A Charlie Brown Christmas

Everyone has his favorite Christmas television special or movie. Most of those in my generation favor How the Grinch Stole Christmas. That would be the animated version, of course, directed by legendary Termite Terrace alumnus Chuck Jones.

I appreciate the Grinch, but it has never come close to being my favorite. No, my favorite has always been the slightly older, decidedly scruffier and more offbeat A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Wait, "scruffier"? "Offbeat"?

Look at it. No, really look at it. Try to imagine you're seeing it for the first time. Compared to contemporaneous Hanna-Barbera output (the last season of The Flintstones, to give a concrete example), Mendelson's and Melendez's first Peanuts outing is twitchy in the animation department. Characters don't always stay in the plane they should, for instance, sometimes finding themselves slightly above or below where they belong. Oftentimes characters seem to go from pose to pose without inbetweens, adding to the impression of jerkiness.

It's not just the animation that's inexact, either. The color of changing elements (Charlie Brown's face, for instance) sometimes flickers between two or more shades. The vocal performances, by real children, are often stiff and sometimes, as in the case of Sally, are downright weird in their timing and inflection. The script embeds a number of daily strips wholesale, but never quite figures out how to transition from punch lines back to the main story: generally the show pauses for a few seconds, then carries on as if nothing had happened.

All this comes under the heading of "scruffiness." The show feels like a mutt, like a weird patchwork of scenes that could use some polishing.

As for "offbeat," it's true that next to the utterly fantastic world of the Grinch, the Peanuts crew looks ordinary. Ordinariness, though, describes only the show's bare bones. Sure, the premise is that a group of suburban kids kills time in the run-up to Christmas, but consider both how the story would usually have been handled at the time the show was made, and how Schulz decided to tell his story.

First, this show was nominally aimed at kids, but in fact it couldn't help but have an adult sensibility because the Peanuts strip itself had an adult sensibility. No other Christmas special aimed at children is appealing to adults except for purposes of nostalgia, and that includes How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The latter appeals to adults today only because we who grew up hyperaware of Golden Age Warner Brothers cartoons have sentimental affection for all of Jones' work. (Well, not me so much: I'm partial to Freleng. But I digress.)

Second, jazz music was reserved for edgy dramatic series, not low-key holiday specials.

Third, "low-key"? What kind of holiday special is low-key? Virtually every network special before and since has gone out of its way to show how special it is. (None of them comes close to trading in the melancholy that hangs over Charlie Brown, either.)

Fourth, what primarily comedic holiday special ever made an extended Biblical quotation its very centerpiece?

All in all, A Charlie Brown Christmas should never have survived to become a holiday classic. Yet it did. Why?

I have to believe a lot of its appeal is rooted in the popularity of the strip, and in particular, the popularity of the strip in the 1960s and 1970s. It was smart, concise, visually clean, and reliably funny. Those are formidable accomplishments for a daily comic strip in any era. Few strips can claim anything close to Peanuts' artistic success in its prime.

A Charlie Brown Christmas is surprisingly successful at preserving the strip's distinctive and appealing visual attributes while imbuing Schulz's world with motion. What's so tough about that? Well, comic strip characters are not always designed with motion in mind. Schulz's characters, for instance, have extremely short, almost nonexistent legs terminated by huge feet -- not the easiest designs to animate walking, I would imagine.

Vince Guaraldi's compositions are so beloved today, it's hard to imagine Peanuts without them. The strip, though, mentioned only classical music, generally Beethoven by way of Schroeder. It would have been easy to key off the strip and use classical, or to resort to conventional movie music (as the later specials like Snoopy Come Home did). A breezy, low-key (there's that term again) jazz backdrop was an inspired alternative.

And what about that Biblical quotation that almost literally stops the show in its tracks? Why do I, a certified nonbeliever, find that moment so right?

I've thought a lot about this over the years, and the only answer that comes to mind is, it's refreshing to hear one of these Christmas specials acknowledge what the holiday is about. I don't have to believe in it to be moved by that scene. Mendelson, Melendez and Schulz took a risk staging it as they did, eschewing splashy animated action or sound effects or music, and ending on a few precious seconds of absolute silence before Linus says, in a matter-of-fact tone, "That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."

Come to think of it, the actual reading from the Bible isn't my favorite moment. It's that pregnant pause, followed by the magnificently simple, perfectly natural reading of that one line, that always gets me. The other moment that stands out for me occurs as Snoopy realizes, belatedly, that Schroeder has stopped playing. The exuberantly dancing beagle looks at Schroeder, then at Lucy, and at the sight of their identically hostile faces, grimaces in that uniquely Schulzian expression of queasy embarrassment before sinking off the piano and slinking off stage. His expression never fails to make me laugh.

Speaking of laughing -- no laugh track. Glorious. Canned laughter kills pathos.

I prefer the strip to its TV adaptations, and routinely watch only the three end-of-year holiday specials. Of these, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving has Peppermint Patty and a didactic tone, and was therefore fatally flawed from the moment the storyboard was approved. (Peppermint Patty's introduction represented the beginning of the strip's long downward slide into lameness, which it reached sometime in the late 1970s.) It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is enjoyable, especially in the scenes featuring Linus and Lucy, but lacks sweetness and a unified storyline. Only A Charlie Brown Christmas got the mix just right.