A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first peanuts Special and took advantage of the comic strip’s popularity in 1965. At that time, Charles Schulz ‘ peanuts has been running for 15 years with the same basic premise: there are a few children here, one of whom has a dog. Not much happens in a typical case peanuts Plot. The larger world of children hardly exists.
The appeal from peanuts was and is just being with these children and understanding their rhythms. As Umberto Eco wrote in the New York Book Review 1985, “about this basic scheme” of observing children and dogs in daily life, “there is a steady flow of variations that follow a rhythm … or two or ten episodes: you have to understand the characters and the situations thoroughly because grace, Tenderness and laughter arise only from the endlessly changing repetition of the patterns and from the loyalty to the basic inspirations. “
A daily cartoon strip turned out to be the perfect medium for endlessly changing repetitions. The first ongoing peanuts
As Sarah Boxer noted in The AtlanticFor Schulz, Lucy was “essentially society itself”. She was manipulative, cruel, and seemed more interested in transactional help, as seen in her psychiatric cubicle, where she sees every patient “who has a problem and a dime”. Described in a hilarious article published in the medical journal The lancet As “the best known psychiatrist of the 20th century”, Lucy’s advice is sometimes more about getting five cents than about real help.
This is how it begins A Charlie Brown Christmas. Charlie Brown is depressed even though it’s Christmas time. After failing to knock down a can of snowballs, he goes to Lucy’s booth and has a nickel thrown in. Before she helps him out, she rattles her can and announces how much she loves the sound of clattering nickel. But eventually she sets Charlie Brown on a path: he needs an activity. And luckily, your Christmas play needs a director.
Before it aired on CBS, both animator Bill Melendez and the network’s executives were concerned about several aspects of A Charlie Brown Christmas
All of these criticisms are more or less correct. The show is disjointed and loosely centered around Charlie Brown discovering the meaning of Christmas. Snoopy thinks it’s adorning his dog house, Lucy thinks it’s about getting a big shiny aluminum tree that she can paint pink. But the true meaning of Christmas is expressed very directly by Linus: Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, as described in the book of Luke.
But the stilted nature of the special still adds to the charm half a century later. Perhaps the fact that there were only three TV channels at the time A Charlie Brown Christmas first airing helped cement it as a classic. But even today, as an exclusive Apple TV Plus and in a sea of family-friendly content, it still stands out. The children sound like real children. They spend their time doing nothing in worlds of their own making, like real children. And like real children, they get sad.
There is also the soundtrack of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, which has a wealth that has something special about it. The haunting singing of “Christmas Time is Here” immerses the viewer in Charlie Brown’s head as we watch the kids skate (Pig Pen’s clouds of dust following him on the ice are a wonderful note) and on the other side the bubbly Optimism from “Linus and Lucy” seems to foster warmth and camaraderie.
Like individual panels in a strip ONE Charlie Brown Christmas it’s all about small moments. The children dance when they should rehearse. The gentle style of the aluminum Christmas tree (an actual fad during the sixties that this special helped kill). Charlie Brown leaves his sad little tree after an ornament dangles it, and the rest of the gang come together and fix it.
Linus is right, Charlie Brown decides in the end: Christmas is about the birth of Jesus. However, he does not come to a church. Rather, he sees that his friends, as cruel and irresponsible as they can be, have found something broken and given him the love it needs to thrive. This kind of seriousness can permeate any culture, any moment, and any viewer.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is available for streaming Apple TV Plus.