(courtesy Halloween Specials Wiki)
While Snoopy remains as culturally ubiquitous as ever and Peanuts is still one of the most popular comic strips out there, that has more to do these days with the number of specials and TV shows that keep popping up on AppleTV than anything else these days.
That is partly to do with the fact that there have been no new strips since the creator of Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, very sadly passed away only a few hours or so ahead of the publication his final (Sunday) strip on 12 February 2000, but mostly to do with the quality and fun of the streaming offerings.
True, they do sometimes feel like the greatest hits and photocopies of the era of the classic specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) with insertions of “Good Grief” and a host of other catchphrases and visual cues, but they mostly expertly draw on the very best aspects and beats of the strip to wonderfully entertaining effect.
This is impressive because the urge to simply recycle, rinse and repeat what has gone before is hugely strong for any long-running franchise, but the people behind shows like The Snoopy Show, now in its third season, know that to remain appealing and culturally relevant they must do more than roll out the usual suspects; that way lies creative and cultural death and happily Peanuts seems to be a long way from that taking place.
Seasonal case in point is the third episode of the show’s first season, which released in 2021, “The Curse of the Fuzzy Face”, which contains three Snoppy-centric stories with a delightfully fun, wise and heartfelt Halloween flavour.
Each of the episodes, which only last six to seven minutes each roughly, offer a delightful look at the characters we know and love, both offering up what we expect from any Peanuts animated outing and pushing the boundaries just enough that the franchise doesn’t fossilise in place.
The music is still Vince Guaraldi jazz-rich some fifty years after his untimely death, the comedy is still charmingly winsome, the ticks and oddities of the characters such as Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Pigpen and a host of other favourites are all present and accounted for, and Snoopy is still as oddball as ever which is good because the show would lose a lot of its sweet eccentricity if Charlie Brown’s dog wasn’t as offbeat strange as he is in the comic strip.
We learn much from “The Curse of the Fuzzy Face” such as the fact that Snoopy does not handle scary movies at all well (“Frightfully Snoopy”), that Snoopy wants the biggest pumpkin in the patch and that he loves to dress up as a witch to get it (“Dress-up Snoopy”) and that while he can be innovative and decide that (magic) tricks are better than treats, all performed on a fabulously decked out doghouse, courtesy of Woodstock and his friends, that sometimes he needs to be reminded that a little bit of heart goes a long way (“Trick Snoopy”).
While this three-part episode will never really be a classic in the way the classic classics are, “The Curse of the Fuzzy Face” provides a much-needed shot of Peanuts-level whimsy, heart and humour, adding to the Halloween canon of the comic strip in ways that neatly honour the past while keeping the characters fresh, fun and zeitgeisty relevant for the current day.
The Snoopy Show “The Curse of the Fuzzy Face” streams on AppleTV.