Having made his mark on holidays like Christmas and Halloween (and to a slightly lesser extent, Thanksgiving and Easter) Charles Schulz's Peanuts gang wound up, probably inevitably, as a Saturday morning cartoon which lasted from 1983 to 1985.
Like the television specials that preceded it, the show took most of its storylines and dialogue from the comic strip. Even 2003's I Want A Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown was lifted from strips from as far back as the late 70s, and many of the classic lines from A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown originally showed up in the strip over a decade before anyone saw those specials on TV for the first time.
Other than the fact that The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show was sandwiched among more thrilling and kinetic animated programming, trying to recreate the subtly and subtext of the comic strip in animated form, much less trying to do it every week, had to be a daunting task. Younger kids could be drawn to it by the characters and the fantasy elements brought to the show by Snoopy, but kids who were old enough to follow along most likely turned to more exhilarating fare. Three years later Jim Davis would repeat Schulz's "strip to TV" formula with Garfield and Friends, which was slightly more successful, though by no means the better of the two.
Having watched two Peanuts specials recently and my one worn out VHS copy of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, what I find especially interesting is that even though new kids are always brought in to provide the voices of the characters, they still sound very much the same. Not just the voice itself, but the delivery and cadence is always very similar as well. It shows just how much thought and care went in to trying to recreate the Peanuts universe in a new medium, even if the transition wasn't always a smooth one.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-11-2005 @ 10:05AM
captainmicahp said...
I have a hazy memory of this show i was very young when it was on, i loved the snoopy red baron and his homeless mexican cousin, but on a side note, i wish they would stop publisihng peanuts, it may have been a good comic strip 40 years ago, but it really feels date, and there has not been an new one published in like 10 years. I am all in favor of respecting a classic, which peanuts most certainly is, but peanuts is played out. there is a reason why Dallas is not on primetime anymore. its time came and went and that is the same for Charlie Brown.
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12-11-2005 @ 12:19PM
Jamie said...
I have to disagree with your Garfield and Friends comparison. That cartoon was highly underrated as satire, particularly for Saturday morning fare. If it hadn't had the "stigma" of being a Saturday morning kiddie show, it would have gotten some young adult viewers enjoying the layered jokes in a way most kids missed. I didn't get that from any Charlie Brown cartoon, much less this one.
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12-15-2005 @ 3:07PM
Joe Cabrera said...
I agree with the last poster. The Garfield cartoon was hilarious: nothing like the inane strip. Most of the credit goes to Mark Evanier for doing such a great job with it. It was definitely written for both adults as well as kids.
And what annoyed me most about those Saturday morning Peanuts cartoons, is that I *think* Charles Schulz required them to use all the dialog from his strips exactly as written. Which means each bit consisted of four parts: line describing premise, line of dialog, line of dialog, punchline. Just like the four panels they originally appeared in. The problem is that the same premise would get repeated on that "first" panel every time, so you'd often get the same line of dialog more or less six times (!) since that's how it went in the paper Mon-Sat. Like I said, annoying.
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