It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown (1969)

Starring: Peter Robbins
Grade: C-

Linus: “It was a short summer, Charlie Brown.”

Charlie Brown: “…And it looks like it’s going to be a long winter.”

You said it…

Summary

Charlie Brown (Robbins) tries to get Sally (Hilary Momberger) ready for school, but she’s watching TV and has no interest in going. Her argument is that she went yesterday, so this should be good enough. Charlie Brown brings up how their mother bought her a new lunchbox, so Sally relents since she went through the trouble of buying it. She makes it clear however that this is the only reason she’s going. The two start walking to school, and Sally goes on about kindergarten and how she will study and get along with everyone, but she is adamant she won’t learn Latin. At the same time, Lucy (Pamelyn Ferdin) and Linus (Glenn Gilger) exit their house to walk to school. Lucy asks Linus if she washed his hands and checks. She’s shocked at how clean his fingernails are and asks how he did it. Linus admits he used toothpaste. What a wild start to this one, right? As Charlie Brown and Sally walk, she asks if there is any way she can get out of starting kindergarten, but he doubts it. Still, she thinks there must be some way around it, questioning if she can get a deferment. Just then, Lucy and Linus join them. Seeing Sally, Lucy asks Charlie Brown what’s wrong with her. He mentions that Sally is so nervous that if someone were to mention kindergarten, she’d probably jump 30 feet in the air. To test her, Lucy says “kindergarten”, and Sally leaps into the air and falls back on her feet. Noting that she only went 10 feet into the air, Lucy calls Charlie Brown out for exaggerating. Once Charlie Brown and Sally get close to the school, he tries to point out how it’s not that scary, but she screams and runs away. In class, Charlie Brown and Linus try to play hangman discreetly while sitting in their seats. The teacher catches them and calls them to the front of the class, with Linus admitting right away what they were doing. Charlie Brown agrees that they should have been studying, but Linus cuts him off and tells the teacher she hasn’t given them any assignments yet.

Yeah, Linus is THAT kid.

Charlie Brown knows Linus fucked everyone over with this comment and lets him know about it because they are guaranteed to get an assignment now. With this, the class is given the assignment of writing a 500-word essay on what they did over the summer.

Charlie Brown walks with Violet (Ann Altieri) and is confident that no one can write a 500-word essay on what they did over the summer. He asks her when she’s going to write hers, but she reveals she finished it already, doing it during study period. This pisses him off. Charlie Brown turns to Linus and asks him why English teachers go to college for four years. Linus bites and asks why, so Charlie Brown comments that it’s “So they can learn how to make stupid little kids write stupid essays on what they did all stupid summer!”. Later, Charlie Brown sits down at home to attempt to write his essay. It’s not too in-depth, as he writes how he “played ball and went to camp”. Counting each word individually, he’s at an 8 count. Laying his head in his hand, he realizes he has 492 words to go. With Linus and Lucy, Linus asks Lucy to remind him what he did this past summer. She talks about how he wanted to stay home, read comic books, and watch TV, but she signed him up for camp. Reminded about this, Linus gets to writing his essay, making it about camp. As he writes how it all started on the last day of school, we flashback to the moment where all the kids were dismissed for the summer. Linus, Charlie Brown, and Schroeder (John Daschback) walk together while Linus details how excited he is to read comic books and watch TV. He asks Charlie Brown what he’s going to do, and he explains how he will spend the summer developing his pitching arm. He motions pitching a baseball when he says it, but all three can still hear the sounds of a bat hitting his fastball to his surprise. Schroeder chimes in to say that he will work on developing his piano technique. He might even write a concerto. Pig-Pen (Gai DeFaria) walks over and comments that he will spend the summer having “clean thoughts”. What that entails, I’m not sure. Either way, he says this while he claps his hand in his book, and the dust cloud reaches the three boys, making them cough. Lucy interrupts to say she signed everyone up for summer camp, and the boys freak out. Right away, Schroeder says he won’t go if he can’t take his piano. Linus is frantic because camps are usually out in the woods, which are filled with queen snakes. He’s terrified at the thought and refuses, but Lucy says she will tell the parents they will all be happy to go.

How she pulls this off legally is never explained. Everyone just feels that Lucy’s forged signature makes this all enforceable by law.

Anyway, the boys get ready and Snoopy (Bill Melendez) joins them. At the bus depot, Lucy takes roll call for the girls. Frieda (Altieri again), Violet, Patty (Lisa DeFaria), and Peppermint Patty (Christopher DeFaria) are all coming. Near the buses, a distraught Charlie Brown, Linus, Pig-Pen, and Shermy (David Carey) all sit on their luggage while Schroeder sadly plays the piano. After Snoopy walks on the bus and wastes time by pretending to drive it, Peppermint Patty directs the rest of the girls like a drill sergeant to get on the other bus. She gets on the bus and updates Lucy like she’s her superior. On the other hand, the boys’ bus is a mess, and they all fight to get on. An annoyed Charlie Brown just watches. Finally, the boys fall onto the bus, and Charlie Brown tells everyone to knock it off and get to their seat, showing a more relaxed version of Peppermint Patty’s drill sergeant role. Charlie Brown and Linus sit together on the bus, and Linus is still worried about encountering a queen snake. He wonders aloud why people send little kids to camp who don’t want to go. He brings up the hypothetical of his parents moving away when he’s gone and not telling him about it. At camp, Charlie Brown is chosen as tent leader and activities chairman. We don’t know who chose him, as the rest of the boys are genuinely surprised. Charlie Brown is happy about it, pointing out his experience as a baseball manager as something that will aide him. Linus and Shermy aren’t impressed with this statement at all. Moving along, Charlie Brown wants to go over the proper way to make their beds. He does his the military way and wants it to be tight enough to bounce a quarter off it. However, his example doesn’t work, as just when he’s about to do it, his sheets come undone and the quarter flops in the sheets. On the other hand, Snoopy made his perfectly and he bounces a quarter off it with ease. Charlie Brown moves on to talk about their upcoming schedule of competitive sports. They will start with a competition against the girls camp across the lake. It will be in swimming, with Charlie Brown asking them to not show up the girls too badly.

He’s confident they will win because “After all, boys are stronger”. Lucy is writing her essay in real time about how after they first arrived, the boys challenged them to a swim meet. Flashing back to the swim meet, Charlie Brown and Lucy stay back and cheer their teams on while the boys and girls swim back and forth from the opposite dock and back. The boys somehow get stuck in the middle and frantically tread water while the girls go back and forth easily to win. Afterwards, Charlie Brown is in the tent with the boys and tries to give them a pep talk about how the loss wasn’t a big deal, though they are taking it pretty hard. He tells them to look forward to lunch and a softball game. He thinks they should seek revenge for that morning’s fiasco by challenging the girls to a softball game. The boys happily agree. Meanwhile, Peppermint Patty lines up the girls in her drill sergeant like manner and tells Lucy she likes summer camp because “It’s the next best thing to being in the infantry”. The girls march into their tent in a line following along with Peppermint Patty’s words. On the flip side, Charlie Brown watches on at the boys’ tent as they all fight to get in the doorway again. Again, he apathetically tells them to get going once they all fall to the ground. While waiting in line for lunch, another random boy asks Charlie Brown what his name is. As soon as he tells them, the kid turns to his friends to make fun of his name. At Charlie Brown’s table, the boys try to eat the bad food, and Snoopy can’t handle it and excuses himself from the table. You know it’s bad if the dog refuses to eat it. Linus wonders who is going to feed him, but Snoopy sits somewhere else and enjoys a gigantic meal he has prepared already, including dessert. Lucy details in her essay how the first day went well with the girls beating the boys in the swim meet. Then, they had a softball game. Peppermint Patty was captain of the girls, and Charlie Brown was captain of the boys.

To decide who gets to hit first, they use their grip to choke up the bat. Charlie Brown wins, but Peppermint Patty puts her hand over the bottom of the bat and claims “eagle claw”. It’s complete bullshit. Just as Charlie Brown is still trying to figure out what the fuck she’s talking about, Peppermint Patty says they will bat first and walks away during the confusion. Right after, Peppermint Patty details the plan in the huddle. She wants Violet to bat first and to hit one over third base, Lucy to hit a single over second base (while telling her to not hit the ball to their shortstop, which is Snoopy), and Frieda to bunt her way to first base. With this, Peppermint Patty expects the bases to be loaded for her to walk on and hit a grand slam, like it’s easy or something. She says that if they can keep the ball away from Snoopy, they could stay at bat all afternoon.

Well, put your money on the girls for this one.

My Thoughts:

With the exception of the final exchange between Charlie Brown and Linus being a great way to end things, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown was a misleading title for this special. When sporting a title like this, the expectation that comes with it is all the Peanuts characters coming back to school for the first day, and Charlie Brown going through how depressing it is for the summer to end and having to deal with another nine months of misery in the classroom. Hearing Charlie Brown’s take on the dread every kid has of going back to school would hit home hard. Considering the protagonist’s strengths, it had a chance to be a real gem of a story. At the same time, Linus could play the role of the opposite mindset by still being the voice of reason but noting the positives about returning to the classroom such as learning, gaining new experiences that help mold you as a person, seeing all your friends, and all the little things someone like Charlie Brown would take for granted. What happens instead at the beginning is Charlie Brown being disappointingly indifferent about going back to school, which seems out of character for him, and Sally being the one who is dreading it. It’s funny for a few minutes, but she’s gone completely from the story after the first act, despite the Peanuts characters’ mixed feelings about their summers ending being a much more interesting topic to unpack. In reality, the program’s title is only to give us a timeline. The REAL title of the TV special should have been Let’s Go to Camp, Charlie Brown because that was a majority of the story that unfolded. Once it’s revealed that the special will be told in a series of flashbacks to just show how Charlie Brown can’t captain a team for his life, and the well-oiled machine that are the girls of the neighborhood beating the boys in every athletic contest, the special with promise because a routine endeavor with middling results.

It starts out of the gate well with the dreaded feelings of going back to school being redirected to being forced into summer camp (“I feel like I’ve been drafted”), but each subsequent scene feels contrived, devolving to a near story plateau. In addition, the timeline of camp happens over a week at the maximum. Two of the biggest events of the story happened in the same day. What else happened over the summer? Camp didn’t go on for three fucking months! These kids can’t afford that shit. Going along with this, the idea doesn’t even make sense. How the fuck could Lucy force five boys to be a part of summer camp by simply “signing” them up, and they are magically forced to go against their will? We can suspend our disbelief for a lot of things, but Peanuts specials, for the most part, are grounded in some sort of reality-based storytelling. Parental consent, signature forging, and one loudmouth somehow making it all possible without a single question from a staff member or adult in the situation was too unbelievable to ignore. Now, had the events that followed been somewhat entertaining, a pass could be given, but everything that happened went pretty much as expected. There are a series of gags about snakes and insects creeping the kids out, there’s marshmallow roasting, Charlie Brown’s team loses the swim meet to the girls, and they lose 43-1 in softball, with the one run coming from Snoopy hitting an inside-the-park homerun. The game isn’t even showed by the way, and neither is the nature hike Lucy writes about. Instead, they just waste time showing the teams’ attempts to walk into buildings and straight lines to show the juxtaposition of the boys somehow not being able to do it and the girls doing it with ease. The question is why? Why talk about more exciting things that happened and could be more entertaining but settle for lame transitional gags that are done more than once?

Furthermore, there are a bunch of random songs thrown in by the girls to antagonize the boys that they somehow all know, and we’re not sure what to make of it because it’s neither good nor sonically pleasing. Even the boys confusingly sing along, staring across from each other as they do like they are about to be murdered. It’s odd. The canoe race could have been a bigger deal, but the follow-up made no sense. It’s said that the boys lost this too, but when Charlie Brown and Snoopy go 4 feet from the dock while paddling, there’s no one in the area racing against them. So, who the fuck did they lose to? No one was there! In another questionable moment, Charlie Brown and the boys go and boat to the girls’ side to challenge them to an arm-wrestling contest, though it’s constantly referred to as “wrist wrestling” for some reason here. Either way, they shout insults at Charlie Brown, but they do it in unison as if it’s a series of song lyrics (“Hey manager how about another ball game?”). It’s really weird and unnatural, like they rehearsed a bunch of insults to a tune ONLY related to Charlie Brown just to be little bitches. It continues when they leave, as the girls bring up random things that Charlie Brown could also possibly not be good at like running, jumping, and pillow fighting. Huh? What does this do for the value of the special? It’s as if they teased us with the interesting parts of camp but decided to ultimately focus on menial moments that neither amplified the entertainment nor were amusing in the slightest. Really, Charlie Brown sums it up with his “C-” essay.

“Detail? Yes, I suppose I could have gone into more detail, but with the kind of summers I have, it’s best to try to forget the details”. Well, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown is forgettable because of the lack of relevant details.

On a side note, he should be grateful if anything. He only got a “C-” for a paper that only fulfilled 13 out of the 500 words he was supposed to write! Yeah, you should be happy as hell because that’s a FAT fucking “F” where anyone else comes from.

As is always the case with Peanuts, there are still some smaller jokes that do get a laugh, but they all root back to Linus, like the unintentional sarcasm of him getting the assignment and asking, “How do you teachers keep coming up with these great new ideas?”. Then, there’s Violet getting chased by a bee and Linus responding by whipping it with his blanket and killing it before stating, “Not unlike Robin Hood”, which was gold. Another great scene that came right after was Lucy pointing out a yellow butterfly on the ground that she assumes is from Brazil. Linus looks down and points out how she’s wrong and it’s just a potato chip. There’s a pause and she realizes he’s right before adding “I wonder how a potato chip got all the way here from Brazil”. For the record, her follow-up was decent, but it would have been funnier had it just stopped after Linus tells her that it’s a chip.

Though it goes unnoticed in the grand scheme of things, Charlie Brown’s child-like explanation of the stars outside was sweet and quite eloquent in his simplistic delivery:

Charlie Brown: “Look at all those stars. Boy, I bet they’re having a good time up there tonight. It looks like they’re really living it up.”

Shermy: “What makes you say that Charlie Brown?

Charlie Brown: “They’ve got all the lights on”.

In any event, whether the special when about things the way it did or if it was renamed to be about camp in some fashion, the climax of Snoopy taking on the role of “The Masked Marvel” and being the boys’ representative to take on Lucy in an arm-wrestling contest was a great way to lead into the finale. The arm-wrestling idea was amusing in general, and I loved how Linus (“They have Lucy, you know?”), Schroeder (“We don’t have anyone capable of beating her”), and Pig-Pen (“She’s tough”) were all unconfident about the prospect of facing Lucy in such a contest. For the record, Pig-Pen was selling himself short. The mind games were on his side. As soon as he gripped that dirty ass hand of his on Lucy’s, she would have lost it. Going back to what actually happened however, I still don’t know the outcome of the match. Lucy was complaining and talked about how she was the winner, but Snoopy seemed satisfied with the result of kissing her to throw her off. So, who won? The whole thing is dropped without anyone saying anything. The training of Snoopy for the arm-wrestling match was okay, but I’m not sure why they made him be the guy to paddle the boat with three other boys in there, considering this specific workout is all arms and they were hours away from competing. Maybe this is being picky, but it still needed to be noted. On a side note, Charlie Brown’s speech to Snoopy before training was confusing. He talks about there being no more gourmet meals and how he’ll have to eat food with good nourishment, naming things like oatmeal, spaghetti, macaroni, corn beef, and another type of beef, but he gets sick at the thought of the last two. Is there something wrong here? None of the food he mentioned sounded bad at all. This kid is high maintenance.

It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown was one of the more substandard specials coming from the Peanuts catalogue. The disappointing direction of the story started things off, but what was more frustrating was how it still showed a potential for success in certain events the characters talk about. However, they still consciously choose to go the mundane route after the teasing of more entertaining possibilities, shooting itself in the foot as a result.