After churning out five specials in a little over two years, the producers of the Peanuts specials took a bit of a break--from making specials. Instead, they spent much of the time working on the first Peanuts feature film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which would open in theaters at the end of 1969. Before the movie debuted, however, they did put together one special, which would originally air that September, more than a year and a half after He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown premiered. And appropriately enough for a special debuting in September, it started on the first day of school.
The ritual of going back to school proved to mostly be a framing device, as the gang is assigned to write a composition recapping their summer. The rest of the special is mostly an extended flashback to the recently departed summer, during which everyone went to camp, signed up by Lucy, even though she's a child and not actually related to anyone except for Linus. But what Lucy wants, Lucy gets, and so everyone heads off to spend a few weeks living in tents in the woods, where Linus worries about snakes and if his parents will move without telling him.
Much of the fun of the special comes from the contrast between the girls and the boys, who are staying on opposite sides of a small lake. The girls, led by Lucy and Peppermint Patty, move with military precision ("It's the next-best thing to being in the infantry!", Peppermint Patty gushes at one point). The boys, on the other hand, are a disorganized mess, all crowding into doorways at once, a la the Three Stooges. Of course, they're inexplicably led by Charlie Brown.
To be fair, the utter disaster that camp is for the boys is hardly his fault. It's a full team effort, as seen in the first boy-girl competition, a swimming race. After Charlie Brown extols the boys to not show up the girls too badly, its the girls who easily win, leaving the boys flailing around in the water. Other competitions go much the same way, with the girls beating the boys at softball 40-1 (the one run is scored by Snoopy, of course), and Charlie Brown's attempt to enter a canoe race comes to an end after he exhausts himself to move four feet from the dock.
The boys' only hope is a arm-wrestling contest between Snoopy and Lucy, of which the two seem to be evenly matched. Who actually won is left somewhat ambiguous, but even if we can credit that to the boys, Charlie Brown would rather forget the entire summer, instead of having to describe it in detail in a paper (though, Linus, who had an equally bad time, didn't seem to have a problem with the assignment).
It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown is a bit repetitive and predictable, but all-in-all it's a fun little special and a nice return to TV for the gang after their 19-month hiatus. Audiences hopefully enjoyed it, because other than the movie, it would be another 18 months before the next special would hit the air.
Next week: Posts return to Sunday as Schroder and Lucy take center stage in Play It Again, Charlie Brown.
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