Charles Schulz's landmark comic strip Peanuts has occupied a unique niche in American pop culture. It's part of a medium often aimed at children, and its cast is a group of kids under the age of 10, doing normal child-like activities like playing baseball, going to school, and ice skating. But these kids also talk about Beethoven, theology, and The Brothers Karamazov. They throw around words like "depressed" and "neurotic," and one of them puts up a "Psychiatric Help" stand instead of selling lemonade. The strip balances hilarity with the fragility of life and the pain of existence, and that balance surfaces in Peanuts' first two big-screen adventures, A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home (both available this week as a two-disc DVD from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment).
Snoopy, the better of the two films, deals with Charlie Brown's beagle running off to be by the side of the sickly Lila, his original owner, while A Boy follows the legendary blockhead to a national spelling bee. (Given Charlie Brown's track record as a baseball pitcher and would-be football kicker, you can just imagine how competing on a larger scale works out for him.)
One story is about failure and the other one's about letting go of the past, and while both of them have their bummer elements -- the going-away party thrown for Snoopy in Come Home reduced me to a sobbing wreck as a kid -- they're also imbued with Schulz's wry sense of humor and the perseverance and pluck of the young characters. (Snoopy Come Home also features great music by Mary Poppins composers Richard and Robert Sherman -- Woodstock's whistling song will never, ever escape your brain once you've heard it.)
The darker elements basically disappeared from the other Peanuts features -- the fun but fluffy Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown! (And Don't Come Back!) -- but these first two movies really capture the feel of the source material. So if you've got kids you need to entertain -- or the wait for the Charlie Brown Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas specials just seems endless -- check out these witty and charming animated flicks.