I am a big Peanuts fan and I have mixed feelings about this.  It will probably be very good or very bad.  I guess I will hope for the best, the trailer looks pretty cute.

I seem to associate Peanuts with good memories from my childhood,  One of my friends had a few paperback anthologies which were just collections of Peanuts comic strips and we would spend hours reading those.  Of course Snoopy was a favorite.  There were life lessons in those comics, very subtle, not preachy.  They could be absorbed effortlessly, almost unknowingly.  Subliminally, as it were.  I remember when the Peanuts TV specials came out and honestly at the time they seemed a little lame.  The only one I really care for today is “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, though “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” is not bad if just for the World War I Flying Ace sequence.  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was the first of the specials made and done on a shoestring budget.  The story of how it was made is interesting in that it nearly wasn’t made at all.  TV executives wanted to cut the classic scene of Linus telling the true meaning of Christmas and Schulz was adamant about it being kept in.  Then there is the iconic theme music, the title song which is “Linus and Lucy” by jazz musician Vince Guaraldi who is coincidentally also a northern California native, hailing from San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.  This little song has withstood the test of time and I belive it will still be heard long after I am gone.

There is a Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California that I have visited.  It is surprisingly large and as an adult you can easily spend an afternoon there.  The kids may be bored after an hour, but most kids today probably don’t even know what Peanuts is (yet).  Definitely worth a visit if you are in or going to be in northern California.  Well, here’s hoping that Peanuts in 3D! will be a classic and keep the Peanuts legacy going for a few more generations.