Thanksgiving: the time for college football, gratuitous amounts of food, and appreciating how much others have done for you. Winter’s setting in, and the world is winding down, so people are inclined to settle down and enjoy the relaxed mood of the season.
Make some hot cocoa? Watch the last of the leaves fall? Maybe bundle up and watch “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.”
But maybe the Thanksgiving special is too overdone; seeing Charlie Brown muse about his bad luck every week of the year while getting resented by his friends is tiring. How about something new, something to pique your interest, just out of the periphery of the public? The name?
“Bring Me The Head of Charlie Brown” is an animated short made by students of the California Institute of the Arts, led by Jim Reardon, parodying the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz. It takes a bloody, cynical approach to an otherwise inoffensive comic by adding a gratuitous amount of violence to be admired or appalled by.
The short opens like any animated bumper, advertising the next Peanuts special, but turns for the worse when the Great Pumpkin puts a hit on Charlie Brown’s head, with the rest of the gang racing to claim it before the others. Lucy’s attempt to blow him up with a dummy football leads into the title, literally screaming in your face.
Schroeder tries to crush him with a hanging piano, and Linus strangles him with his blanket right after he muses about feeling like someone’s out to get him. Even his dear dog Snoopy bites his hand off as he holds a peppermint patty, standing in for the character with the same name.
Charlie Brown is forced into hiding, donning a toupee and a trench coat, only to be rushed by the gang all at once.
Charlie ditches his disguise with an unzipped leather jacket and a mohawk, Terminator-style, as he turns the violence on them, mowing them down with a weapon. Lucy gets a lucky shot on his shoulder while nursing a bullet wound in her chest, only for him to wheel around and blow her head off with a weapon.
His rampage extends even past them into a truly ludicrous montage of cartoon violence; Charlie rakes two Nazi soldiers and Adolf Hitler with a weapon, two biplanes dogfight and collide head-on, Mickey Mouse gets his head bashed in by a bag. A caricaturized Rocky Balboa gets clocked in the face by Popeye so hard it chimes like Big Ben, and Dagwood gets kicked in the crotch by Blondie (if you know or remember them) so hard his head rockets off his neck with a fount of blood.
At the end of it all, a panning shot of the bloodshed and the inglorious dead is shown, with Charlie Brown standing triumphant enough to deliver a one-liner and cut to an implied one-night stand with The Little Red-Haired Girl.
The total run time of the short? Three minutes, twenty seconds.
Insane, no? Just wait until you hear who was behind it. Jim Reardon, the creator? Co-wrote WALL-E and directed 13 seasons of The Simpsons alongside Matt Groening. The narrator, Rich Moore, went on to direct Wreck-It Ralph, its sequel, and Zootopia. One of the voices of Charlie Brown, William Hanna, co-founded Hanna-Barbera and created Tom and Jerry.
Why would they create something so insane? It can be very likely understood with the ending message left by Reardon.
“The creator of this picture wishes to state that he does not in any way wish to tarnish or demean the beloved characters of Charles M. “Dutch” [sic, his actual nickname was Sparky] Schulz’s comic strip, Peanuts. No malice or damage to their goodwill was intended,” reads one slide.
The other reads, “So please don’t sue me, because it will drag through the courts for years, and I haven’t got a lawyer – and besides, you’ve already got half the money in the world, and I haven’t got any. OK?”
The short was likely made in contempt of the industry that Reardon and his friends were going into, one where the work of animators was largely contractual with terms far in favor of producers and recognition was scarce. Shorts like these were a way to get back at them and exercise their free will, something substantiated by others like it.
Mickey Mouse In Vietnam, made in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War by Whitney Lee Savage (father of Adam Savage of Mythbusters renown) shows Mickey enlisting in the army before dying moments after landing ashore.
Bambi Meets Godzilla, from the same year by Marv Newland (commercial animator) shows Bambi grazing in a field behind scrolling credits before being unceremoniously crushed by the kaiju’s foot.
That being said, have a happy Thanksgiving and keep these in mind if you wanna give people a nice shock or two.
Stay weird, Forest Hills.
