Since we are on somewhat of a break with Peanuts specials , I thought it would be good to something a little different. I've been doing this since 2015 ,I've looked a lot of non-holiday Peanuts specials. The tones and lengths of them have changed over some time it might be good to look at some of my early ones and see if any thing can be expanded or changed.
The second Peanuts review ever we've done was on "It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown." There were a few reasons I started the lookbacks on Peanuts specials , one was because it was the 65th anniversary in 2015 , the other was an opportunity to maybe catch some I've not gotten to see before. This was one of those that I hadn't seen before the lookback at all. The background information on this special and the 1990's specials over all is that after "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown" aired CBS , the home of Peanuts specials kind of gave up having anymore new ones. As mentioned in my "It's Spring Training , Charlie Brown" that was meant to be on CBS but was part of cancelation after 1992 and didn't make it to TV until 1998. This specia came out on VHS (direct to video) release in 1997, one of the last specials over seen and worked on by Charles Schulz.
This was also the first special to be worked on with the process of digital ink which you can kind of tell compared to the old fully hand drawn style of the past specials.
In my look back I didn't breeze through the opening or take out anything .
This special is about Linus , he does a lot of roller skating which leads him to girl ( of course ) named Mimi.
The thing is this special starts with a scene of Linus just roller skating with some music backing it. A lot of Peanuts specials do have filler but, this one felt excessive to a point. I did skip one thing, it also had Snoopy trying to go up a skate ramp without skates. But if you were to skip everything upto the the title cards at 1:50 past, you'd miss nothing in this special. In fact, after the title cards there's more Linus skating. That lasts a minute. Then the rest is Linus goes to a birthday party , there are other characters there too and he gets down tonight (or shakes his groove thing, pick whatever song you want.) . Going by the title of the special you would think that this was the birthday party in the title well, nope. It's 2 minutes of just partying and barely any dialogue. Well it is more filler. There's scene where Sally and Charlie Brown talk about the party then it goes back to more Linus skating. It's recycled footage from earlier too. The space between 0:00 and 7:25 (except for the title cards and credits from 1:50 to 2:30 in) was pretty much what could be classed as filler.
He's a dance machine/ Copyright Peanuts
If are one of those people who look at animation deeply , you will notice an error since before Linus was wearing roller skates, then he takes them off and you his red socks ( I thought he'd be a Rangers fan) then when he's helping Mimi he has his normal shoes on. Later the shoes are gone again when are drinking lemonade together on a bench.
It happens that Mimi is visiting for a birthday party, she loves Birthday parties. so conveniently his birthday is in a couple days (Hmmm Linus) so he invites her. The special continues where Linus hears her amazing singing in his head for awhile. (He's high on love , or the inspiration for the Kylie Minogue song)Linus has really fallen smitten with this girl her song plays either in his head or she's singing again both ways he's in love. The animation to speak up again, when he for example, is skating back home seems to be more traditional looking than what we saw at the beginning. Linus tells his best friend, Charlie Brown, about his new love because that's what best friends do. This special gives us the funniest facial expression I've seen on Linus ever.
There are some normal Peanuts antics in this special like Snoopy and Woodstock scenes. For the party Linus waits for his girl of the hour to come. They also got the rights to sing Happy Birthday in the special (since it wasn't public domain or whatever was going on yet)
This is a Peanuts special where you could skip the first 7 minutes and not miss anything does kind of seem they needed to fill the whole 24 minutes but didn't have enough story for the 24 so they maybe had enough for the 16 to 17. It's plot we do get isn't bad it's simple story with some enjoyment to it. I don't recommend it to someone who hasn't seen a Peanuts special as the first one to see or for someone who is to recommend as the first one to see it might make it harder to get into the other specials.
Nice retro car
This special isn't on DVD, it's on VHS though if you buy it used on somewhere, or watch online. It hasn't aired on television though ironically, ABC could use it as a filler special when they add more time to a special to air the whole special without editing it , but they still need commercials. They could air this with the 7 minutes cut out of it as a back half special to fill in hour. (That's kind of a joke there)
To give it a rating out of 10 it gets a 7.2/10 it's not a bad special but the filler does bog it down.
Might do more of this ,we'll see.
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