those 500 new Peanuts shorts

The 500 new short Peanuts animations being created by Normaal in France have been getting some attention of late. There are at least a couple of examples out there, floating around in the wild; I’m not going to link to them here because they appear to be unauthorized. But this French TV report will give you at least some sense of them:

I like that the visuals seem to be trying more to be Schulz than to be Melendez (although not without that influence). Not that there’s anything wrong with how Melendez brought the material to the screen! But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only right way to interpret the strip for animation. There are some moments where the mechanicalness of computer-aided animation comes through in arm swings and the like, but all in all, quite reasonable.

They may be only 90 seconds long, but with 500 of them, that makes 12.5 hours. That’s like a season-and-a-half of a sitcom. It’ll be a lot of material to watch!

Animated Peanuts
We finally know how Charlie Brown did at the Super Bowl!

If you’ve never seen the 1994 Peanuts special You’re in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, well, you’re not alone. It aired only in 1994, linked to that year’s Super Bowl, on NBC, which had never before and has never since aired a Peanuts special. It has never been rerun, never …

Animated Peanuts
Free Snoopy Weekend

Apple just announced that this weekend, you can watch all of their original programming for free (you will have to sign in for an account, but not a subscription.) This means The Snoopy Show, Snoopy in Space, Camp Snoopy, and the new Peanuts specials that were created for Apple should all be …

Animated Peanuts
RIP Willie Mays

Willie Mays has died. The baseball great lived until the age of 1993. “Why is that relevant to a Peanuts blog?” I hear of a few of you cry (though many of you know better.) Before Lee Mendelson had any connection to Peanuts, he made a documentary about Mays… and …