A Look Back at the Charlie Brown Christmas Special

My family was a big peanuts family. We would watch every special, every year, for every holiday (including Valentine's). We had the Vince Guaraldi CD of the soundtrack, and my aunt owns a gigantic stuffed snoopy that she tried to get on the space shuttle. When I rewatched the Christmas special last night after not seeing it for a few years, I noticed some of the luster fade away from my childhood tradition.

All the kids are just.. the worst. Like maybe Schroeder has some redeeming qualities, and pig pen, apart from his exterior, is a genuinely sweet person. But the rest of the cast, Patty, Lucy, Freida, Sally,  Violet and sometimes even Linus are just mean people to Charlie. The kids just treat each other, and especially Charlie, not only childishly but downright harsh. They insult, disrespect, demean Charlie's direction, and then make as if all is solved because they sang a carol. Interspersed throughout the program are various character highlights that display their flaws. Freida's vanity, Sally's greed, Patty and Sally's callousness, and Lucy's outright disinterest in her friends problems.

Some of these can be labeled as just childish behavior, or even a generational problem with television of that day, but in a modern era of television admonished by older generations for promoting delinquency and meanspiritedness, it seems a bit hypocritical that a popular program from 1965 would display the same themes. Charlie isn't a shining outlier in this either. Yes he's the subject of most of the insults in the special, but he can be just as rude and cynical as the rest of the cast

I don;t really know where I'm going with this, just wanted to point it out there that the peanuts gang are a bunch of little pricks running around. Maybe don't hold your childhood to a perfect standard? Maybe don't watch Charlie Brown? Maybe boycott all DHX media brands? who knows.


P.S. Regardless of anything I've said The Great Pumpkin is a perfect film I will die on this hill.

Comments

  1. Rose PinnisiDecember 1, 2018 at 11:50 AM

    Do you know that most of the Peanuts characters are based on real (adult) people from Charles Schulz' life? He might not have been trying to make them seem like good people. Most of the time, I think he was kind of venting some feelings in the relatively safe realm of comics.
    It does make it a bit weird for me when thinking about the "cute, charming" Charlie Brown movies. I guess they're more about examining and reflecting on life as a whole than they are the sort of "for kids" piece of media that people seem to think they are. An interesting example of something that was "not for kids" before that was really allowed in comic form, maybe? I don't know enough history to really make that claim.

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