It’s Acid, Charlie Brown!

When my son was younger, he loved Charlie Brown and the woebegone world he inhabits. He liked jazz (courtesy of Vince Guaraldi) and he liked the fact the characters play baseball. The only cultural connective tissue I can draw between jazz and baseball is Ken Burns and his documentaries, Jazz and Baseball. If the Peanuts characters became Civil War reenactors, the kid would probably grow to believe Ken Burns and Charles Schultz were his real parents. That’s fine-they can pay for his college.

There there’s the A Charlie Brown Christmas app. It’s a quaint repurposing the source material that features some modest interactivity while flawlessly capturing the signature melancholic vibe. My kid loved the iOS version until Charlie and Linus’ arms came off.
It was a glitch but imagine trying to explain that to a horrified child. Good grief, indeed.

Later, we pored through a “Look and Find” book entitled Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown that takes scenes from A Charlie Brown Christmas with random objects thrown in (a stuffed camel, a maraca, a pipe-basically the decor of the average freshman dorm), intended for young readers to find. Seeing the kaleidoscopic holiday landscapes of the Peanuts characters’ otherwise humdrum world in static, printed form makes apparent just how psychedelic they were.