You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but are you award-winning?
- By : Nat
- Category : Animated Peanuts
I hope everyone is having good holidays, finding joy and happiness and yes, even though it may be materialistic, I hope you’re getting good gifts. Good gifts make people happy, both those who give them and those who get them.
Among the gifts I got this year was an audition notice and a copy of a play script… a play I’ve done before (Heaven Can Wait) is being put up by a respectable local theater, and Mrs. AAUGH Blog is encouraging me to try out. I haven’t done a play in a long while, but I used to enjoy trodding the boards a bit, and yes, I did do You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown once, playing Linus. I was not great… I am not a talented song-and-dance man, to put it mildly.
All of which brings me to today’s topic, the upcoming DVD release of the animated You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. First, to firm up one uncertainty I posted in an earlier message: yes, I will be included in the documentary featurette on this DVD release, talking a bit about the history for the piece. Which brings me to the real topic: if you go to t
he Amazon page for this DVD release, you’ll see a promotional video. Among other claims it makes is “Based on the award-winning Broadway musical”.. a claim that I feel needs a few asterisks.
- The play was originally an 0ff-Broadway musical, and yes, it won awards there in 1967 – but that was its target location (this wasn’t some sort of a test run aimed at taking it to the big time.)
- There was a Broadway production in 1971, but it was rather undistinguished production, short-lived and winning no awards that I’m aware of.
- There was a 1999 revival on Broadway, and that one did win awards, but coming over a decade after the animated version was produced, the animated version was not based on the revival.
So if they made the claim “based on the award-winnning show which was later a Broadway show and would, after this was based on the original show, be redone as an award-winning Broadway show”, I would have no qualms. Of course, this announcement would’ve taken up the entire time for the promotional video. I guess I’m just too picky.
(And to link this into the AAUGH.com reference library: we did recently obtain a playbill for the original production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the St. Marks Theatre… however, while it’s the original production, it is disappointingly not the original cast, as it comes after Gary Burghoff, the original Charlie Brown in the play, had already headed out to Southern California to head up a Good Man cast there. So it’s the original production, but not the original playbill. Still, it’s an interesting thing to have.)
