To Mom And Dad With Love

New releases

The new kids book To Mom and Dad with Love says that it’s an adaptation of a The Snoopy Show episode “To Mom and Dad with Love”… which is interesting, because as things are sorted on the Apple TV+ service that hosts such things, this isn’t a The Snoopy Show episode. Rather, it’s a stand-alone special, Snoopy Presents: To Mom (and Dad) with Love. Picky, picky, I know.

Anyway, this is not a complete adaptation. It drops the Woodstock storyline and the breakfast-making, focusing rather on the Peppermint Patty storyline center. In reading this version, it struck me just how much that storyline is grounded in the classic Peanuts specials — Peppermint Patty being ambivalent about Mother’s Day is cut from the same cloth as Charlie Brown’s feelings about Christmas. I think that acknowledging that holidays aren’t happy days for everyone is important. And the book — which is text augmented with images straight from the special — does keep in the passing mention that some kids have two moms. It’s s small piece of representation, and in ways, small representation matters.

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