Peppermint Patty made her first appearance in the strip in 1966, and almost immediately became a fan favorite. She would make her animated debut less than a year after her comic debut in You're In Love, Charlie Brown, and would be upgraded to co-lead in the very next special, He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown. After that, she would be a regular presence in nearly every special, frequently playing a important co-starring role. However, even in the specials she was prominently featured in, she was, at best, the secondary lead character, frequently being the agent of chaos that the special's actual lead (usually Charlie Brown) had to battle against.
Finally, as a new decade dawned, Peppermint Patty got to be the unquestioned lead character in a special. Once again revolving around a sport, and cashing in on Winter Olympic fever (the Lake Placid Games concluded the night before this premiered), She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown finds her as a figure skater, practicing every morning at an outdoor rink under the guidance of a World Famous Crabby Skating Coach, aka Snoopy.
To be honest, I'm sort of surprised that the Peanuts production team chose figure skating to be the centerpiece of the special. Being from Minnesota, Charles Schultz loved ice sports, and his own kids participated in them, even though by 1980, the family had lived in California for two decades. But unlike other sports that had been featured in the special, figure skating is all about movement and grace, potentially a hard task for a Peanuts special, where the occasionally ragged animation was part of the charm.
We see Peppermint Patty perform her routine twice, once in practice early in the special, and once in competition toward the end. The animation in both segments is impressive. To be fair, the animators rotoscoped her moves over actual footage of skaters (including Schulz's daughter, Amy), but it still looks quite nice. Indeed, it is some of the best animation seen in the specials to that point.
However, the two segments of her skating combined only take up about five minutes total of the special. That means there is plenty of time for hijinks such as Peppermint Patty and Snoopy (her coach) taking out an entire boys hockey team trying to crowd her off the ice, a lengthy segment in her classroom, where she struggles to stay awake, much to the chagrin of her teacher, and the special's primary comic setpiece, an extended segment where Peppermint Patty, after spying a sewing machine at Marcie's house, decides that Marcie is going to sew her a skating dress, despite Marcie's protests that the machine belongs to her mother and she herself does not know how to sew.
There is one odd quirk in this special, in that we clearly hear adult voices. The only other special where an adult was heard clearly (as opposed to the usual "wah-wah" sounds) was Play It Again, Charlie Brown, in which adult voices, as part of an odd gag, were heard coming out of spray cans. Here, the voices belong to Peppermint Patty's teacher and a shop clerk. While both characters remain off-screen, they have audible conversations with Peppermint Patty. I'm not really sure why it was done that way, as there was nothing in the conversations that couldn't have been covered using the normal style. Perhaps it was done to justify clearly understanding the announcer at the skating rink during the climatic skating completion, which I guess is as logical of a reason as any.
Phil Roman returns to direct the special. Schultz largely adapted the storyline from a series of comics that ran This is the final TV outing of most of the principal voice cast (Patricia Patts as Peppermint Patty, Arrin Skelley as Charlie Brown, Daniel Anderson as Linus, and Laura Planting as Lucy), though they all would get a final time with the characters in Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!), which would arrive in theaters only a few months after this aired.
She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown proved that Peppermint Patty could carry a special just fine, which is why it's odd that she was pretty much regulated back to being a supporting character after this. It's a nice little entry, a good way to kick off the 1980s, and a good conclusion to the half-decade run of sports-themed specials. Peppermint Patty may be multi-talented in numerous sports, but figure skating will remain a surprising first among equals.
Next week: Snoopy finds love under the big top, in Life is a Circus, Charlie Brown.
No comments:
Post a Comment