Is Charlie Brown, of all people, a purveyor of toxic positivity?
That certainly wasn’t the case for decades of comic strips and (to a lesser extent) TV specials and feature films, where Charles M. Schulz’s iconic everykid lost every baseball game, missed every chance to talk to his red-haired crush, and was continually upstaged by his ill-behaved beagle, Snoopy. (Fittingly, it’s Snoopy whose name “presents” the newest generation of Peanuts animated specials.)
Some of the longer-form Peanuts narratives in animation or on Broadway pointed out the long-term perseverance this endless losing necessitated, and indeed, there’s a sweetly daft optimism inherent in his every “I’m gonna kick that football clear to the moon!” But Schulz and his past collaborators understood not to ladle the syrup on too thick. If Charlie Brown starts acting like a traditional hero, he loses exactly what makes him quietly heroic.
Maybe it was only a matter of time before just trying your best wouldn’t be considered enough of a win for a young audience. Because the Charlie Brown of the new Apple TV+ animated special A Summer Musical—er, excuse me, Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, out Aug. 15—isn’t just trying his best and muddling through his self-doubt and neuroses. No, old Chuck spends most of these 40 minutes as a tireless booster for the wistful and timeless magic of summer camp and the great outdoors.
The Peanuts characters have often sounded like children speaking the language of neurotic adults; that’s part of the fun of Schulz’s writing. Here, though, Charlie Brown just sounds like a middle-aged nostalgic. Does he not worry anymore?
In Summer Musical, that worry is moved over to his younger sister, Sally. It’s theoretically a good idea. Some of the other recent Apple Peanuts specials have spotlighted perpetual supporting players like Franklin and Marcie, and Sally has always been one of Schulz’s funniest characters—little-sister energy bent into a grasping capitalism. (“All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share,” she plaintively explains about her exorbitant Christmas demands.)
Sally’s reluctance to attend summer camp with her big brother feels very in-character, especially when she sings a song enumerating her complaints and lamenting missing television. That Charlie Brown keeps responding by waxing sentimental about his many fond memories of this cherished camp is, ah, decidedly less so.
He’s aghast to learn that the camp will soon close due to lower enrollments, sad less for himself (this is supposedly the core gang’s final year as campers) than for Sally being denied multiple years of parent-free wonder.
To sell any Peanuts characters as gleeful over lack of parental supervision feels like a modern concession, given that adults remain perpetually off screen in this world. Typically these characters have been too complex for kids-rule bromides. In past specials, Charlie Brown referring to Sally’s “generation” (they’re two or three years apart) would have been a deadpan imitation of grown-up-speak, enhanced by the awkwardness of less-than-polished kid voice actors. In Summer Musical, it seems grimly straight-faced—downright humorless, even.
That’s really the main problem with this special, even more than the mutation of melancholy to sentiment: It’s not all that funny. For long stretches, it barely even tries to be funny.
As Charlie Brown tries to figure out how to save the camp, there’s an obligatory comic Snoopy subplot where he and his Beagle Scout birds search for a treasure chest, but it’s threadbare even by the standards of a B-plot. Summer Musical has the meandering shagginess of classic Peanuts specials, but almost none of the funny dialogue. Obviously these things are for kids, but this seems pitched down to an almost Sesame Street level.
Longtime fans might console themselves with some nice touches, like glimpses of “younger” Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and others drawn to resemble their early 1950s incarnations, and the use of Eudora, a semi-obscure supporting character from the strip. Schulz’s son Craig and grandson Bryan, along with co-writer Cornelius Uliano, clearly respect the characters. But do they understand them?
The authorial voice that comes through most clearly here is Ben Folds, who wrote the songs. He doesn’t sing any of them, leaving that to the overpolished kid performers, but his piano-based mixture of exuberance and melancholy are all over each tune.
There isn’t much room for him to work in his material that’s most immediately congruent with the Peanuts sensibility—character songs like “Annie Waits” or “Zak and Sara.” But at least his kid-friendly lyrics have some bounce, some attempt at wit.
He’s a good match for Peanuts, or at least for some version of these characters. For the moment, they’re preoccupied with reassurances. Summer Musical essentially converts Sally from the strip’s old view of camp as a source of ambivalence and trepidation to a more comforting vision of wholesome unity.
It may be nice, but it’s not Schulz’s version of childhood.
