By 1982, Peanuts had been in production for over 31 years. That's literally tens of thousands of strips that Charles Schulz had produced during that time. Schulz was also keeping busy writing numerous TV specials (this is the 23rd) and four feature films. It would be logical to assume that many of the specials were adaptions of storylines from the strips. However, while Schulz brought over a lot of the running jokes from the strips, and individual gags and punchlines were often recycled, most of the primary storylines of the specials were originals, with, at that point, only You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown and She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown being straight adaptions of storylines from the strip.
Peanuts alternated between gag-a-day strips and longer story arcs, but most story arcs only lasted for a week or two, which is far too little material to be adapted into a 30-minute special. However, it seems likely that Schulz was getting burned out having to create so much material for scratch, so for A Charlie Brown Celebration, there was a radical change in format. Instead of one primary storyline, the series would be broken up into vignettes. All of them would be straight adaptions of strip storylines. And, most noticeably, for the first time, a Peanuts animated special would run for a full hour.
Schulz and the production team was apparently concerned that audiences would be confused by the format change, so he filmed a live-action intro (with his Emmy prominently placed right behind him), where he gave a brief tutorial on his writing process before explaining that tonight's special would be more like the comic strip. That started a long series of quick gags, mostly revolving around school. It isn't until ten minutes in that the first extended story takes place, a rather silly story about Peppermint Patty deciding to go to private school and ending up enrolling in a dog obedience school, with her being none the wiser until the very end of the segment. That is followed by the next extended segment, where Sally gets jealous of Linus meeting an old girlfriend on a field trip, which ends with Snoopy as a helicopter getting Linus off of a roof.
The other long vignettes in the special involves Lucy throwing Schroder's piano down the sewer, Marcie and Peppermint Patty trying to find caps for their baseball team, and the decidedly odd climatic story, in which Charlie Brown is hospitalized, and Marcie and Lucy both despair him ever getting well. It becomes clear why this is the final sketch thanks to the climax, which has Charlie Brown taking Lucy up on a promise she made while he was sick, with disastrous results (regarding that football, maybe she did have the right idea all those years).
This one is hard to judge in full because of the somewhat mixed quality of the vignettes. To be honest, for the most part, the quick blackout jokes worked better than any of the extended stories, all of which played better on the page as a series of daily strips rather than animated. The technical quality was good, with solid animation, and some interesting use of backgrounds (I especially liked the background change during a segment when Lucy repeatedly convinced Linus there was a spider on the stack of firewood he was carrying).
This one marks a changing of the guard--or rather, a changing back of the guard--as Bill Melendez is the only director credited. This is the first Peanuts special he's directed since What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown in 1978, which he co-directed with Phil Roman, and his first solo directorial credit on a Peanuts special since the aforementioned There's No Time for Love... a decade prior, which was also the last time that Roman didn't direct or co-direct a special. That's because he was jumping to the competition, as he would become the house director for the Garfield specials (the first one, Here Comes Garfield, would premiere later in 1982, though it should be noted that both Melendez and Lee Mendelson were both producers on the early Garfield specials, and that Mendelson would be an executive producer on the Saturday morning series Garfield and Friends). Roman would be back to direct the next one, but that would be his final outing as the house director for Peanuts.
This would also be the final special for most of the voice cast, as only Peppermint Patty's voice Brent Hauer, Sally's voice Cindi Reilly, and Linus's voice Earl "Rocky" Reilly (presumably Cindi's brother, though I can't find anything to confirm that) returning for the next year's It's an Adventure, Charlie Brown. The most important thing about the special is that it showed that a vignette format could work, as several future specials would partially or completely be vignette based, as would be the 1983 Saturday morning series The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show.
A Charlie Brown Celebration is an improvement over the last three specials, but is still not a great addition to the Peanuts canon. Perhaps if it had been only 30 minutes, it might be more fondly remembered today. Instead, it mostly exists as a footnote.
Next week: When Mr. Van Pelt gets a job transfer, Linus and Lucy must ask Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown?
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