Peanuts: The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show

Peanuts 

            I've held off writing about The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show for many reasons.  I guess with this year (2025) being the 75th anniversary of Peanuts and wanting to write about more Peanuts stuff, might as well get into this one.  This actually makes it seems more like an against my will thing, and not really , but there's a lot to explain.

           The Charlie Brown and the Snoopy Show wasn't the first comic strip-based cartoon series or TV series, but it wasn't the least either. Though maybe a more successful approach was "Garfield and Friends" this series premiered on CBS (The Charlie Brown Station)  the network that gave Peanuts the first ever TV special appearance and was the current home of specials. It very much is fitting that they would be network to commission to have a Saturday morning hours Peanuts cartoon. 

             The was written by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and had Bill Melendez, the man who worked on the specials, working on it, along with Phil Roman who had also become part of the Peanuts animation team. He would later work on the Garfield specials and series. It had everything that be expected with working on Peanuts as a thing.  

         The series premiered on September 17,1983. It came on CBS after a "Dukes of Hazzard Cartoon" because 1980's and before  Benji, Zax & the Alien Prince, a thing Hanna-Barbera was doing that might be a post of its own because it sounds strange enough to exist.  It was on in a "prime" Saturday morning slot meaning later in the morning, but also on against "The Littles" or oh wait it premiered the same day and time as "Alvin and the Chipmunks" on NBC. Ok then. At least, CBS didn't put it on against "The Smurfs" that'd be stupid.  

                What's the show about?  Is a funny question.  Because I mean it's a show with Peanuts characters you've seen the strips and specials it's this.  It's more like the strips in how the show is formatted versus most of the specials. There is one special that I can tie really into sparking the idea of this series and that's special number 23: "A Charlie Brown Celebration" .  ACBC instead of having a full hour long (45 TV minutes long) story it was different segments presented with their own stories.  The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show  uses that format.   

THE NBA team shows up? 

              For example, the first episode is called "Snoopy's Cat Fight" but the whole thing isn't just Snoopy getting into a --- (whisper whisper) oh right yeah, getting into a fight with a cat.  It's six stories put into the 24 minutes the episode has.  They have their own titles like Schulz and the team grabbed random words and were finding ways to use that word for a story.   "Woodstock",  "Baseball". "Sally" "Peppermint Patty", "Piano", and "Blanket".   Not every episode had six stories, some had more, some had less: it depended. So it did have an allowed flexibility.  It fits with the comic strip in how some strips were a simple one day piece and others were a few days or a little longer for a big story. This allowed them to pack alot of segments in the traditional, at the time, 13 episode run of the first season. 

 

             That also means it kind of plays things in a safer way, not really trying to do an ambitious story for 11 minutes, 7 minutes, or 22 minutes.  Peanuts wasn't that disconnected from having stories done in vignette fashion that was more the standard way things were done.  A Charlie Brown Christmas even does that, but does connective into one theme story of Charlie Brown trying to get through Christmas and his feelings.  Most of the specials before "A Charlie Brown Celebration" does eventually have a story even if other things happen to happen in them as well.  

               This series presents viewers with Peanuts snippets almost like taking the comic strip and using and animating it. In fact, a lot of the stories in this series are the comic strip. A factor for this is, now we have easy ways to back track and look at older Peanuts strips from the start to finish.  Back then the only way to see older strips would be to buy one of the compilation books or have the foresight to snip out daily strips from newspapers for years.  There probably was a few other ideas, but either way it wasn't as easy as it today.  The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show isn't the only Peanuts media to take from the strips and make a story or use stories from the strips.  The aforementioned A Charlie Brown Celebration presents stories from the strips, and other specials took lines and stuff from the strips even "A Charlie Brown Christmas" has some dialogue taken from strips.  

                The title of the show fits with most of the specials having the name of either "A Charlie Brown_" , "Charlie Brown's__" , "It's a _____, Charlie Brown" or some variation of that.  If you notice one thing about anything Peanuts made before Schulz's death and some things after, the name Peanuts doesn't show up on specials at all.  It's not A Peanuts Christmas or  Peanuts Easter Beagle.  Schulz never liked the name "Peanuts".  He wanted to the name Li'l Folks at first, since that was the name of the work that became Peanuts, the syndicator didn't want that name because, rightly, did sound like a few other things.  He couldn't think of a new name and they chose Peanuts.  Even saying in a 1987 interview:

     

"It's totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing — and has no dignity. I think my humor has dignity."

 source 

              So it also would seem anything that wasn't directly the comics or marketing used Charlie Brown as the title in some form. Charlie Brown and Snoopy being the most well known names makes sense to call the show that too, versus "The Peanuts Show". [ The UK name for the Peanuts Movie is the better name , though Charlie Brown's name should have been first]   

                Back to the show itself, it's the only animated series done by Bill Melendez. I do wish we had more Melendez animated works, personally, I like his style and would have loved to see more characters beyond Peanuts done in his style. [ I know he worked on non Peanuts specials too]. 

         Also like Peanuts specials, the voices for the characters were done by actual human children.  Brad Kesten was the voice of Charlie Brown in season 1, his first Charlie Brown role was in "Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown" (1983), but would be replaced by Brett Johnson in season 2, because voices.  Sally's voice actress was swapped from season 1 and 2 as well. Peppermint Patty was voiced by girls in this series, as opposed to boys who normally did her voice. Victoria Vargas also co-voiced P.P in "What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown" (1983).  This was to make sure it had that Peanuts feel to be consistent.   

             In terms of characters, which on one hand does feel silly to write, but stick with me.  There is an interesting mixture of characters in the show.  Characters, that by this point, had been "dead" in the comics do show up here. Shermy, who had really didn't show up any more strips after 1969 is here.  Frieda, who was waning in usage by this point because Schulz really couldn't figure out what to do with her.  Patty (the non Peppermint one) who was cut back on, but seemingly lasted as a background for a long time.  Funny enough, Violet, doesn't show up.  There's a the more, at the time, recent characters of Truffles who didn't appear in the strip since a storyline in 1977, and Eudora was introduced in 1978 and would be gone by 1988.  Rerun is featured here, this is before his big revival in the 90's and after he was kind of pushed back, because Schulz didn't know what do with him but couldn't kill him off fully.  Otherwise, the characters are the key players that last through the strips.

         I wish I could say more about the show in a direct way like about plots and stories, but this doesn't have that as much it's a mixture of shorts stuck together.   They even did the this earlier the same year this series came out with the special "It's an Adventure, Charlie Brown". This is a series for if you like Peanuts it will please you. It's not big or doing big interesting stories.  Of course, another factor is that new specials were still being made. 

         The enjoyable thing is seeing Peanuts characters doing stuff. It's also nicely animated  and near special quality in terms of animation.  The music is also befitting a Peanuts piece of media. It also calmer than other Saturday Morning affairs.  The theme song also simple a piano piece composed by Desiree Goyette and Ed Bogas. That was for the first season, they or the network or someone must have thought it wasn't energetic enough and they went for more an upbeat version of the theme with lyrics. The music piece of "Let's have a Party" was used  on the soundtrack of "Flash Beagle" and then an edited version was used for the 2nd season of this show.  

          The series aired on CBS in that prime slot for a bit, but it seems it didn't catch what CBS thought it would do. They moved to the quieter and earlier slot of after  Captain Kangaroo and on against reruns of The Flintstones and whatever ABC was doing.  It seems Alvin and the Chipmunks had more juice in it (it did run longer) and maybe because NBC had the Smurfs the audience just stuck around for Alvin.  It probably would have made more sense to run it after "Dungeons and Dragons" and not after a cartoon based on "The Dukes of Hazzard". 

             Then again, this is Peanuts, so shouldn't have done better just by the fact it's Peanuts. You would think that Peanuts would have done really well in the space. The specials were still, at this time, doing well in ratings enough where again CBS had 3 run in the same year as the premiere of this show. Does the format hurt the show? That's hard question to answer.  Alot of cartoons around this time were either full 22 minute stories or were shorts combined together, and rare but existing 11 minute 2 halves affair that were starting to gain more and more later on.  This show really fits in with the contemporary feel of cartoons at the time.

             You also might look at the year it came out and wonder wow, 1983, that's 33 years after Peanuts first came out, the first special was out in 1965- 15 years into the strip's history.  If anything, Schulz was protective over his property as much as he could be. Any interest anyone would have in making a Peanuts TV show would have to follow what he wanted and he wanted people, including himself, he could trust to bring it. The other thing is he felt the strips should be the direct source instead of an original set of stories, though Schulz did insert some extra stuff too. But did it come out too late to have the same impact versus being the 1970's, for example?   

          I, myself, don't know. There's nothing really wrong with the series, it does what you'd expect. Maybe played it too safe by just using the comic strips as a main basis and not doing television-exclusive stories, but even some specials were using the strips.  It might be because it was on CBS Saturday Morning which seemed to be losing to NBC, but at least beating ABC?  The show wasn't on the line up in the 1984-85 season, but returned for a second season in 1985 and was put in the slot that's pretty much not even Saturday Morning in the Eastern time zone, and a slot where sports might take it out in the west coast. That season was really 5 more episodes. They also seemed to trim down the shorts to just 3 shorts per episode. Then the show was over. 

            The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show  wasn't the only Peanuts series made whilst Schulz was alive.  The mini-series "This is America, Charlie Brown" came out in 1988 running various specials on American history.  Peanuts, of course, didn't stop being successful because of end of this series, the strips continued, and there would be at least a few more years of CBS getting specials for Peanuts. 

           This show did end up in reruns later on. It ran on Nickelodeon under the bad title of "You're on Nickelodeon, Charlie Brown" this was the era of Nickelodeon that when they got reruns to  "Pinky and the Brain" they stuck their logo in the intro because that sounds sane.  It also ran on other channels for a while as well.  

          It did take some time for another Peanuts TV series affair came out until the also  named "Peanuts" series from a French animation studio and network. They made a series that you know Charles Schulz isn't alive because of that title, that went was also a series of shorts done very much in comic strip style, taking comic strips and put them in motion. It wasn't bad, but wasn't strong or good either. The idea was somewhat more limited in scope and felt like something you'd air between shows on a kid's channel, like one short then back to "Ben 10".  

             When Peanuts made a deal with Apple for the Apple TV Plus streaming service they ended up making a new series called "Snoopy In Space" which was an educational series that would be for STEM focus something something that came out in 2019.  Then in 2021, They created "The Snoopy Show" which is also a bad title. That series decides to go with a problem many current (written in 2025) Peanuts media does go really hard with Snoopy and seemingly skewing younger in target. It's not a bad series, but does feel a little too off to be Peanuts.  They also made a series called "Camp Snoopy".  

            It is interesting to kind of see that Peanuts didn't have a long run as a series. In terms of comic-strips becoming animated shows it does depend.  I think Garfield and Friends probably is the strongest one, with maybe Dennis the Menace the 1980's series, and the funny thing about that one is Dennis had a live-action series first that ran longer than the animated version. "For Better for For Worse" tried a series, that didn't last long, same with even "Big Nate". (Different factor for that latter) One would think that Peanuts would have had a better success. Maybe the specials model fit it best, telling stories at different times , instead of a weekly series. 

        I do think this series is good because again it does bring the fun of Peanuts to the screen and allowed for shorter stories to be brought out. It pretty much is an animated version of the comic strip, but nothing about it seems half done or bad, everyone put as much work into how this looked and sounded as they did with the specials.   

            That's it for now, tune in next time when we have a party with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, then Snoopy gets a hangover.