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spiderbraidsLast one :-)
(With apologies to Paste Magazine's It Still Stings :-))
Animation moves on, but we haven’t. In Well, That Happened, we relive animation moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction. We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved.
Be it in the funny papers or in animation, it's hard being Charlie Brown :-\ To put it lightly, he's a failure at baseball, kite-flying, and well, pretty much anything he does, and some of his failures are more confounding and infurating than others (Obliviously running off the track in a track-and-field race? Missed the word "beagle" in a televised spelling bee? Been there, done that) However, out of all the confounding and infuriating failures of his in the world, this particular one I'm about to discuss is the confounding and infuriating-iest... precisely because it isn't actually his fault for once :-\
Within Charles Schultz's lifetime alone, Peanuts spawned four cinema movies, a handful of TV series, and a glutload of singular specials that kids of the 60s to the aughts grew up with... You might ask 10 different people and get 10 different answers on which Peanuts animated work is their favorite (for me, it's Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown :-)) But ask which one is their least, and I imagine many of them would point at It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, aka the one with the homecoming football game, or the one with Heather... Heather has nothing to do with why this particular one stinks, but the football game does :-\
Now, when you think of Charlie Brown and football, you probably only think of one thing, Lucy van Pelt pulling the football... and well, turns out Lucy is the placeholder for the homecoming game, so you get that three times in the game, and if you're thinking, "Wouldn't that run the risk of costing them the game?", well, yes, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here :-) After scoring their first touchdown, Chuck and Lucy are sent out for the conversion, and of course she pulls her cr@p :-\ And then, the one time in this special Chuck questions Lucy pulling the football in an actual game rather than in their usual context, it's on the ensuing kickoff, which a) you're not supposed to placehold to begin with, and b) you can't score off... and yet Lucy does it again anyway :-\ And during halftime, Chuck's teammate Peppermint Patty sideeyes him and says "I think we know who our zero is", to which I quote Chuck, "Good grief!" :-\
Jump forward to the final play of the game, and that missed conversion is now the deficit between Chuck's team and the other team, and Peppermint Patty decides to send in the kicking team, commenting that even Chuck could not possibly miss a kick from 5 yards out... John "New Orleans Saints kicker, not the Sing Street director" Carney would beg to differ on that, and given Chuck's legendary incompetence (should we also mention that he somehow lost a baseball game in which he inherited a 50-run lead from PP with one out left, and managed to get her knocked out cold with a line drive from his first pitch? Yeah I think we should), you totally could imagine him somehow putting this trivial kick wide right, or even (and this is a bit of a deep cut) accidentally kick Lucy's hand instead... which would be somewhat more palatable than what actually ensues (one guess :-))
The real issue, though, comes after the quote-miss-unquote, when instead of having the whole team mad at Lucy, we just have Chuck and Linus van Pelt (as in, her brother, and also Chuck's BFF) letting the blame lie with Chuck... Yeah, they're what TVTropes call Extreme Doormats, but the two guys you'd most expect to defend themselves, even if no one else did, instead expect Heather to think Chuck to be a fool and would rather he'd made that extra point, which we'd understand if he'd actually missed, but he never even had the chance to actually kick that extra point :-< Even just before the kick, Chuck was thinking that this is his last chance to impress Heather, when you'd think he should have been thinking that if Lucy pulls the ball, she'll humiliate herself in front of not only the rest of the team but also a whole crowd of spectators, and for once he wouldn't be the one blamed for the loss... It's as if the writers never considered that possibility :-\
To add final insult to injury, at the homecoming party, Lucy and PP show up (with Frieda for some reason) and rub it in by telling him that he doesn't deserve to come for the reason you'd expect, which is pretty rich coming from Lucy of all people (yet somehow not surprising :-\) and instead of showing any effort to defend himself and give them what for (even if Lucy might have been like "Oh yeah? Prove it"), Chuck just lets them blame him without response, and Linus isn't even there to back him up :-\ They laugh as they leave, and that's the last we see of the girls in the special :-(
Reruns replaced Peppermint Patty's comments after both of the "misses" with reversed audio (and that's what been released on DVD, though advances in modern tech have made it trivial to show that she says "Chuck, you can't do anything right!" after that fateful [non-]kick), but the real underlying issue with the special will always still be there: There are lots of people who could potentially call out Lucy or side with Chuck, like the teammates or even the spectators at the game, but even if none of them had any reason to do so (after all, would you step up to her and say that? [tm this guy complaining about another animated tsundere character not being called out for blatantly throwing a spelling bee]), you'd expect Linus or even Chuck himself to at least put in some effort to defend themselves instead of just accepting the blame, but even in the epilogue, where Chuck doesn't remember anything that happened the previous day, Linus still doesn't even so much as bring up his sister when he talks about the game, much less fault her for the loss, to which again, "Good grief!" (Well, at least we can be thankful that Linus didn't try to steal Heather from Chuck... Been there, done that)
Random thought: The football game segment ends with Woodstock packing up his TV camera and heading off with Snoopy, but nothing ever comes of it :-\ Arguably, it was unbelievable enough even when this special first aired in the late 70s (though juuuust plausible that no one would have thought to roll tape on the game, since it seems no one thought to roll tape on this special, or else you'd think there'd be off-air recordings of the original airing of this special before they reversed the audio of PP's comments ;-)), but the final act probably could not believably play out like it does just a few years later, thanks to the invention of the consumer camcorder... Imagine someone actually being able to back Chuck up against Lucy, though of course Chuck would have to stop being a doormat long enough to even accuse her to begin with ;-) Instead we have to make do with It's Magic, Charlie Brown, or even that infamous clip of Peter "Family Guy" Griffin kicking Lucy :-\
(With apologies to Paste Magazine's It Still Stings :-))
Animation moves on, but we haven’t. In Well, That Happened, we relive animation moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction. We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved.
Be it in the funny papers or in animation, it's hard being Charlie Brown :-\ To put it lightly, he's a failure at baseball, kite-flying, and well, pretty much anything he does, and some of his failures are more confounding and infurating than others (Obliviously running off the track in a track-and-field race? Missed the word "beagle" in a televised spelling bee? Been there, done that) However, out of all the confounding and infuriating failures of his in the world, this particular one I'm about to discuss is the confounding and infuriating-iest... precisely because it isn't actually his fault for once :-\
Within Charles Schultz's lifetime alone, Peanuts spawned four cinema movies, a handful of TV series, and a glutload of singular specials that kids of the 60s to the aughts grew up with... You might ask 10 different people and get 10 different answers on which Peanuts animated work is their favorite (for me, it's Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown :-)) But ask which one is their least, and I imagine many of them would point at It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, aka the one with the homecoming football game, or the one with Heather... Heather has nothing to do with why this particular one stinks, but the football game does :-\
Now, when you think of Charlie Brown and football, you probably only think of one thing, Lucy van Pelt pulling the football... and well, turns out Lucy is the placeholder for the homecoming game, so you get that three times in the game, and if you're thinking, "Wouldn't that run the risk of costing them the game?", well, yes, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here :-) After scoring their first touchdown, Chuck and Lucy are sent out for the conversion, and of course she pulls her cr@p :-\ And then, the one time in this special Chuck questions Lucy pulling the football in an actual game rather than in their usual context, it's on the ensuing kickoff, which a) you're not supposed to placehold to begin with, and b) you can't score off... and yet Lucy does it again anyway :-\ And during halftime, Chuck's teammate Peppermint Patty sideeyes him and says "I think we know who our zero is", to which I quote Chuck, "Good grief!" :-\
Jump forward to the final play of the game, and that missed conversion is now the deficit between Chuck's team and the other team, and Peppermint Patty decides to send in the kicking team, commenting that even Chuck could not possibly miss a kick from 5 yards out... John "New Orleans Saints kicker, not the Sing Street director" Carney would beg to differ on that, and given Chuck's legendary incompetence (should we also mention that he somehow lost a baseball game in which he inherited a 50-run lead from PP with one out left, and managed to get her knocked out cold with a line drive from his first pitch? Yeah I think we should), you totally could imagine him somehow putting this trivial kick wide right, or even (and this is a bit of a deep cut) accidentally kick Lucy's hand instead... which would be somewhat more palatable than what actually ensues (one guess :-))
The real issue, though, comes after the quote-miss-unquote, when instead of having the whole team mad at Lucy, we just have Chuck and Linus van Pelt (as in, her brother, and also Chuck's BFF) letting the blame lie with Chuck... Yeah, they're what TVTropes call Extreme Doormats, but the two guys you'd most expect to defend themselves, even if no one else did, instead expect Heather to think Chuck to be a fool and would rather he'd made that extra point, which we'd understand if he'd actually missed, but he never even had the chance to actually kick that extra point :-< Even just before the kick, Chuck was thinking that this is his last chance to impress Heather, when you'd think he should have been thinking that if Lucy pulls the ball, she'll humiliate herself in front of not only the rest of the team but also a whole crowd of spectators, and for once he wouldn't be the one blamed for the loss... It's as if the writers never considered that possibility :-\
To add final insult to injury, at the homecoming party, Lucy and PP show up (with Frieda for some reason) and rub it in by telling him that he doesn't deserve to come for the reason you'd expect, which is pretty rich coming from Lucy of all people (yet somehow not surprising :-\) and instead of showing any effort to defend himself and give them what for (even if Lucy might have been like "Oh yeah? Prove it"), Chuck just lets them blame him without response, and Linus isn't even there to back him up :-\ They laugh as they leave, and that's the last we see of the girls in the special :-(
Reruns replaced Peppermint Patty's comments after both of the "misses" with reversed audio (and that's what been released on DVD, though advances in modern tech have made it trivial to show that she says "Chuck, you can't do anything right!" after that fateful [non-]kick), but the real underlying issue with the special will always still be there: There are lots of people who could potentially call out Lucy or side with Chuck, like the teammates or even the spectators at the game, but even if none of them had any reason to do so (after all, would you step up to her and say that? [tm this guy complaining about another animated tsundere character not being called out for blatantly throwing a spelling bee]), you'd expect Linus or even Chuck himself to at least put in some effort to defend themselves instead of just accepting the blame, but even in the epilogue, where Chuck doesn't remember anything that happened the previous day, Linus still doesn't even so much as bring up his sister when he talks about the game, much less fault her for the loss, to which again, "Good grief!" (Well, at least we can be thankful that Linus didn't try to steal Heather from Chuck... Been there, done that)
Random thought: The football game segment ends with Woodstock packing up his TV camera and heading off with Snoopy, but nothing ever comes of it :-\ Arguably, it was unbelievable enough even when this special first aired in the late 70s (though juuuust plausible that no one would have thought to roll tape on the game, since it seems no one thought to roll tape on this special, or else you'd think there'd be off-air recordings of the original airing of this special before they reversed the audio of PP's comments ;-)), but the final act probably could not believably play out like it does just a few years later, thanks to the invention of the consumer camcorder... Imagine someone actually being able to back Chuck up against Lucy, though of course Chuck would have to stop being a doormat long enough to even accuse her to begin with ;-) Instead we have to make do with It's Magic, Charlie Brown, or even that infamous clip of Peter "Family Guy" Griffin kicking Lucy :-\
