Peanuts books sometimes leak out in odd places (I still have not been able to locate The Big Book of Peanuts anywhere but Costco, for example, and for those who have been asking, even they seem to be out of it now). If alert AAUGH Blog supporter Scott hadn’t called my attention to Walmart’s exclusive book adaptation of the animated special Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, I might not have known about it.

Now, Walmart… I’ve got a bit of a relationship with Walmart. I head there when I need something that I’m not finding in my usual spots, and they offer something that is relatively cheap, but not quite adequate. I might find a bean bag chair that won’t fit my mid-sized frame, or an extension cord that won’t take my three-pronged plug, or some other such thing. They have what I’m looking for, but less. As such, you’ll understand why I don’t go to Walmart much any more.

The exclusive edition is somewhat like that. It’s “an interactive book with sounds” according to the cover, which may lead you to expect that it is one of those books with buttons that you push to make sounds at certain parts of the book. Well, you’re almost right, but being Walmart, it’s something like what you’d expect, only less. It doesn’t have buttons. It has button. One. If you read through the adaptation, every time you see a little picture of Snoopy making a kissy face, you push the button, and it makes a kissy noise (one of a selection of kissy noises, I should note, so it’s not always sounding the same, but it’s not as if there are specific kissy noises to go with each invocation.) Over the course of a 28 page adaptation, you will press the kissy button a grand total of four times. Really, there’s far more interactivity involved in turning the pages than in pushing the button.

(Not that there’s anything inherently unfun with one button. Setting my memory machine back to the early days of arcade video games, I remember one early black-and-white game where the only control you had was a single button, which you used to drop bombs from a plane that was flying over a canyon. It was all about timing. It wasn’t the most memorable of games, I suppose, but I played it a few times and got my quarter’s worth of fun.)

Hallmark published this book for Walmart. The art of this adaptation (by Vincent Martone) comes from an earlier Little Simon adaptation, which Hallmark reprints in the book Holidays Through the Year. This edition also uses the endpapers from that book. One thing that it doesn’t use, however, is the text; all of the text has been rewritten, rephrasing just about everything that Justine and Ron Fontes had written into a new script by Megan Langforde. The result doesn’t seem to be particularly better or particularly worse, and it didn’t need that degree of change to add in the four button-pushing points.

The book costs $9.95. I found it racked with other Peanuts stuff in the gift card section, unsurprising given that it’s a Hallmark product. If you don’t have a Walmart near you, we;;, you’re probably out of luck for now. I’ve checked their online store at Walmart.com, and while they can get two different Running Press adaptations of the special for you, they don’t offer this Walmart exclusive edition.

(I worked on a Walmart exclusive item once, a couple decades back. It wasn’t Peanuts related; rather, it was an Eek! The Cat comic book, based on the animated TV series. These comics were only available in Walmart, and only as a bagged set; you got three issues of Eek!, plus the comic book adaptation of the movie Freaked. That’s right, if you wanted these kiddie cartoon comics, you had to get an adaptation of an obscure PG-13 movie as well. Because Walmart.)

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