I have no idea whether their material will be offered just to the Japanese audience, or if it will be headed this way.

Often, the limited-color foreign covers look quite charming. Sure would like to get this one for the AAUGH.com Reference Library!

Now that we can see the cover for the upcoming book It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: With Sound and Music, it’s clear that they’re doing something which I thought they might. Is this book the general market version of Hallmark’s recent sound button book of the same special? Well, yes  and no. It does take up the same conceptual space. However, it’s not using the same adaptation. For whatever reason, Running Press had provided Hallmark with a Great Pumpkin adaptation which was different from the one they’d released to the general market in recent hardcover releases (the Hallmark one had a classic flat animation style art, while the general market got highly modeled Tom Brannon art), and now each market has a sound button version of their own adaptation. Even the sound buttons themselves aren’t the same (or are at least in a different order.) So if you’re collecting all the versions, combinations, and permutations, you won’ t be able to get away with not getting this one, I suppose.

Now here’s a video on how they’re painting the backdrop for You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, where it will start a five-and-a-half-month run this May.

And speaking of animated Peanuts, the next DVD release is now preorderable. Happiness is Peanuts: Team Peanuts features the TV special Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown, with some material from The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show to fill it out.

To make up for that, let me note the Peanuts thing that is making me happy today: simply that there is a Peanuts book entitled Buon San Valentino, dolce Babù. Doesn’t that sound poetic?

The cover for Peanuts issue 4, coming in April, featuring Lucy and… who is that masked marvel?

Two things to notice:

• The Peanuts characters never appear on screen with any of the other characters. There has long been a reluctance to allow Peanuts characters to be mixed in with other properties, and that shows here.
• In the large number of characters, we see ones who originated on TV animation, theatrical shorts, comic books, children’s books and even in a stand-up comedy act… but unless I miss somebody, the Peanuts characters are the only ones for whom the newspaper comic strip is home.  Now obviously, this is not a deep study on the history of animation, and there certainly are plenty of strips that have made it into animation, some quite successfully… but it still is a less-common source for popular animation.

But, of course, Peanuts and the Super Bowl bring to mind You’re in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, a special which has not seen air in a long time and has not been released on DVD (I presume both are due to problems with licensing the Super Bowl name and trappings from the NFL). However, VHS copies are easy to come by, as this special got wide distribution through an unusual means – copies were sold at Shell gas stations nationwide.