The Peanuts can be goofy and funny at times, at other times it's sad, other times it's poignant , and at various points it can be serious.
I covered "What Have we Learned, Charlie Brown" on this blog before and that special was serious and solemn and was about war. The primary aspects in the special were Linus finding out the gang were spending the night on Omaha Beach and later they are in Belgium in locations where the fights of World War I happened, a look at the most major wars of the 20th century. The part where Linus looks out at the beach and the images of the D-Day invision pop up is dialogue free and antic free , it's Linus in cased in the events of that battle with just solemn music and the sounds of warfare. The viewer sees this for about 2 minutes before Linus explains to his friends where they were. It continues with the gang going to the American Cemetery while the words of Dwight Eisenhower play out talking about D-Day , while more images of the invasion. It finishes that over 2 minutes with Eisenhower's words hoping that the world will find peace. It knew where to to a little relief again where we have Snoopy driving a car again. It goes back to more about the Normandy invasion with Linus narrating over more war images. (Again you can read this more in our look back)
My point in explain that is the Peanuts are something that somehow has a dog that can drive a car , a tree that eats kites, and funny looking dances ,but also can do other things and not be out of place. To a more concise main topic , there are points where the Peanuts handed serious stuff to it's audience and didn't down explain it. People died in World War I and II it "What have we learned" outright said that. If you think animation is a thing just for children ,which I never think Peanuts was just for, then it handled a topic many other shows would handle so well. Now all this is not about that special , we are talking another serious topic: cancer.
"Why , Charlie Brown Why?" premiered on March 16th 1990 on the CBS television network, being one of the last few specials to premiere on the network. I'll get to more back story on the special a little later.
The special starts with a normal day , the Peanuts gang is going to school , Sally of course not over joyed about it. There's a new character Janice , she and Linus seem to be good friends. As Janice gets in the bus she hits her arm on the railing and mentions she has another bruise. When they make it to school Janice notes that's she's not feeling well and in the classroom she's not feeling well still and she goes to the nurse and her mom picks her up. Three days later the gang is at the bus stop and there's Janice noticeably missing. (Also weird that Lucy is not with Linus waiting for the bus stop.)
The class finds out that the reason why Janice hasn't been in class is because she's at the hospital sick. (Or thankfully Linus said it because I couldn't understand what the teacher said) Charlie Brown and Linus decide to visit the hospital. Meanwhile , Snoopy is being the World's Greatest Surgeon (I want to see his degrees). They go to Janice's room and they find out that she has more than a fever instead it's cancer, specifically leukemia. She explains that it can be treated and explains the process they went through for the tests. Also Linus and Charlie Brown pretty much ask questions that a person wanting to know I mean adult or child. She also explains chemotherapy and tells them that it will make her better.
More after the jump
There's a sad moment after they leave the hospital.
Linus comes home and Lucy is watching TV and she wonders where he has been. He tells here the news. It doesn't seem to phase Lucy much and she asks for a drink then he explains some more and when he says he touched her forehead a few days ago, Lucy goes on a tangent about how he touched Janice then now giving her milk and that she could could catch Leukemia. (This could seem like Lucy is just being her normal jerk self, which yeah sure, but it also might be something someone would think if they didn't know any better. In other words someone might think the same thing Lucy did.) Linus explains you can't catch it and explains that she also didn't get cancer from doing anything wrong.
Another thing to note is the special has hints of detail of time passing , it started in fall where we see the leaves well falling and then it transitions to winter now where snow is seen. To kind of get a moment of relief there's a Snoopy scene with him riding with some birds down a snowy hill. Once again Linus, Charlie , and Sally wait at the bus stop and an old friend shows up, Janice is back , she has lost her hair. When they get to school there's this boy who comes up to Janice who starts talking about her cap, then he pushes it off and starts laughing at her being bald and she starts crying. Linus honestly tears him a new one and the kid sees the error of his ways. (Possibly though , the kid didn't understand why she was bald or what really happened and that can happen in real life where someone makes fun of someone for looking different in the first place.)
Its around Christmas time and Linus decides to send a present to Janice. There he meets her sisters and the with curly hair tells him that Janice is out getting her treatments, while the orange hair sister is un happy about everyone being nice to Janice and that they have to be careful around her. She seems un happy she can't even get chicken pops. Linus asks her if she really means it ,and she says not really but she feels left out of late. (The sister is an example of maybe a relative of a child with cancer, everything in the family kind of has to stop to focus on the sick kid, and their siblings may feel a little un-noticed and left out.)
The snow starts melting and greenery starts showing meaning it's now spring. Final part Janice says she's feeling better now and the swings are back at school. Linus pushes her on the swing and she says she has a surprise and her hat comes off and her hair is shown to be grown back. The happy music at the end kind of showed we were going to have a happy ending. (And No I am not going touch that hair growth is slower than that, this still is a cartoon where a dog knows how to plug in Christmas lights after all.)
Also it's nice seeing the kid that bullied her earlier over joyed too.
In the credits there's a mention :
Special Thanks to
The American Cancer Society
And to its
California Division
And to
Sylvia Cook , R.N., Standford Children's Hospital.
Sylvia Cook inspired this special in the first place, from the Chicago Tribune in 1990:
One December day in 1985, a dedicated young nurse named Sylvia Cook sat down at her home in Sunnyvale, Calif., and wrote ``Peanuts`` creator Charles Schulz a letter. She had gotten his address from the local library.Day after day at Children`s Hospital at Stanford University, Cook watched her young patients endure arduous cancer treatment, not fully understanding what was happening to them or why. These children, some still in diapers, were scared and confused.
``I wanted to make it easier for them,`` Cook said. A cartoon about a child with cancer would really help, Cook was convinced. And the ``Peanuts``gang, near universally beloved by kids, could do the job better than anybody, she decided.
``Charles Schulz called me the day he got my letter,`` Cook said. ``I was amazed.`` Indeed, Schulz gets 100 or more letters a day.
``If someone writes and tells you they want to do something for children with cancer, how can you ignore it?`` Schulz said in a telephone interview from his California office.
Schulz told Cook that though he`d never taken the ``Peanuts`` gang into such territory, he wanted to do the project and volunteer his services. He also didn`t know anything about childhood cancer, and he told Cook it would take a lot of money to make even a short animated program.
Cook wasn`t deterred. She started raising money, eventually enlisting the help of the American Cancer Society. In many meetings, along with a pediatric cancer specialist and cancer society staff, she taught Schulz about childhood cancer: what children fear, what they must endure. He consulted her on the storyline.
Along the way, the project grew a lot bigger than Cook ever imagined. Instead of a privately funded cartoon to be shown in hospitals, it evolved into a network TV show that will be viewed by millions. ``I thought, why go to all the trouble of raising the money when it could be a television show and the sponsors could pay for it,`` Schulz said.
I think the topic that the special was talking about was handled very well it's something I would expect from the Peanuts. Linus is the audience surrogate as we see how he reacts to Janice's Cancer and how he reacts to it. We also see how someone may react like Lucy , Janice's sister, or even that bully to even the questions that Charlie Brown and Linus ask Janice when they first find out might something that someone especially children would ask. Charlie Brown flat out asks her if she's going to die. The music flows evenly through the special to fit the different emotions of the scene. Also the rendition of "Farther Along" really gave me some tears.
As I noted in the plot of the special : I like the pacing of time , since cancer does take a long treatment time (varying lengths of time depending on person and case) it does that well. Though I kind of get what they were doing starting with fall and ending it in spring , like a re-birth or something.
Anyway that's our lookback.
No comments:
Post a Comment