What’s Going Down With Charlie Brown?

by Chris Vegvary

You remember the old Peanuts gang, don’t you? Charlie Brown, the little kid who just couldn’t, and his dog Snoopy, who has flashbacks of wars long-passed, and Snoopy’s little dyslexic flying friend Woodstock? And let’s not forget the rest of the gang. Lucy, the sadistic girl psychiatrist, who seemed to get off on seeing Charlie Brown get hurt both physically and emotionally; Charlie Brown’s crazy sister Sally, who has a strange and unhealthy obsession with the distant, cold, piano-playing Schroeder; Linus, the emotionally crippled kid who still clutches a shred of his childhood blanket and sucks his thumb, and who waits every Halloween in a pumpkin patch to summon an evil spirit called the Great Pumpkin; and the rest of the terrible crew.

Charlie Brown cartoons are fairly old, and I don’t think there’s been a fresh one since the 1970’s, but I could be wrong about that. Watching them now, some of the references are surprisingly adult, and it’s kind of a mystery to me why there was never a live-action film based on the Peanuts characters. A film could have been made back in the day, before all this new-fangled modern technology came out, where now we might see the entire gang texting on cellphones and whatnot.

I’ve heard that they were making a film based on the Archie comics, but it’s not going to be the film you’re probably expecting. The film will deal with a zombie attack in the town of Riverdale, forcing Archie and friends to fight for their lives against the undead. Sounds far-fetched, right? It’s true, though. So I ask you, why can’t we see a Peanuts film based around a zombie attack or something similar, with Charlie Brown and the gang taking up arms against an army of Walkers? Of course it would have to be a light-hearted comedy, but with the popularity of zombies nowadays due to shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead, and with classic comic characters like Archie getting their own zombie-ridden live-action films, why not get Charlie Brown into the mix? Imagine Snoopy swooping down like a World War I flying ace and blasting apart zombies from atop his mystical dog house.

I’m sure it won’t happen, or it definitely won’t happen anytime soon, but if you think about how I described the Peanuts characters earlier in the article, you might have yourself a decent dark drama/horror/comedy featuring some of your favorite characters from classic comic strips. Let’s make Charlie Brown and Snoopy and all the rest relevant again by giving them their own movie.