(courtesy First Showing (c) AppleTV+)
If you’re of a certain age, you will be well acquainted with how good Peanuts specials are for your heart, your mental health and your general sense of glowing wellbeing.
Three of the most well-known of the 52 animated specials in existence are A Charlie Brown Christmas (there is no festive season without it), It’s the Great Pumpkin and It’s the Easter Beagle, but honestly you can throw on any of them and instantly feel like is going to be a whole lot better.
That sense of happiness and existential balance restored is definitely a hallmark of one of the latest specials, Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, which was originally released on 15 August 2025 at the height of the northern hemisphere summer season.
Given that’s the heart of winter Down Under, and right across the southern hemisphere, it made sense to hold A Summer Musical until now, seasonally at least, so that it at least occupies the right part of the year.
Granted, the whole camp culture at the heart of this 40-minute all-singing, all dancing, all-sweetness and hilarity in equal measure is not really a huge thing here in Australia, if at all, but thanks to our saturated familiarity with U.S. culture, the idea of kids spending some or all of their summer away at a camp doesn’t seem completely foreign to us.
So, there’s some relatability on setting there, but what A Summer Musical really delivers on is balancing the warmhearted, charming feel of one of the old-fashioned but still perennially popular animated specials listed above, and the need to connect with a younger audience who, unlike this reviewer and others of his age group, haven’t grown up with Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip as part of their pop culture furniture.
The characters that are most recognisable to even the casual observer, and of course this means Charlie Brown (Etienne Kellici), who anchors the special, Snoopy (Terry McGurrin) & Woodstock (Rob Tinkler), Sally (Hattie Kragten) who also has a major part to play, Lucy (Isabella Leo) and Linus (Wyatt White) are all happily present and accounted for.
But lest you fear the “lesser” characters don’t get a look in, and honestly in a comic strip as wonderfully ensemble-oriented as Peanuts, surely everyone is well-loved in one way or another, we are also treated to cameos from the likes of Peppermint Patty (Lexi Perri), Marcie (Arianna McDonald) and Franklin (Caleb Bellavance), and non-speaking appearances from Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Patty, Violet and a host of other familiar animated faces.
The whole gang is pretty much presented and accounted for in a story which sees Charlie excitedly going off to camp at Cloverhill Ranch which is set in forested rolling hills and next to verdant sprawling lakes – although as the bus races along the country roads, which travel through the trunk of a giant sequoia tree, there is the ominous sign that urban development is racing out to meet the grounds of this vacation idyll – and where he has, he gushingly admits and sings, he’s had some of the best moments of his life.
This is Charlie Brown in beaten-down, existential suffering mode; rather the lead character of A Summer Musical is well loved and liked and happy in his own skin which is a good thing because Sally, at her first camp vacation, is having none of her brother’s bonhomie and jollity.
As far as Sally is concerned, and she is a character of very firm and hilariously inflexible opinions and actions, CloverHill Ranch is hell – it’s too noisy (at one point she’s screams at nature to be quiet and hilariously they comply with even the fireflies scurrying to escape her wrath), people play pranks on her and there are ‘lake snakes” out to get her (or sticks but Sally doesn’t hang around to see that).
You know, of course, that there will come a moment when Sally relents and sees Cloverhill Ranch the way her brother does, and that comes courtesy of a friendly pony who makes her new friend realise that maybe going on camp isn’t so bad, after all.
The plot as it goes is not really all that revolutionary, but unlike some of the Peanuts specials which meander charmingly around and are as apt to give time to sight gags as they are to narrative punctuation points, A Summer Musical follows a reasonably straightforward path to its final act where Charlie Brown and the gang have to fight to save Cloverhill Ranch from development.
But being a musical outing, it is peppered with songs, five of them in fact – “Best Time Ever” by Morrow and Zachary & Weiner, “A Place Like This” by Morrow and Zachary & Weiner, “When We Were Light” by Ben Folds, “Look Up, Charlie Brown” by Folds and “Better Than We Found It” by Folds – and while again they are hardly going to set the musicals world on fire with sheer originality are lots of fun to listen to, coupled with the requisite dance and montage scenes that speak very much to the emotions in play at the time.
They also summon up that nice, cosy sense of Peanuts-ness that makes these musicals so genuinely delightful to watch.
You know that while there is angst and pain – no more so than when Snoopy, in full Beagle Scout mode, finds a treasure map, and taking a break from sleeping on the top of his red kennel-like tent, leads Woodstock and the others in search of treasure which, um, may not be quite what he’s expecting or when rain looks like wrecking the camp-saving concert in the final act, driving Charlie Brown to despair – that everyone will be okay in the end.
The thing about Peanuts specials, and the comic strip itself really, is that they allow the awful, sad, painful stuff to be there and get expressed while acknowledging that eventually things will sort themselves out and there will be a happy-ever-after of sorts.
That’s always been a charming part of Peanuts, and this willingness to be authentic about the human condition in all its good and bad shades is fully presented and accounted for in the 40-minute heartwarming storytelling of A Summer Musical which proves, if not emphatically but well enough to make you feel a cosy happy glow, that there’s a lot of life left yet in the animated specials of the most loved comic strip of all time.
Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical streams on AppleTV.