Snoopy y Charlie Brown: Peanuts, La Película

I loved the Peanuts half hour TV specials as a kid, particularly Halloween and Christmas. I make my kids watch them each year and they enjoy them. We have also watched at least one fuller length movie made some time ago (about a spelling bee?) that ran a little too long. Before the specials even existed I loved the Peanuts comic strips. This movie handled the characters great, no complaint there. I just got part way through and said okay where are we going with this and how much is left. So maybe the bottom line is Peanuts is more effective in small doses than in a full length movie. They seemed to realize that in having a short movie to start and keeping the running time down. Of the story lines the best (and the one that could be enjoyed the longest) was the Snoopy WWI theme. But the bottom line is that it may be hard to make this work for an hour or more no matter how you do it, even if you have stupendous graphics. In any event, nice to see a new generation of Schulz's carrying the torch.

P.S. In watching some of the older shows recently, I remembered that the best of the TV shows was where they basically just strung a bunch of the daily cartoons together, rather than tell a traditional story. Charles Schulz was a cartoon genius, and had a penchant for running a series of consecutive strips on the same subject, sort of a continual story with a daily punch line, which is directly transferable to the screen. Maybe they could go back to that format next time around?