I apologize for the lack of reviews in a while. It’s my own fault… and the fault of that new Hallmark edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas which interacts with a stuffed animal. “That would be a great review to do as a video”, thought I. But videos take time to put together, so I kept putting it off, and now the product has been out for months and Christmas has been over for weeks, and who wants a video then? (If you really need me in some sort of video, how about this one where I meet for the first time a particular 20-something year old woman who is my biological daughter. Yes, my life beyond Peanuts has its oddities.)

Anyway, the new  A Chaelie Brown Christmas adaptation is an odd little trip. Oh, the book is pretty normal reusing art for an earlier adaptations, and with sound buttons that you hit at certain points in the reading to provide a bit of music, a bit of dialogue, or a relevant ssound effect… standard sound button stuff. It’s the stuffed Snoopy that comes with it that makes this an experience. Assuming you’ve correctly turned on both the book and the doll, whenever you push a sound button on the book, Snoopy also makes noise (that’s the full reaction; there’s no motion here.) Most commonly, he laughs. For the songs, he hums along. There’s also a sound of disappointment.

It’s when we get to Linus’s recitation of the annunciation to the shepherds that you really question if this was a good idea. This scene is always handled with particular care in these book adaptations. They do not trim it, do not reduce the dialogue despite the condensed nature of these adaptations. And in this case, they put Linus’s entire speech on a sound button… and that makes for a long piece! So you press the button, and Linus starts laying down scripture, and you get to the part where he’s talking about shepherds looking over their flock, and the stuffed Snoopy makes a sheep sound. And when we learn that the shepherds were sore afraid, he makes the sound of fear, and so forth. And you start to wonder whether, when Luke was writing down the Gospel, he put a “sound of cartoon dog imitating a sheep goes here” in the marginalia. Really, it’s experiencing scripture as you’ve never experienced it before.

Looks like the book is now out of stock at Hallmark,com, so I hope ] if you want something like this, that you already bought one… and if you didn’t want it, that you didn’t.

As I’m playing catch-up, let’s see what else we have in the pile. Oooh, Sleepy Snoopy! It’s just a board book, so it’s not something most people need, but I think that if you have desirre for a Peanuts board book, this is a very fine example. It’s just six spreads of Snoopy looking for a comfortable place to sleep, but it is both suitably simple for kids (and requires zero Peanuts knowledge) and the art is lovely. (Paige Braddock wrote the book, while Caitlin Leonard provided the lovely art.)

How to Draw Peanuts for Kids is exactly the book y9u’d expect it to be, if you’ve spent any time with how-to-draw-cartoon-character books. It teaches you about drawing basic shaps, like circles and cones. Then, for each chacacter, it shows that character as an arrangement of those shapes, then as those shapes connected with lines, and then as full inked detail. There’s blank page space for you to work on your own drawing. And yes, these are helpful beginner items, but I look at the perfect picture that they show you and I can’t help thinking about the Peanuts strip from Sunday, September 13, 1964. In that one, Charlie Brown is frustrated by not being not being able to make the perfect letters shown in his writing textbook, until Linus points out that they just found the best versions of the letters they were showing and made photostatic copies of those to show them again and again. It would be kind of nice if a book like this took its instructions and gave them to, say, 20 kids, and then run one of the better results next to the “ideal” drawing, so that the kids trying to learn have a more realistic sense of what they are likely to achieve.

This new  book is “by” Charles M. Schulz, but has a credit for “illustrations by Justin Thompson”.

Share the news!