This sounds like a trivial question, why should we care about a 60 year old cartoon, unassumingly something that has been in our collective American mindsets for generations. Strangely though, it seems like I can’t walk 5 feet in a Hallmark store without reaching either a Snoopy or Woodstock. It’s a given, holidays mean curling up with a dog, happiness is learning how to fly a kite, I forgot to get you a card, good grief. These phrases mean virtually nothing, but people are still attracted to these characters. No comic has ever been more lucrative, and sentimental than Peanuts.
This becomes even more apparent during the holiday season, which in my eyes, is owned by Charles Schulz. Once “It’s the Great Pumpkin,” Charlie Brown comes on, I expect the cold and dreaded weather. I’m conditioned to associate these light-hearted movies and shorts with the holiday season, one that can be seen as the most stressful time of the year. The dull and almost melancholy world that Schulz has created is one that resembles our own. With the simple background and design, it seems like it can be from any time, and we are invited to step into it. Instead of trying to compensate for the dreary time of the season, the Peanuts franchise embraces it. Instead of joyous dinners and celebration of the season, he comments on the increased capitalist influence Americans have over the holidays; When Sally finds out Christmas decorations have been put up before Thanksgiving she states “I haven’t even finished my Halloween candy!”, in a way, criticizing the way the franchise would become. Schulz has found a way to exaggerate the failures of childhood, and as a result, helps us celebrate little joys in life.
In the world we live in, we see ourselves in these (almost pathetic) characters. We have an unrequited crush, we get outshined by our friends, we try and fail continuously to kick a football. Schulz doesn’t have dream sequences of success and happiness, he has them of war. In many ways, Peanuts reminds us that the world we have grown up to expect is not the world we live in. We don’t live in a fantasy where Santa is real and everything always turns out great, we live in one where the songs we sing are outdated (Charlie Brown saying that his grandmother doesn’t live in a house, but a condominium). Our love and admiration for these characters have been passed down for decades because of how closely they resemble ourselves. They are the main reason the franchise is still alive. I ask you to try to name any other comic from its era that is getting a new show on Apple TV.
Even with the love I, and many others, still have for this franchise, some aspects of the show seem a bit dated. Most recently, with ABC’s airing of “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” along with “This is America, Charlie Brown: The Mayflower Voyagers,” a lot of alarming stuff came up. For example, when Franklin (presumably one of the only people of color in the entire franchise) goes to sit down at the Thanksgiving table, he is given the apparent worse seat. It is visible that he struggles with the chair as well as being seated on his own side of the table, with none of the children even noticing or trying to help him. Was this intentional from Schulz, by saying that although we all want to give thanks, some people are systematically put in a lower position that makes them have less American freedoms that they can be thankful for? Or was it just plain inconsiderate and racist. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but many of the new graphics of the story also find it equally troubling.
This isn’t even to begin the almost embarrassingly historically inaccurate special, “This is America, Charlie Brown: the Mayflower Voyagers.” There are many things that were purposely left out when telling this tale. Like how the land that the pilgrims found (a problem on its own) was empty, but it doesn’t say how a European disease systematically wiped out an entire group of people. As well as forgetting that most Native Americans were kidnapped by Europeans who forced them to speak English, they didn’t learn in an exciting setting in a new land. They were kidnapped, enslaved, raped and forced off their land if they weren’t murdered for it. This telling is very problematic, as well as its continued use of “Indian” when discussing Native Americans.
It seems to be a clear product of its time, and should be preserved in this way, but with modern eyes it all seems very wrong. Just because we over sentimentalize a franchise as iconic as the Peanuts, should we continue to show its questionable material on TV? Should nostalgia override our modern American standards?
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