missed it.
Compared to the new “specials” that have been produced recently, this one was great. The animation style was much cleaner, and the character styles were reverted to '60s-era appearances and actions (i.e., Snoopy pretty much acted like a dog). Some of the subplots and transitions seemed a bit forced, but there were also some gems in there (the Beethoven bust smashing, for example). I would watch this again.
The Lucy-Beethoven bust smashing was also back in the '60s strips - I think every plot and sub-plot in the new special was taken from old strips (IIRC pre-mid 1960 maybe? I don’t remember when Snoopy first took to the WWI air battlefields or became Joe Cool on Campus or started rewriting “Paul Clifford*” - OK, Wiki states that was 1965). Actually because Snoopy was less anthropomorphic in these comic than he would eventually become, they couldn’t do the plot where Linus gives his blanket to Snoopy with the standard “don’t give it back to me”, and Snoopy thinks “This is going to be fun” (oddly, Linus reads Snoopy’s mind and retorts that its NOT going to be fun). Snoopy ends up making the blanket into a Sports Coat, Linus gets over his blanket habit and is happy, and then Charlie Brown, feeling guilty about Snoopy’s actions, buys Linus a new blanket causing Linus to instant revert to his old habit while making Charlie Brown feel like an even bigger blockhead.
Yep, even at this late date I remember this - I read those 50s/60s Peanut compilation books way too many times as a kid…:smack: