In 1959, Charles Schulz agreed to a deal with Ford to allow his characters to pitch the car company's products. Hired to direct the ads was Bill Melendez, a veteran animator with stints at Disney and Warners under his belt. Schulz and Melendez hit it off. In 1963, Schulz met producer Lee Mendelson when the latter approached him about doing a documentary on the cartoonist and his characters. At Schulz's recommendation, Mendelson hired Melendez to do some animation for the documentary. Two years later, when Mendelson and Schulz started work on A Charlie Brown Christmas, they hired Melendez to direct the special. Over the next three and a half decades, the trio would produce 39 TV specials, four feature films, two separate TV series, several documentaries, video games, PSAs, and numerous TV commercials, all while Schulz was producing a daily strip and Mendelson and Melendez worked on non-Peanuts properties (including Garfield). After Schulz's death in 2000, Melendez and Mendelson would proceed to produce another five specials for ABC, mostly using notes and adapting assorted comic strip storylines.
After a three-year hiatus following I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown, ABC bought one final special from Melendez and Mendelson. He's a Bully, Charlie Brown would prove to not only be the final new special to premiere on ABC, but the final Peanuts special based on Schulz's notes, and the final narrative special created by Mendelson and Melendez. It would truly be the end of an era. Luckily, with this special, the two of them went out on a high note.
For the first time since It's the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown, the special is not merely a collection of vignettes but actually has a consistent plotline. It's summer again, and everyone heads off to camp expect Lucy, who doesn't want to go, and Peppermint Patty, who has to go to summer school instead. At camp, both Charlie Brown and Rerun almost immediately run afoul of the titular bully, Joe Agate, the latter when he asks Joe to teach him how to play marbles. Joe is encouraging at first, but after he beats Rerun, announces they were playing "for keeps" and takes all of Rerun's marbles, a scam he's pulled on other campers before.
Charlie Brown decides it's his job to take out Joe, but the only problem is that he doesn't know how to play marbles. Luckily, Snoopy is on hand to teach him, and it leads to a surprisingly tense confrontation between Joe and Charlie Brown for (literally) all the marbles.
In the highly amusing subplot, Peppermint Patty is jealous that everyone else is heading off to camp without her, but is especially disturbed by the idea that Marcie and Charlie Brown are spending quality time together, a fear that Marcie (showing a lot of backbone here) is quite happy to encourage. Eventually, Peppermint Patty shows up to camp, just in time to never see Charlie Brown because he's holed away learning how to play marbles.
Schulz apparently started working on the script for this (with the two primary storylines drawn from two separate strip arcs) before his death. While the on-screen credits again only list Schulz's "created by" credit in terms of writing, and the closing credits list Lee Mendelson's son Jason (who had voiced Rerun, Marcie, and Peppermint Patty on a variety of series and specials in the early and mid-80s) as "story development" (as he had done on the other four ABC specials), IMDB lists Justine Fontes as the script's writer. This is her only IMDB credit, but she is an acclaimed children's book writer, who seems to have come into the Peanuts world when she and her husband adapted Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown into a book. Could she have been the ghostwriter for the other post-Schulz specials? It's possible, but given how much tighter this script is compared to the meandering nature of the others, I have my doubts.
Given that the previous special was three years earlier and the next one wouldn't be for nearly five years, this is unsurprisingly the only Peanuts outing for most of the cast, including its Charlie Brown, Spencer Robert Scott. Indeed, this is his only IMDB credit. There were two returning cast members, however, with Jessica Gordon, who had previously played Marcie in A Charlie Brown Valentine, and Jimmy Bennett, who had played Rerun in I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown (Bennett hadn't had many credits by his previous turn as Rerun, but by this one came out, he had been featured in such films as The Polar Express, Firewall, and Poseidon, and Evan Almighty would arrive the next summer). While Peanuts specials rarely cast actors who were reasonably well-known, this one proved to be an exception. In addition to Bennett, Paul Butcher, who was a regular on Zoey 101, had a small role as one of Joe's victims, and Joe himself was voiced by Taylor Lautner. Even though this was a couple of years before the release of Twilight, Lautner wasn't an unknown at this point, having played one of the title characters in The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl and had also appeared in a prominent supporting role in Cheaper by the Dozen 2. Also, Rory Thost, who played Peppermint Patty, had previously voiced Charlie Brown and Linus on an episode of Robot Chicken. In addition, this would be the final time that Bill Melendez would voice Snoopy, as he had done since A Charlie Brown Christmas (He would posthumously voice Snoopy and Woodstock in The Peanuts Movie, using his archived voice).
As noted, this would also be Melendez's final outing as director, and indeed, outside of archive material, his final project of any kind. This would also be the final Peanuts special for Melendez's co-director Larry Leichliter, who would go on to work on such shows as Adventure Time and The Loud House. This would be the final narrative special involving musician David Beniot, but not the final Peanuts outing, as he would be the music director for the documentary It's Your 50th Christmas, Charlie Brown and would be the featured pianist in The Peanuts Movie.
My only real objection to the special is that it revolves around, of all things, marbles. A bully stealing kids marbles was unbelievely quaint in 2006. It would have been quaint in 1966. I'm also trying to figure out why Rerun and all the other kids dragged sacks of marbles to camp with them. The origianl storyline from the comics had Joe be a neighboorhood bully, which made a bit more sense.
Still, that's a minor complaint with a special as strong as this one. This isn't a top-tier special, but it's definitely in the next one down, and is easily the best special since Happy New Year, Charlie Brown two decades earlier. After this, both Melendez and Mendelson would retire. Melendez would pass away less than two years later, in 2008. Mendelson would produce 50th Christmas in 2015, but apparently had no involvement in either the next special or with The Peanuts Movie. He would die in 2019.
Without giving too much away, the special concludes with Charlie Brown finally, unambiguously, being the hero. While Peanuts would live on, He's a Bully, Charlie Brown was the final chapter in a 41-year saga. That makes the viewing experience rather bittersweet, but I'm glad Mendelson and Melendez were able to go out with a quality special, and their version of Charlie Brown finally was the winner we all knew deep down he was.
Next week: We finish up this column for 2023 with a look at the first and (until Apple TV+ revived the franchise) only post-Mendelson/Melendez special, the deliberately retro Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown.
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