Is there a single character in the entirety of fiction that
better represents childhood depression more than Charlie Brown? Seriously, he’s
the on-again-off-again punching bag of all his peers, he is the product of a
society where the children act far more like adults than the actual adults do
and, for whatever reason, life as a whole seems to take great pleasure in
taking a massive dump on his day for its own amusement. That skit from Family
Guy where Charlie ends up as a thuggish stoner might be an
optimistic expectation, all things considered. Still, even with all
that baggage, he and the rest of the Peanuts canon are yet another staple of
pop culture. Most of it came out before I was even born and, without seeing any
of it for myself, elements of it are just
that
pervasive that they have always stuck with me: Charlie’s aforementioned
emotional scars, the football gag, “You blockhead!”, Patty and Marcie’s ‘relationship’,
the cripplingly sad songs that would show up in the TV specials and movies, “No
dogs allowed!”; the list goes on. So, even though I am going into this with
little to no prior experience with the series, it would be nearly impossible to
go into this film completely blind.
