Review: A Charlie Brown Valentine

Good grief, Charlie Brown. Sometimes you are adorably miserable, heartwarmingly endearing and oh so loveable. But sometimes you also make me wanna puke.

Wood Sprite wanted to watch A Charlie Brown Valentine, but we couldn’t find it on Netflix. Being a red-haired girl myself, I must confess that I always found ol’ Chuck’s infatuation with “the little red-haired girl” to be embarrassingly cute. So when I found it on YouTube, I thought we would enjoy it together. But it wasn’t the original film, which I could not find on YouTube. In fact, it was a much newer version, which you could tell from the animation and voices and, let’s face it, poorer storytelling.

The thing about the new versions of the classics is that they take things way over the top. Where the antics that used to annoy me—such as the girls chasing after the boys’ affections, helplessly stuck in their unrequited love—remain, the stereotypes are even worse. The little red-haired girl is now being bullied and needs someone to rescue her, for example, and both Marcy and Peppermint Patty are mooning over Charlie Brown. It wasn’t even cute; it was annoying. And it didn’t feel authentic.

I get that girls chase boys first; I’ve been there. We develop first. I think part of me was okay with the storyline’s development in the past because of the time, and if it had continued in that direction with more subtlety I probably wouldn’t have minded so much. But it was completely overdone in this newer show. The theme is so overused and annoying, reducing most of the girls to nothing more than boy-crazy annoyances. And that, in and of itself, is even more annoying.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia