Well, I was disappointed by I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown last night.
Lucy and Linus' little brother, Rerun, wants a dog. That's the storyline in what should have been a short, funny little story. Instead they stuck it into an hour timeslot; even without the commercials it probably ran 42 minutes and the story was stretched out to the limit. The animation was very crisp and nice, Rerun got off one really good line ("They were having a contest about crabby older sisters at school. I won!"), and there was one funny visual sequence with Snoopy collecting the musical notes that "poured" from Schroeder's piano; they tumbled into a wastebasket, then Snoopy used them to decorate a musical Christmas tree.
Aside from the story being overlong, the kids' voices sounded too old in many instances, especially Lucy. One of the charms of the original stories was that they used real children's voices; most of these voices sounded like teenagers. (I'll probably find out they were all 9- and 10-year-olds; maybe it's just all those hormones in the milk and in chicken--they sure didn't sound like little kids to me.) The story meandered too much, and in one really absurd scene, Lucy was so out of character that it was sad: seeing that Snoopy's brother Spike is thin from his trip from Arizona, she volunteers to nurse him (you even see her in a nurse's uniform). While Lucy's softer side has come out occasionally--she collects candy for Linus and then takes him home from the pumpkin patch in It's the Great Pumpkin, for example--I can't see her nursing a stranger, especially a dog!
Sorry, this won't be on my annual list any time soon.
On the other hand, I can watch my old Ask the Manager Christmas tapes and still get a laugh at the verbal banter between Dana and Joe and later Dana and Dan. The programming is long gone--indeed TV38 in Boston has been "Borg-ized" into just another UPN station--but the absurd antics of these guys still bring the chuckles--and the occasional tear.
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