Obscure Holiday Specials #4: It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown.

 

As you are all well aware of, I am a fan of Peanuts despite never actually calling it Peanuts. No one ever called it that because Charles Shulz hated the name. It was forced on him by the newspapers. That's why just about every Charlie Brown comic strip collection book was like "Holy Hot Fuck, Charlie Brown" or "Stop shitting on the Carpet, Snoopy!" I don't know why I always have to use curse words to try to get comedy out of something but I do. Anyway, It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown and it was the 36th animated special and the last one to air on CBS which it did on November 27th, 1992. The next one would air on NBC, and several others would go direct to video. I didn't even know about them until today, so expect reviews of them.

Anyway, I liked this special a lot more as a child, even going so far as to say that I liked it more than the 1965 A Charlie Brown Christmas which goes to prove how rock stupid I was as a kid. Anyway, this does not hold up to adult scrutiny mostly because I've now read most of the Peanuts backlog of comic strips and plan to talk about them when I read the rest. The problem with that is that well all of the material in this story was taken pretty much verbatim from the comic strips. Plus going back to the well of Christmas when the first special was so well known. Not exactly the greatest idea. Plus I was curious about the Harold Angel character and wanted to see if he had appeared before and he had appeared on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, in a segment called The Play. I know some of the material I'm sure popped in from the comic strip to the animated specials but Charles Shulz tried to make them mostly new material. I don't know if he was busy in 1992 or what but the majority of this special is from the strips and that just feels lazy.

Another really big problem is that the special doesn't feel like it gets to the ACTUAL plot until the last 10 or so minutes, the actual plot being a play that several of the characters have to perform in (Peppermint Patty is a sheep, Marcie is Mary, Franklin is the Angel Gabriel which I'm sure bothered some racists so I'm glad it was done and that sorta thing). Not to say that some of the vignettes weren't cute or funny, just that I think they needed to spread the full plot out ya know. It's not terrible but it certainly isn't better than A Charlie Brown Christmas like I thought at eleven.

FINAL VERDICT: Admittedly this is still a fun special and I wasn't bored during the 23 minute run time but man, they could have done better. Maybe spread out the jokes about the play through the entire run time or something. The whole vignettes thing just doesn't seem to work for the specials, and I don't know if it works for The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show because it's been decades since I've seen that show. I'm just amazed that a guy who was a stickler for quality didn't want something better. Anyway, It's Christmastime Charlie Brown is a C+ special.