It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown (1996)

Starring: Justin Shenkarow with a voice cameo from Elisabeth Moss
Grade: C-

“There’s no one on our team named Lefty!”

Seriously, Lucy. Get it together.

Summary

Despite the snow coming down and his yard being filled with quite a few inches of snow, Charlie Brown (Shenkarow) is undeterred. As soon as he comes out of the house, he shovels a path directly to his makeshift baseball field because it’s technically spring and he wants to get into baseball mode. Upon getting on the mound, he calls for the rest of the Peanuts gang to come over and begin spring training. No one shows up. As he tries to speak aloud about how important it is to get in shape, several snowballs from an unknown assailant are hurled towards him, knocking him down.

Eventually, the players start to come in for practice. Linus (John Christian Graas) shows up, so Charlie Brown asks where their shortstop is. Of course, this is Snoopy (Bill Melendez), and he shows up via ski lift. After Lucy (Marnette Patterson) gives Charlie Brown a hard time once he tries to fire everyone up, the rest of the gang leaves because the snow continues, prompting Charlie Brown to jokingly ask a snowman if he wants to catch a few flyballs. Sometime later, winter is officially over. The snow is all gone, and Charlie Brown is right back on the green. He’s ready for some baseball, and the rest of the team is out there as well. To warm up, Charlie Brown takes the team through some basic drills, but it’s obvious the team is terrible. As Linus tries to ask how the team is doing and Charlie Brown tries to avoid saying they absolutely suck, we cut to the diminutive Leland (Gregory Grudt) at his home. He gets up from bed and immediately puts on his baseball gear, as he plans to try out for a “Big League” team. After he has his sister (Noley Thornton) tie his shoes for him, he goes to Charlie Brown’s team practice. He asks to see the team manager, but Snoopy ignores him. Once Lucy points Leland in the direction of Charlie Brown, Leland calls her pretty and heads over. He tells Charlie Brown his intentions of joining the “Big League” instead of staying in tee ball, but Charlie Brown isn’t necessarily convinced he can contribute because of his size. Even so, he gives Leland a tryout. He’s awful at the basic fielding drills. Following this, Charlie Brown stresses the importance of learning signals. He gives him one for bunting. Though it takes Leland a bit, he learns it.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what a bunt is.

Later, Charlie Brown hits some balls towards Lucy, but she fucking sucks and can’t catch a single one. This leads to him calling her the “worst outfielder in the history of baseball”. She changes the subject and brings up how they don’t have uniforms as if this is supposed to magically give them talent. Soon after, Charlie Brown, Linus, and Snoopy walk in the city, with Linus pointing out they are the only team in the league without uniforms. Charlie Brown says he was talking with Mr. Hennessey at the hardware store the other day, and he said he would sponsor them and buy them uniforms if they won a game. They go to Hennesey’s Hardware to talk with the man. As they talk, Snoopy messes around with some of the product in the store and gets hurt several times over. Following this, Charlie Brown is back on the field with his team and tells them the good news and the bad news. The good news is that Mr. Hennessy has offered to buy their team uniforms. The kids go nuts hearing this. The bad news is that it will be on the condition that they win the first game of the season. Suddenly, everyone starts freaking out. Lucy points out how they’ve never won a game too. Even so, Charlie Brown thinks they can do it and fires up his team for practice. That night, Charlie Brown wears his baseball cap to bed for good luck and wonders if anyone else does the same. This is where we see Snoopy sleeping on top of his doghouse with his baseball cap over his nose, going up in the air and back down again as he snores.

It’s the first game of the season! Following a speech from Charlie Brown to his players, the opposing team shows up, and they all have matching uniforms. One of the kids asks Charlie Brown if they’re going to do the national anthem, but Charlie Brown says that before their games, they do the “Hokey Pokey”, with catcher Schroeder (Travis Boles) playing piano to accompany the tune. Following this, Franklin (Jessica Nwafor) brings out a boom box and sings and dances with the team a tune straight out of the early 90s, as he hypes up the game. Now, let’s play ball!

My Thoughts:

A constant in the Peanuts franchise is the children’s love of baseball. With it being springtime and the cold weather is finally coming to a close, this felt like the right time to watch It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown, as it really captures the changing of the seasons and the renewed interest in outdoorsy activities very well when it comes to the child’s mindset. At the same time, it’s nice to see Charlie Brown in a good mood for the first time in a while.

Here, he takes a leadership role as team manager and does an admirable job. The team is decent besides Lucy, and they seem much more competent here than they do in Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown. They aren’t great, but they are capable, which finally shows us that our star is doing something right for a change. Though I’m not entirely sure how Leland made the team because the only thing he did correctly was remember the bunt signal, his insertion into this particular storyline was a fun one. The gag of the pitcher not being able to throw a strike on him because of his size is a funny one, especially when Charlie Brown realizes it. It’s even more amusing when Leland almost fucks this strategy up when he starts swinging for the fences on two back-to-back pitches. Generally, Leland is a cute little character, and he added a fun and different dynamic to It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown. With the exception of the clear continuity error of Charlie Brown initially being at home plate when Leland gets on base but is then on the bench with the others when Leland scores an inside-the-park home run by sheer luck, the “First game” sequence is done very well. Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of Leland. Though I’m not sure how he could be involved in future stories because of his significant age difference from the other characters, his presence is amusing enough to keep around. You could easily do a big brother/little brother arc between him and Charlie Brown where he tries to teach Leland the ways of life but continuously fails in classic Charlie Brown-like fashion.

On a side note, Leland’s actual head shape without the baseball helmet is a bit disturbing. It made him look like he was born with a birth defect with its distracting, almost alien-like appearance.

As I said before, the Peanuts gang actually plays some good baseball here. With Peppermint Patty on the team, they could’ve been kicking some major ass. Sadly, she was nowhere to be found, which is weird because she’s on the poster. Even so, Snoopy proves himself to be useful, we see Schroeder tag a guy at home, and they clearly have a good enough offense to win the first game 27-26. At the very least though, I would have appreciated a couple of scenes where Charlie Brown was able to strike someone out. All we see is the opposing team hitting everything he throws at them, including the first fucking pitch. Thankfully, a good portion of the hits are easy pop flies, but Lucy is an awful right fielder who misses every single one of them, a recurring theme regarding Lucy playing baseball. As a Peanuts fan though, I’m good with this because Lucy needs some humbling. After a decent buildup and solid first half, the rest of the special kind of tapers off regarding the momentum. Though they win the first game to get uniforms from Mr. Hennessey (who’s dressed like a member of a barbershop quartet), Leland quits the team because the uniform is too big for him. Why no one thinks to adjust his measurements is beyond me. You would think they would try a little harder to keep the kid who won the game for them and is essentially a cheat code because he’s the size of a toddler. Even so, it’s a sad goodbye, and when he leaves, the team and the special plateaus until the end. They lose the second game (in a close 27-25 score), Charlie Brown is blamed, and Linus has the audacity to go up to him at the mound and ask if the game is over and if they lost.

Excuse me? How in the fuck does one not know when the game is over? Where the hell was this idiot at?

Seeing Franklin was cool, but the random music interlude before the game, where he does a music video shtick that Tone Lōc, Paula Abdul, and even Kid ‘n Play would be jealous of, kind of lost me. This couldn’t have been a more obvious attempt at the Peanuts franchise trying to stay relevant with the times and managing to date itself in the corniest way possible by doing so.

I do think the theme of the special should’ve still been more about baseball rather than the uniforms. At the end, Charlie Brown comes to the conclusion that “It’s not how you look, it’s how you play the game”. Well, yeah, wasn’t that obvious? Why is this the lesson he learned? If anything, he was the only one who understood this from the beginning! He was the one who wanted to practice and work hard. Dogshit players like Lucy and Linus were the ones who kept bringing up the uniform thing, so he went out of his way to find a solution to make them happy. So, can you tell me why Charlie Brown had to learn the lesson? Linus and Lucy should’ve been the two to say the final lines of the special because it’s clear they were the ones who needed to learn something out of all of this. Linus is just confused, stating how he actually thought they would play better if they had uniforms. It takes Charlie Brown to make the extra step to come to the realization for him. Why is this on him? This didn’t make any sense. It seemed forced just because Charlie Brown is usually the one who has to learn something by special’s end, but there was no indication whatsoever that he was desperately wanting a uniform in the first place. He didn’t say a single line that made it seem like it. He loved the game for what it was, unlike his teammates. At one point, Lucy actually says aloud to the opposing team, “Yeah! We’ll show them! We got new uniforms!”. Again, why isn’t someone else other than Charlie Brown learning a lesson here? Then, they have the audacity to shit on him even more when he misses the game-saving catch after he pleads in his head, “Please let me be the hero!”?

Honestly, it’s kind of bullshit the way things ended. Also, fuck Schroeder for this. He wants to act all tough to Charlie Brown by berating him for missing the catch, but he didn’t say a single thing to Lucy through the entirety of the two games showed, despite her missing EVERY SINGLE BALL that came her way.

On a side note, there’s an amusing bit where the team’s water “fountain” is just a water hose used for drinking. If you grew up playing baseball back in the day, this couldn’t be more accurate. Also, when the hose goes haywire on Snoopy and everyone on the team gets sprayed, I couldn’t help but think: Can you imagine how bad Pig Pen was stanking after being doused in hose water during a baseball game in the heat?

It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown was a decent baseball-focused special that did a solid job in working a story around a lesser-talked about character, but the combination of the story losing steam once he exits, and the stupid focus on the importance of a uniform compared to actually practicing the sport ended the second half of the special on a befuddled note. Additionally, it just wasn’t all that funny either.