I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown (2003)

Starring: Jimmy Bennett and Adam Taylor Gordon
Grade: A+

As Rerun builds a snowman to greet Spike, the sun melts it After he begs for it to stop but fails, he eloquently speaks aloud like a poet stating, “You can talk to the moon, but the sun won’t listen”.

For a children’s animated special, I still sat back and was like, “Woah. That was deep”.

Summary

With a dog bowl on his head, Snoopy (Bill Melendez) leads Woodstock (Melendez) and a few of his bird pals to the top of a snowy hill. Then, they all jump inside the bowl and use it as a sled to go down the hill. Once they crash-land into a tree, Charlie Brown (Gordon) and Linus (Corey Padnos) walk by, with Linus commenting how Christmas decorations are getting more lifelike every year. As Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy build a snowman together, Charlie Brown asks where Rerun (Bennett) is at because he was supposed to come with. It turns out he had to go with their mom on her bicycle for Christmas shopping. Next, we see Rerun on a carseat on the back of his mom’s bicycle as she drives recklessley to the store. He tells her constantly to watch out for certain objects she doesn’t notice. After this is over with, Rerun is wiped out and wants to relax. He goes and asks Sally (Hannah Leigh Dworkin) to ask Snoopy to come out and play. Sally tells him he’s resting and to go find something else to do like reading a book. When he explains he can’t, she tells him to do something he knows how to do.

Rerun, Lucy, and Linus sit on the couch watching TV, and Rerun brings up how someone at school asked him if he had an older brother who dragged a blanket around. He denied it and said he was an only child, and Linus becomes visibly agitated by this. Rerun was also asked about his “weird older sister”, but he doubled down on being an only child. Lucy licks her ice cream angrily. Rerun goes on about how some of the guys at the playground were talking about crabby sisters, and he won, with all of them agreeing he had the crabbiest sister in the neighborhood. Lucy changes her tune and is happy, seeing herself as a celebrity. This comment induces chuckling from Linus, so Lucy warns them to wait and see how crabby she’ll be at 40 or 50. By 90, she’ll be nice though. Changing the subject, Rerun talks about the real problem in being a little kid is that no one wants his opinion on anything. Uncaring, Lucy tells him to go to bed. Seeing this as her asking for his opinion, he starts writing some math on a piece of paper and argues that since there are three of them, each kid should have 33 1/3 rights. Unfortunately, Lucy explains that it’s actually 90% her, and the other 10% is spread evenly between Rerun and Linus. Everyone in a family has a job, so Lucy gives Rerun a paper to write down what he thinks his job could be. Once he picks watching TV, she snatches it away from him. Next, she explains the benefit of having an older sister as it’s like having “a compass to guide you through life”. Rerun asks Linus if this is true, but he deflects by claiming he’s not there and puts a blanket over his head. Lucy storms off as she can’t believe she’s expected to live in a house with two brothers. They fall off the couch because of her aggressive exit. Then, Rerun points out how he’s Linus’s younger brother but he doesn’t suck his thumb nor use a security blanket like him.

At first, Linus doesn’t care, but Rerun keeps going and talks about how Linus will gain a resentment towards him when they get older and will find ways to get even, prompting Linus to dump his blanket over Rerun’s head. Later, Rerun plays with his building blocks and Lucy threatens to kick them over to see what he would do. He admits he wouldn’t do anything at first. However, years down the line when her and her husband need a co-sign to buy a house, he says he will refuse. With this, she angrily leaves without doing anything. Following this, the three siblings are playing a board game. Rerun wonders that if his other siblings are weird, is a third child able to develop an immunity. Once he continues, Lucy has enough, picks him up, and throws him out of the house. At school, Rerun’s kindergarten class goes through an arts and crafts assignment, and he’s really happy about it. Though they are supposed to be drawing the face of a classmate, he’s drawing a football stadium with many different faces in the crowd. When the girl tells him the actual assignment, he flips his paper over and tell her to turn her face because he can only draw a sideview anyway. This girl talks about how she’s trying to convey the feelings of someone looking into the future with hope, but Rerun just draws her ear. The two continue their school day, but this girl has had enough of this kindergarten stuff, so Rerun jokes how they should run to Paris. They could be on a plane by midnight and be there tomorrow. When she questions if he has any money, he explains he has 50 cents, which could potentially upgrade them to business class.

If he’s willing to fly Spirit, anything is possible.

Upon getting home, Rerun tells Lucy about the girl and his idea of going to Paris but admits he doesn’t know where it is. The next day, the girl finds Rerun to tell him that the teacher said the principal wants to see him. Confused, he goes in and the principal yells at him for the Paris conversation with the girl and accuses Rerun of harassment. Rerun goes home and tells Lucy he’s been “fired”. He explains the whole joke to the girl about Paris and says she found it funny enough to tell her mom. Unfortunately, the mom blew the joke out of proportion who told the teacher who told the principal, and it led to him getting suspended, which he refers to as being “fired”. Thankfully, Christmas vacation starts tomorrow. The next day, Linus is pulling Rerun in a sled, and Rerun thinks their mom should let them get a dog. Just then, Snoopy shows up, swings Linus around by his blanket, and launches him into the snowman Lucy was building. As the two lay there, Rerun walks up with Snoopy and comments that it would be fun to have a dog. Rerun writes a letter to Santa Claus, but Lucy tells him not to because Santa won’t have time to read them since he stands all day on the corner ringing that bell. When he gets home, he’s tired and won’t want to read a bunch of letters. Rerun continues writing. At first, he’s on the fence about asking for a bicycle or a dog, but he ends up choosing dog because “you can’t fall off a dog”, which is comically untrue. Now, Rerun starts overthinking things and asks Lucy if Santa will leave the dog on the front porch or the backyard upon delivery. Then, he gets a little worried if Santa will drop it down the chimney, or he’ll just leave him a gift certificate instead. Lucy interrupts to explain some facts. Their mom doesn’t want him to have a dog, so Santa isn’t going to bring him something that their mom doesn’t want him to have.

Rerun gives this point props and refers to it as “Supreme Court stuff”.

Rerun goes to the pet shop and passes by Snoopy who exits with a bone in his hands. Banking on Santa giving him a dog, Rerun tells the employee he needs a leash, collar, and supper dish, and he can put it on his tab. With this, he’s physically kicked out of the store and into the snow next to Snoopy who’s just sitting there with his bone. Rerun starts to realize Lucy is probably right about her theory. He starts to tear up a bit, so Snoopy hands him his bone to cheer him up. Lucy and Sally go to Lucy’s garage to play in the sandbox because Lucy’s mom put it there for a while, but Rerun is in it playing by himself. Lucy tells him to leave and points out how there are two of them and only one of him, so he uses his Jack-in-the-Box toy as his plus one. Despite the effort, their mom calls Rerun over for “B of the B Day” (Back of the Bike Day). Again, this is when Rerun rides on the back of their mother’s bike. They ride through town to do errands like going to the dry cleaners to return coat hangers. All the while, she continues to hit things like parked cars and hedges. Another regular occurrence is a German shepherd chasing them, and he doesn’t quit until Rerun throws his shoe at it, though he’s running out of shoes. Since Rerun is the youngest of the family, he’s stuck with his mother all the time. We see him stuck in the shopping cart at the grocery store, the stroller at the mall, and then back on the bicycle. Rerun realizes that sometimes he goes a whole day without touching the ground. Lucy goes up to Schroeder while he plays his piano and tells him how she liked Schroeder the first time she saw him. Of course, Schroeder disliked Lucy the first time he saw her. Changing the subject, Lucy asks if Beethoven ever had girls hang around him when he would play, but Schroeder doesn’t want to hear her nonsense while he’s trying to practice and says this wasn’t the case, while restating her question in much harsher fashion. Lucy reads off how different the octaves are between a piano and a toy piano and how a toy piano doesn’t compare, so Schroeder starts spazzing on the keys to prove her wrong.

He dares her to challenge him with more factoids, but she just comes to the realization that she should never fall in love with a musician.

Snoopy and Woodstock walk in with snow on their heads and shake it off to where it gets all over Lucy. She angrily leaves, and Snoopy and Schroeder happily high-five. Snoopy runs around and finds Charlie Brown walking with Rerun outside. They all dance in a circle for a bit before Snoopy swings them both into the snow playfully. Charlie Brown wonders why he can’t have a normal dog, but Rerun tells him how lucky he is and asks if Snoopy has relatives. Charlie Brown tells him about Snoopy’s sister Belle from Kansas City and his brother Marbles. Marbles only popped in for a day and left because he rode on top of Snoopy’s doghouse when he was acting like the World War I Flying Ace, and it got too real for him, leaving dizzy after a few flips in the air. Snoopy’s other brothers are Andy and Olaf. They came by and spent a few days with Snoopy. After they accidentally destroyed the inside of his house after getting a little too excited for some food and drinks that Snoopy served them, Snoopy told them to visit their other brother Spike in Needles, California. Somehow, Andy and Olaf got lost looking for Spike and ended up in Alaska. Rerun wants one of them to be his dog, but he knows his mother won’t allow it. Rerun wants to know if he can play with Snoopy sometimes, and Charlie Brown is cool with it as long as Rerun’s mother allows it. With this, Rerun sees this as potentially the best Christmas ever. Sometime later, Rerun tries to play basketball by himself but falls over while trying to dunk. He goes over to Charlie Brown and wants him to ask Snoopy if he wants to come out and shoot a few baskets with him. Charlie Brown goes inside to look for him, but Snoopy sprints out the house, grabs Rerun’s basketball, shoots and makes two shots on the court, gives the ball back, and runs back inside. Charlie Brown didn’t see any of this and pops his head back out to say he couldn’t find Snoopy but doubts he would want to.

Rerun asks for him to ask Snoopy to come out to play. Afterwards, he promises to give him a Christmas cookie with sprinkles. Hearing this, Snoopy runs out of the house and jumps around with the happy Rerun. They play for a bit, and Rerun gives him a cookie. After eating it in seconds, Snoopy snatches the bag from him and eats all the other cookies while running away. They continue to play inside and outside and Rerun is having a ball. On another day, Rerun asks Charlie Brown if Snoopy wants to play chase the stick, but Snoopy hands him a sophisticated rejection slip because he’s busy at the moment. On yet another day, he asks again if Snoopy can hang, but Snoopy declines. Later, Rerun asks his mom again for a dog for Christmas, but she turns him down. Rerun goes to Charlie Brown and offers to buy Snoopy from him, pulling out 16 cents and asking him to say what it is because he has no concept of money. Rerun wonders if this is enough, but Charlie Brown turns him down because he needs $10 million. Rerun now sees Santa as his next option and wants to know if Lucy can take him to see him. Unfortunately, she’s busy today and thinks tomorrow might be better. Lucy goes into Schroeder’s house and gives him a chance to do something Beethoven never did and that’s buy his girlfriend fuzzy mittens for Christmas. Schroeder has already thought of something Beethoven has never done. With this, he lifts his piano to send Lucy flying. Lucy comes back and talks about how Beethoven probably thought he was too good to play jingle bells, so Schroeder lifts the piano again to send her flying. She lays on the ground as Schroeder starts playing like crazy, and the notes come alive into the air and fall onto Lucy’s face. She leaves, but Snoopy collects the notes and decorates a Christmas tree with them.

Snoopy goes home, puts on his Santa costume, grabs a few physical notes from Schroeder’s piano, and goes to a street corner to ring his bell for donations. Woodstock joins him, and Snoopy rings the bell to the notes he took. Sally appears with her Christmas list. She asks for a bicycle, a new sled, and a pair of in-line skates. Woodstock writes this all down, but when Sally adds a new jump rope a little late, Woodstock throws out the paper he was writing on. She goes back to Charlie Brown, and he asks how meeting Santa went. Sally just talks about how tough it was to get past his secretary. Lucy walks with Rerun towards Snoopy dressed as Santa. Lucy questions the validity of this “Santa” to the point where Snoopy sticks the bell directly on her nose. Quickly, Charlie Brown shows up to give Snoopy some food and a little girl shouts over to her mom that Santa is eating out of a dog dish. Lucy brings over Rerun to show him this Santa isn’t real, but Rerun doesn’t care, as long as he can give him a dog for Christmas. Lucy outs Snoopy as a dog in a Santa suit, but Rerun says he likes him and hugs him. Referring to him as Santa, he asks for a dog and contributes a coin to the happy Snoopy who shakes his hand.

Though he may not be Santa Claus per say, Snoopy might be able to help Rerun out.

My Thoughts:

Stepping a little outside the box, I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown is a Peanuts special focused on Linus and Lucy’s little brother Rerun, and somehow, it doesn’t lose a step of momentum. After the death of creator Charles M. Schulz, the Peanuts specials were always going to face potential backlash from fans if they dared to stray away from the formula that made it what it was since the 1950s. However, the only way to keep the franchise going in the modern era is try and attempt different things in hopes of sparking some magic and finding new avenues to keep things fresh. In doing so, Rerun gets to be the star of the show, and it works in spades. It’s not forced, it doesn’t take away from our usual star, as Charlie Brown does well in an important supporting role, it’s a great premise to add to Peanuts‘s Christmas-centric specials, and it’s genuinely funny.

To ensure Rerun’s success as the star, he’s given all the best lines. Though you feel for the kid who wants a puppy for Christmas, and you love to see how happy he is when there is a dog around him, he’s also a sarcastic little brother and a cheeky one at that. Constantly, he’s messing with his siblings and talking shit and it’s really funny to see their annoyed reactions to his intelligent responses. It’s written too well to not succeed. Though it’s hard to tell because of the basic animation if Rerun is trying to be sarcastic and delivering it in a deadpan style for comedic effect, or he’s genuinely aloof to how prickish his comments are, it’s funny, nonetheless. Much like his older brother Linus, Rerun goes back and forth in looking like a kid wise beyond his years and arguably smarter and cooler than his siblings (“Say hello to the stupid kid with the blanket and his crabby sister”) to a kindergarten kid who is exactly his age (“Dogs like cold cereal”). No matter what side he leans towards however, they come up with some great lines for him. Come on, threatening to refuse to co-sign for Lucy’s house when she is an adult is legitimately hilarious! Each scene is written in a way to further develop Rerun while making him a character we want more of in future specials, no matter how big of a role, and they pull it off in each successive scene. It’s seen even in the somewhat irrelevant scenes like during the arts and crafts segment, with Rerun sucking up to the teacher and slyly telling the girl next to him “When she’s happy, we’re happy” like they work in a coal mine or something.

The chemistry the character has with everyone makes you wonder why he wasn’t included in previous specials more often. The interactions with Charlie Brown where he tries to convince him to let Snoopy “frolic” with him and trying to sound smart by throwing out synonyms of the word only brings out the best in Charlie Brown, with him declining and explaining the other synonyms to “No” like to deny, refuse, or disagree. Watching Rerun get this resistance and flipping out because of it was a great moment. We can see he’s got some Linus and some Lucy in him.

Without a doubt, the best scene in the entirety of I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown is Rerun asking Snoopy how he decides to bark at certain people who walk by. In a hysterically deadpan Snoopy way, he literally flips a coin and comments, “Woof”. How can you not love that? In a distant second place is Rerun losing a tooth when playing with Spike and saying, “I must be getting old. Next, I’ll start losing my hair!”.

Lucy’s side story is fun as well. Her reasonable negativity with Rerun is needed to create doubt and it’s not incessantly annoying this time around. Maybe she’s deciding to be a little less of a bitch because she’s dealing with her brother instead of Charlie Brown. Either way, it’s done well here, so it’s the first time in a while where you don’t want to yell at her to shut the fuck up. For a Peanuts special, this is important because the Lucy character usually has a tendency to lean too hard into her aggressive side and can be exhaustingly miserable. Thankfully, they are able to curtail this in I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown and make sense of her actions and responses. In addition, all of her segments with Schroeder were entertaining and filled with a lot of great quips (“There’s an appalling lack of mistletoe”). In the most on-brand Lucy moment I may have ever seen, we get this seconds-long shot of her entering Schroeder’s house. First of all, this was really cool because I don’t think we’ve ever seen the inside of his place before. We always see the singular room where he plays the piano and nothing else, but this is the first time where there is some design involved to give the viewer more of an idea of what he’s grown up with. There are all of these portraits and statues of Beethoven, and the baseboards are painted in piano keys! I loved it. Going back to Lucy though, she walks in the front door without knocking, bypasses all his cool stuff without a care in the world, and nonchalantly throws her coat and hat on the gigantic statue of Beethoven like she owns the place before going to the room where Schroeder is at. It’s hilarious and such a great representation of Lucy as a person without saying a word. Bill Melendez and company did such a great job in winning me over with Lucy this time around, a far cry from my reaction in previous specials. It gets to the point where Schroeder is the one who comes off as unreasonable and prudish at times.

By the time he refuses to take in Spike because “Beethoven never had a dog”, it’s like alright, fuck off dude. Stop being weird. Maybe Lucy SHOULD piss him off more. With a comment like that, he deserves it. That’s how good of a job they do with Lucy here. They still maintained the crucial parts of her personality, but she wasn’t a nuisance anytime she appeared onscreen. That is why it works. Beforehand, they didn’t find this balance a lot and made her so unlikable that you groaned every time you saw her. In I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown, her presence is welcomed, and she gets a lot of fun moments to remind us that she too is an iconic character, like telling Spike “You’re as thin as a promise!” and making it her goal to fatten him up, or her threatening to punch Rerun so he remembers his one line in the Christmas play before passing out.

It’s nice to see Spike too! Of all Snoopy’s siblings, Spike was the one who needed some love the most. I even liked when Lucy helped him gain weight because we all know he wasn’t eating right beforehand. He’s lonely out in the desert and has just been surviving all this time. He deserves a better Christmas than that. Rerun and everyone giving him an ample amount of love was a heartwarming series of scenes because it means so much to both characters. A big problem I had with Snoopy’s Getting Married, Charlie Brown is Spike’s lackadaisical response to everyone and everything, even when he hasn’t seen his brother for such a long period of time. It was my biggest criticism of that special, but they fixed it completely here. He’s still Spike, but to see him show some happiness in seeing Snoopy and the two hugging meant the world. When he departs with his cactus, they do an even better job, as he shakes Charlie Brown’s hand and hugs Snoopy goodbye. Then, he has a thought bubble of everything he did with Rerun, revealing that the memories the two created together were significant to him, despite his usual plain-faced expression. Following this up, he gives Rerun a sincere hug as well, and Rerun responds in kind. All those games they played, and all the fun they had in such a short amount of time meant the world to the both of them, and you can feel it. It was a great moment and fixed all the problems I had with Snoopy’s Getting Married, Charlie Brown. All that was needed was a little bit of emotion for the emotional moments. It can make or break a special, and it made this one. On top of this, Charlie Brown’s attempt to go door-to-door with Spike to leave him with someone was really funny. Though Violet saying she’d rather have a coyote when Charlie Brown said Spike had to live in the desert with the animals seemed like a bit of an overreaction, it definitely got a laugh from me.

The only thing that didn’t fit was the “Ace Airline” sequence. In this scene, Sally needs to go Christmas shopping, so she enlists Snoopy to fly her somewhere because it was the “cheapest ticket” she can get. Acting as her pilot, Snoopy has her sit behind him on his doghouse, and he pretends to fly it like he would as the World War I Flying Ace. Charlie Brown and Rerun watch the entire thing a few feet from them in pure confusion, but I don’t get it. The whole joke of Snoopy doing stuff like this is that it’s in his imagination. Is Sally somehow on the same wavelength as her dog? She seems to fully believe in everything that is happening and is asking for complimentary food (to which Snoopy humorously offers her dog food), a greeting, oxygen masks, and whatever else. Apparently, they also do a full flip with the doghouse acting like a plane. When it starts to snow, she asks to go back home, so they crash (I guess?), with both of them falling off the doghouse and into the snow. What the hell is going on here? They’re not actually flying, and Snoopy doesn’t think the same as the others. This is a stretch of the imagination even by Peanuts standards. As young as Sally is, for her to be dead serious in this segment makes her look like an idiot. If this was her just deciding to play with her dog, you could suspend the disbelief, but it’s confusing as to what’s real and what’s not in this scene. Even Charlie Brown looks legitimately confused as to what he’s looking at, so it begs the question what is actually happening if no one else is in on the joke. I suppose it was funny for Rerun to watch this madness and it somehow inspires him enough to want to get a dog even more, but how they got there was strange. Honestly, it just seemed like it was included to give Sally something to do other than her coming to the conclusion that winter isn’t for her after she couldn’t figure out how to put her boots or mittens on.

Charlie Brown’s asking if Rerun is a starving artist and that being the only reason he’d want to buy his drawn picture of Snoopy was gold. I might use this line in real life. Snoopy laughing after reading Spike’s disastrous adventures in his letter was great too. It’s a very brotherly-like thing to do. Lastly, Snoopy’s cute little family and their interactions are always amusing, especially the small cutaway with Andy and Olaf. The joke about them inexplicably finding themselves in Alaska when trying to get to Needles, California was hilarious.

As great as the special is, I will admit that it goes a little long and has like three endings. Just when you think it’s over, they hit you with another, another, and THEN an epilogue. It’s a tad overdone. For the record, all of the scenes are still humorous, but it’s as if they wrote the ending and then thought, “Oh wait! This would be funny too. Let’s just pile it on there!”. Following this, they did it a few MORE times. Very easily, it could have ended with Spike holding up his Dollar Tree decoration kit that says, “Merry Christmas” to the audience. For a Christmas special, this would have sufficed. Out of nowhere, they slide in the Christmas play segment, but I understand it somewhat because it gave Lucy a chance to show some sisterly love, and it helps Rerun get over his sadness with something else to worry about. Then, just when you’re about to turn it off, Rerun goes to Charlie Brown’s house to ask if Snoopy wants to pull him in his sled. Admittedly, it was still chuckle-worthy to hear Charlie Brown talk about how he’s not sure if Snoopy is coming out because he won’t stop laughing. The final line of “Maybe a dog is too much trouble” after he pulls Snoopy on the sled instead is a great way to put the feather in the cap of the premise and halt the idea from going further. So, this gets a pass. Nonetheless, after ALL of this, Charlie Brown has this existential dialogue while lying in his bed that doesn’t fit the story at all:

“Sometimes, I Iie awake at night, and I ask, “When will it all end?”. Then a voice comes to me that says, “Right after the credits”. Of course, this leads to the credits playing. It’s extremely meta and strange for a Peanuts special. Don’t get me wrong, I actually loved it, but it did not fit the previous 49 minutes whatsoever.

I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown might be one of the most underrated Peanuts specials there is. For a special focused on someone other than our usual star, you have to really bring it to avoid losing the audience. With their fourth Christmas-related program, the Peanuts team absolutely brought it. In doing so, they legitimized a lesser-used character in Rerun, saved another in Lucy, and only furthered the franchise’s legacy when it comes to holiday related programming. No one does Christmas like these kids.