A few years back, there was a bit of an online fervor over whether or not Snoopy killed Peanuts. Charles M. Schulz’s most iconic character, from his classic comic strip filled with memorable ones, can sometimes be overwhelming, but Snoopy’s core characteristic is that he’s meant to be a lively agent of positive(ish) chaos. Charlie Brown and company may live in a cynical, melancholic world that rarely shies from presenting a wide swath of failures and disappointments to its child audience, but that world also allowed for bouts of sheer weirdness that loosened things up, often playing with the medium itself. Snoopy is just the epitome of Schultz’s more sillier flights of fancy–often literally, what with the beagle’s frequent aerial battles with the illusory Red Baron.
But Snoopy can be too much at times, and The Snoopy Show could be a test of viewer patience with the iconic dog. Apple TV+ acquired the film rights to nearly the entire Peanuts library, and while an ill-advised move to air those films solely on its streaming channel got squashed, it’s clear that the streamer still wants to mine a specific voice and symbol from the brand that can stand on its own. The most recent adaptation, The Peanuts Movie, feels like the main inspiration and standard bearer for this current version. Peanuts’ earnest, off-beat black comedy core has, over the years, transitioned from a slightly quirky, somber satire in which life can suck (and how to work through the suckiness) to a more slight, cringe-based comedy offering, like The Office (U.S.) or Meet The Parents. Charlie Brown still gets the brunt of bitter nonsense thrown his way, but rarely are we sitting with him through the misery and embarrassment. Instead, his issues are presented as fodder for visual gags and hilarious asides, as The Snoopy Show sets out to make Snoopy the Peanuts representative, the connective figure of the various Peanuts characters and the brand as a whole.
It’s not necessarily bad thinking, but the approach is questionable. Snoopy was mostly silent in previous iterations, letting out the occasional high-pitched yelp when hurt or frustrated. The Snoopy Show has him chirping incessantly, along with his partner Woodstock, evoking the nonsensical noises of the infamous Minions. Each episode is composed of three seven-minute shorts, so nothing goes overboard or too long. Each installment involves Snoopy getting into some kind of scrap or situation, elevating the wackiness a bit beyond even the sillier moments of Schulz’s original comic. The animation and visuals are beautiful and clean, but not so much that they look flat and computerized. The characters designs are perhaps a bit too sharp, but the backgrounds and settings are delightfully evocative of that classic Bill Melendez look, the watercolors slightly seeping past the hand-drawn lines. Gags are propped up occasionally with comic strip-esque details, such as written-out onomatopoeia, blackened scratch-balls floating above angry faces, and dust clouds erupting when characters take a tumble. The voices are great (the casting of Lucy and Linus in recent Peanuts entertainment continue to be spot-on), and the music remains in harmony with Vince Guaraldi’s classic scores, although it is a bit more frantic, if only because some of the antics are.
The core personalities of the Peanuts gang are still intact, and are sometimes given a bit more oomph. (It’s nice to see more of Peppermint Patty’s overall athletic prowess.) But this definitely is a show focused on Snoopy. The best shorts pull in the various human characters into Snoopy’s direct orbit. The first episode provides slightly canonically inaccurate Cliff Notes on the story of how Charlie Brown adopted Snoopy, and how Snoopy met Woodstock, both of which are brief but quietly endearing. Episode four’s “Happiness Is A Warm Blanket” segment sees Snoopy at his most earnest, as he tries to help Marcie enjoy a snow day. But most of the episodes are focused on the pooch’s various antics. An entry where Snoopy has to bring Sally her lunch while imagining he’s in a war zone is mostly frustrating, even at seven minutes; a later bit where Woodstock falls in love with a shuttlecock from a badminton game is just too absurd to enjoy.
The timing and execution of many of the visual jokes is sharp, even with weak premises and the dedication to that classic visual style (which is a good thing and a far cry from that bizarre “bubble” movement in the franchise’s last TV outing). There are classic, recognizable gags, like Lucy’s acerbic putdowns and Patty’s inability to recognize Snoopy as an actual dog, and some more “modern,” cartoon-ier gags, like an extended bit where Snoopy tries to do chores for Lucy but completely screws things up in over-the-top ways. The Snoopy Show generally eschews dark comedy and only dabbles in the more philosophical struggles of the ways life can be a dark, consistent drag, where small moments of joy or contentment can feel momentous, mostly depicted through Charlie Brown himself. Beyond that, it’s a pleasant, funny, weightless affair that manages to evoke the feeling of Charles Schulz’ seminal comic strip, but not its meaning. But hey, Snoopy is fun.
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And here we have my two favorite depictions of Lucy Van Pelt (she only has to actually appear in the first one, Linus gives the perfect description in the latter).
“This was Lucy’s idea, and she doesn’t help people. She’s a freak, Charlie Brown!”
Christ, that’s the best depiction of gaslighting I’ve seen since that one Angela Lansbury movie….or is it?
It’s such a brilliant bit of writing and such a brilliant performance from Paget Brewster, I’ve watched it over a dozen times and it’s still so beautifully ambiguous.
I like Snoopy well enough, but reading through the Complete Peanuts books, I realize that he did start to dominate the strip in the 70s.Mostly that’s fine, except for the strips where he plays tennis. There are a million of them, and the joke is *so often* “Snoopy swings a racquet for three panels (or more on Sunday), and in the last panel he says something from tennis.”
First few examples in the 1975-1976 book:
“He who lives by the bad call, dies by the bad call!” (1/12/75)
“I didn’t invent the double fault . . . I merely perfected it!” (2/2/75)
“I hate playing on a windy day!” (3/9/75)
“Aced him again!” (6/2/75)Maybe that stuff’s funny if you care about tennis (as Schulz clearly did). I have no idea. But as someone who’s never paid any attention to it, it just seems like the joke is “Tennis is being played.”
Have they put out the volumes where it’s all about Rerun?
Yep, the whole series was completed in 2016. Quite an achievement!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Peanuts#Volumes
26 volumes, gadzooks! And I thought my complete Calvin & Hobbes boxset was big.
I notice that Barack Obama did the intro for the one with the final strips. Just imagine what Trump would say. “I never liked it. Charlie Brown is a loser. Lucy’s a winner. Winners don’t need blankets.”
“Also, Lucy is ambitious. Sure, she doesn’t have a degree in psychiatry. But she didn’t let that stop her from offering psychiatric help. Reminds me of when I created a university.”
I had some tennis-loving adults in my family as a kid (and still do, it’s weird how popular it is in the South & Midwest, especially with older people, but nobody ever talks about it) and remember endless yellowing tennis-themed Peanuts strips clipped from newspapers and taped to various refrigerators. I have the feeling that was the aim, plus Schulz was probably playing tennis all the time himself like you say so that was on the brain. The strip was running on fumes a little by the mid 70s and definitely later (but I mean, that has to be expected with 40+ years of drawing a daily strip.)
After reading the Complete Peanuts a few years ago the ‘70s are probably my favorite decade for the strip, but one thing from that era that I thought was annoying was Schulz using Snoopy’s writing to make really bad puns(“You can’t have your cake and Edith, too!”).
Yeah, the puns aren’t very funny either. But I do agree that the stuff with the kids remains really strong. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it!
Golf too. I know absolutely nothing about golf. But i know the name Sam Snead, oh boy do i know the name Sam Snead. It’s all from Peanuts. But, i could never ever take that as a negative against it. I think it’s wonderful. A guy doing what he loved, every single day of his working life while he was able, talking about what he loved.
Based on the clips I’ve seen I’d say the character design and animation as well as the voices are quite good while the backgrounds have none of the almost childlike simplistic charm of the earliest Peanuts specials. The writing sounds mediocre which is still better than the bulk of what Sparky himself wrote (and later rubber-stamped) from the seventies on, which was fucking awful. If it introduces kids to the original comic strips and the Halloween & Christmas specials then that’s just fine. For the record, a lot of the animation Schultz had a hand in wore out Snoopy’s welcome as well.On a closing note, if you’ve never read the original Peanuts strips from the fifties (before my time as well) seek them out. They are fantastic.
The simplicity was a necessity of those specials being hand drawn and very low budget as much as an aesthetic choice. It’s much easier to animate now and the screens are many times the resolutions so you have to expect they’ll fill the backgrounds in more (sometimes to the point of being too busy, I’ve noticed.)I don’t love it and don’t hate it in the new show, but I don’t think the early specials have a background art style that’s particularly sacred either.
Peanuts was my childhood, and I cherish every bit of it—even those bits in the 70s when Schulz would get obsessed with tennis or golf for weeks on end. Personally, I have no problem with Snoopy-forward shows like this—there’s a melancholic strain to Peanuts, sure, but sometimes people talk about it like it was written by Kafka.
I can guarantee i won’t watch this new show, i know it isn’t for me, i am fine with that. But despite this, i also hope that in 15 years time , i can still talk with the kids about how Peanuts IS fucking Kafka.
I have vivid memories of a special from the 90’s that was called “Why, Charlie Brown, Why?” that was all about Linus having a crush on a girl with leukemia and I think that has forever skewed my memories for Peanuts into being darker than it was tbh.
nope, i think your 90’s take on it was pretty much bang on. Shit was dark
Was he into her because the chemo made her bald like him? Edit — ah, Linus was the one with the crush.
Oof. Even as a teenager I recognized Snoopy as the cute mascot during the Peanut’s Jazz and Heroine Appreciation Hour.
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I watched a bit of Peanuts on TV but was never a huge fan. My wife was though. During a holiday to California in 2019 (from Australia) we went to the Charles M. Schultz museum in Santa Rosa. It was actually a really great tribute to the creator and characters. It gave me a greater appreciation of Schultz’s work and I find myself interested in the new show. The museum is worth the pilgrimage for any fans out there.
“A few years back, there was a bit of an online fervor over whether or not Snoopy killed Peanuts.”Good grief, what a dumb hot take, Internet! There’s plenty of room for cynicism and whimsy to coexist with each other, and in fact, that juxtaposition of two seemingly different tones (Charlie Brown’s existential angst, and Snoopy’s absurdist tangents) is part of what makes Peanuts so special.
Basically as soon as I learned to read I became Peanuts obsessed—at 7 I would save and then blow my allowance on cheap used copies of the collected paperbacks at a used bookstore a few blocks away (that, wow, I was allowed to go to by myself…) They seemed to have an endless supply of them. And VERY quickly I learned to try to get the older volumes—the older, almost always the better—partly because of what’s discussed here. Still, I wasn’t exactly discerning enough that I actively disliked the relatively current (mid 80s) stuff and would watch any of the specials (like those dire educational This is America Charlie Brown or whatevers…)—my personal favourite was the animated, shortened version of the Off-Broadway musical Snoopy the Musical, which must have not been shown much as none of my friends remember it–luckily my dad was wise enough to record it (which I still say is infinitely better than the much more successful previous musical, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown which also got a shortened animated version…) So I guess I liked Snoopy well enough in that case…
“Snoopy is just the epitome of Schultz’s more sillier flights of fancy”Indeed. Snoopy was everything from an astronaut to a world famous grocery clerk.
Grocery clerk? World famous? LOL.
No Snoopy, No Peace.
Schulz himself admitted in the later years of Peanuts he focused too many strips on Snoopy and Woodstock and not enough on the kids. So, having Snoopy dominate the action is a difficult temptation to resist.
are the people.. person of color.. in the strips getting any attention in this series?
Only a B?Good grief.
“A few years back, there was a bit of an online fervor over whether or not Snoopy killed .”I’m not sure how it is elsewhere outside of the US, but at least in Norway the strip was just called “Snoopy” (or maybe it was “Snoopy and friends?”).