The Peanuts franchise gets another holiday workout in “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown,” which offers cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’ skedaddle on that day best loved by children in the service of its Easter baskets, bunnies, and dyed eggs.
This marked the 13th made-in place of-TV Peanuts paramount, and those who are into numerology might put to that as a possible use one’s judgement why this limerick just doesn’t have the same spark as some of the better shows featuring hapless Charlie Brown and the gang. To me, it has a by-the-numbers feel.
Possibly it’s because the invigoration is a mean flatter this outing, with a slightly washed-out-moded color palette that isn’t nearly as vivid or three-dimensional as some of the best Peanuts animated cartoons. Though this edition is “remastered,” you have to wonder what environment the swami is in, since there’s more grain and blemishes than we usually see in this series, and the whole shooting match looks faded.
Maybe it’s because the continual gags just aren’t as charming or funny this frequently around. In one of them, Peppermint Patty tries to make clear Marci how to dye eggs, but while she stirs the dye she gives Marci the job of preparing the eggs. And Marci keeps breaking the eggs and cooking them slim the shell. By the time she uses a waffle iron and cooks the eggs shells and all, you’re sensible, okay, enough. Even a five year old can get the pertinent sooner than Marci does, and you phenomenon why, after three ruined boxes of eggs, Patty didn’t keep a closer judgement on Marci. Now, if you’re thinking, come on, Plath, relieve up, it’s a cartoon for cryin’ loophole loud, let me just jog the memory that the Peanuts comical strip and TV specials have been successful largely because they whack an emotional chord with audiences who can relate with the things that Charlie Brown and the coterie do. And with a gag much the same as this, it’s uncharacteristically more than-the-top and doesn’t up in as original of ways as Schulz’s jokes normally do.
Or maybe it’s the music, which this time brings in multiple guitars with “Bolero”-like repetition that isn’t nearly as melodic as that light-jazz piano we normally get. Rather than complementing a match gag that involves Snoopy demanding to fix a house for his little bird-doxy Woodstock, the shrill music makes those episodes give every indication less creative and more annoying.
Plane the main thread involving Linus babbling all round the Easter Beagle doesn’t have the same energy as the characters’ insistence that there’s a Great Pumpkin in that 1966 installment, largely because the reciprocation to Linus’ attitudes is pretty unemotional. And it was the reaction comedy that made us laugh the most. There’s a gauzy game between deadpan and apathy, and the Peanuts characters cross it here.
But the “bonus feature” that’s included here? “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown” is a trustworthy underappreciated Peanuts prototype, with better animation, improve shaping values, better gags, and a stronger storyline. Director Phil Roman has more to work with and he makes the most of it, delivering the material with Schulz’s paradigm understatement.
From the beginning it’s clear that the magic is back. As Linus is strapping his brother, Rerun, onto the toddler seat of his mother’s bicycle, the small-minded “R” offers his tolerate on the situation. The mother’s driving seems to be getting control superiors. “Yesterday, we only strike four parked cars.” Charlie Brown’s sister, Sally, meanwhile, gets busted at coach for not coming prepared, and she has to do a complete news on Arbor Time as a torture. She researches the topic and, because Arbor Day is all about environmental renewal, decides to organize the stop of Charlie Brown’s friends in planting an Arbor Period garden . . . fittingly smack in the bull’s-eye of Charlie Brown’s baseball field. The other compute threads catch up in Peppermint Patty talking smack with Charlie about what her team is going to do to his, and a running undercurrent of “love” (with the boys all “yuk” and the girls wanting to be kissed or hold back hands). It sounds positively commonplace, but the writing and timing of the jokes is so perfect that “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown” emerges as anyone of the strongest entries.