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The Peanuts gang returns to TV with the first new production in eight years and the first since the comic strip's creator died.
By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 14, 2002
These days, it's considered a classic of TV animation -- a happy collision of low-budget creativity, a perfectly composed music score and now-legendary comic characters.
But when animation director Bill Melendez and executive producer Lee Mendelson put together their first TV special based on Charles M. Schulz's popular Peanuts comic strip -- 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas -- they had a different reaction.
"We thought it was a disaster," said Mendelson, who was a documentary producer making a film on Schulz' life when the opportunity came to produce A Charlie Brown Christmas.
"We thought we had ruined Peanuts. Too slow. Too religious. What's the jazz music doing on there?" he added. "I thought the show was awful. CBS hated it. (But) he liked the show. He was smarter than us."
The "he" in Mendelson's story was Schulz -- known as "Sparky" to his friends -- the humble, competitive, complex creator of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and the entire Peanuts universe.
Schulz drew nearly 18,000 Peanuts strips from the comic's October 1950 debut until the last original strip was published Feb. 13, 2000 -- the morning after his death. And he worked with Mendelson and Melendez on every TV production that featured the Peanuts gang.
Until now.
When A Charlie Brown Valentine debuts tonight, it will mark the first Peanuts special produced for broadcast TV in eight years and the first produced after Schulz's death.
But Melendez and Mendelson said they have the perfect source of inspiration to ensure their new Peanuts specials -- and they hope to produce one a year for current franchise owner ABC -- how close to Schulz's particular vision: the comic strips.
"We agreed with the family that we would rely on the comic strips (for plotlines and jokes)," Mendelson said. "Schulz's main theme, one of his main themes, has been unrequited love, going back to the days when he lost a girl in St. Paul. So we wanted to revisit the subject. Valentine's Day is hard to Charlie Brown."
Indeed, every serious Peanuts fan knows Schulz based his character of the Little Red-Haired Girl -- a classmate of Charlie Brown's that he worshiped from afar, but who remains out of his league -- on Donna Wold, a woman the cartoonist met in the 1940s while working as an instructor at a Minneapolis art school.
As the legend goes, outlined in a 1989 biography, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, Schulz asked her to marry him at the same time another man did, and she chose the other man. So, in the world of Peanuts, love is rarely rewarded; Lucy chases piano-playing Schroeder, Sally chases Linus, and Peppermint Patty chases Charlie Brown, who chases the Little Red-Haired Girl (never actually seen in the strip).
"Schulz was snubbed big-time, and I think that was a scar he wore for the rest of his life. . . . he channeled that rejection back into the strip," said Brian Walker, a Connecticut writer who works on the comic strips Hi and Lois and Beetle Bailey (both created by his father, Mort Walker).
"Like all great entertainment, (the Peanuts TV specials) really work on two levels," added Walker, who also curated an exhibit on Peanuts for the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Boca Raton and is working on a book about the history of comic strip art. "I don't think Schulz ever wrote his strip down to a juvenile level. The kids can just enjoy the characters, and the adults can read all this extra stuff into it."
Such themes continue in A Charlie Brown Valentine, which finds Charlie Brown trying to work up his courage to approach the Little Red-Haired Girl as his pals work through their own Valentine's Day challenges. The first Peanuts special to tackle romance, 1975's Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, covered similar ground, minus the redhead.
In many ways, tonight's Peanuts special echoes stylistic touches considered groundbreaking when A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted 36 years ago:
Voices are provided by children, instead of adult actors (which is why they've had 14 voice casts over the years). The instrumental jazz score passes up big production numbers for gentle, enduring tunes. No adults are fully shown on camera (even their words are only represented by squawking trombone riffs). And even now, Melendez creates the voice of Snoopy by reading the lines himself and speeding up the tape until the words are unintelligible.
Somehow, all these flourishes came together to create an animated franchise that has sustained its popularity for nearly 40 years and 45 TV projects.
"They're instant nostalgia," said Derrick Bang, entertainment editor at the Davis Enterprise newspaper in California and author of the book 50 Years of Happiness: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz.
"Charles Schulz had a spooky ability to convey a sense of nostalgia for a life we never experienced . . . which sounds like a weird contradiction," Bang added. "I am led, watching those shows, to believe that I had those experiences . . . even though I didn't."
Mendelson and Melendez have at least two other Peanuts TV specials planned (ABC, which acquired the classic holiday Peanuts specials a few years ago, has been more aggressive about developing the franchise). The next project is called Lucy Must be Traded, Charlie Brown (in which C.B. might actually win a baseball game), and another is a holiday show centered on Snoopy.
Through them all, the pair will rely on 40 years' experience working with Schulz to anticipate how he'd want them to bring Peanuts into the 21st century.
"I call him a humble egotist . . . never swore, never drank . . . he wanted to be the best, but didn't want to show about," Mendelson said of Schulz. "He said to us once that he always thought there would be a market for innocence in the country. And God knows that's true."
As a longtime fan, Bang looks forward to another heady dose of Peanuts-fed nostalgia.
"I'm going to be anticipating the warm feeling, the glow of familiarity," he said. "That's hard to define beyond corny words . . . like trying to define love. But if it comes through, I'll know it, because my wife and I will look at each other and smile."
A Charlie Brown Valentine airs at 8 p.m. Thursday on WFTS-Ch. 28. Grade: B. Rating: TV-G.