Performed entertainment depicting the Peanuts characters aged up is a genre all its own. While there have been movies like (insert name of indy film that I just stumbled upon a few years back and now can neither recall the name of nor find any reference to), it’s been more visible on stage. Brendan Hunt’s Asbsolutely Filthy is a fine example, and Dial P for Peanuts has graced the stage as well. However, the biggest impact and commercial success has probably been Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead, depicting tawdry teen years for the gang. First performed in 2004, this award-winning Bert V. Royal play pops up again from time to time, and sometimes it has an impact. Indeed, it did so quite recently.

Seems there was a high school production of it being staged in, of all places, Santa Rosa, California, home to the Schulz studio, and museum, and ice rink, and so forth. Now, the Peanuts people have always been wisely mellow about parodies and interpreting works, as long as they’re not likely to be confused as licensed items. A couple nights into this long-planned, long-rehearsed production, the school pulled the plug, citing unspecified “complaints”, presumed to be from parents concerned with the play’s themes of sexuality, drugs, and other things that of course have nothing to do with issues facing actual teenagers (cough, cough.)

So what did the young actors do? They staged the play for two more nights anyway, using a local theater and thus avoiding the entanglements with the school. Sold out shows, raising thousands of dollars. The school, faced with the bad publicity, stepped back, allowed the play to return to campus to conclude its run. But they also announced a new policy requiring all scripts to be screened by the school, and instituting age restrictions on shows with certain themes.

Step two for the theater kids was creating their own brand new play, called [REDACTED], a musical mocking concern groups and school boards seeking to censor the arts. They took that show to a statewide theater festival, and one the top prize… and a bunch of other prizes as well.

For more details (and photos!), you can go read this article from KQED.

But you know somethin’? Working their way around censorship and responding to attempts to tamp down on art with art — the kids are alright.

***

As long as I’m posting about Peanuts and teen concerns, I find myself noting this ad that ran across my Facebook feed.

I expect a few of the Peanuts hardcore are cringing a bit at “the Peanuts”. It’s normal in licensing to avoid referring to the kids as “peanuts”, the term that rankled Charles Schulz for decades because he thought it was inappropriately diminutive of his characters and his efforts. “Peanuts” is the name of the property, the kids who star in that property are generally referred to as “the Peanuts gang”…. it, the group from Peanuts, not a group of peanuts.

But Knott’s Berry Farm is in Southern California, and SoCal has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are a generally pleasant climate, beach access, creative sensibility, and social room here for a wide range of people. The minuses? Well, earthquakes, fires, and street gangs…. and while the first seems consistently variable and the second is increasing with climate change, the third seems to be relatively calm compared to its heyday. As such, all Southern California amusement parks, which are magnets to teens of all stripes, are careful, keeping out folks who display signs of gang membership. Still, people can be concerned, and can have long memories of things like a gang fight that took place in the Knott’s parking lot around four decades ago, during the years when crack was prevalent. So I can certainly understand management not wanting to announce that a gang of any sort, Peanuts or otherwise, is taking over the park.

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