MonsterHunter

The only question I have is where in the hell was Pig Pen? That stinky little fellow is the only reason anyone watches these adventures of an ugly, bald whiner and his weirdo friends. You would think that Charlie Brown would have the decency to invite his dirty buddy to Thanksgiving dinner, but alas, I guess this holiday is for clean people only. If I were Pig Pen, I’d be glad that I was having my own Thanksgiving dinner down at the shelter or wherever it is that filthy freak lives, because Chuck is usually busy celebrating his big pity party regardless of what holiday the calendar says it actually is.

Maybe it’s because of Pig Pen’s absence in this one that I don’t recall seeing it all that much in my youth. At least not as much as when Chuck ruins Christmas, gets suckered by the Great Pumpkin or runs into the Easter Beagle. Either that or because in my house, Thanksgiving meant two things: a Detroit Lions game and a Dallas Cowboys game. Sure, there was a big meal with all the trimmings. We had your turkey, stuffing, gravy, cheese and meat platter, rolls, mashed potatoes and Baby Ruth bars, but you have to understand that deep down we recognized this merely as the “pre-game meal.” I think we also watched a parade, but this was before the era of ESPN and their NFL Gameday coverage, so it’s safe to say that if we had it to do all over again, we’d probably skip those over-inflated balloons in favor of the over-inflated Chris Berman so that we’d know whether to take the ‘Boys or the points.

Whatever the reason for my lack of fond childhood memories of this particular holiday special, I was determined to watch it in an effort to get into the Thanksgiving spirit (whatever that is). I wasn’t expecting it to be on par with the greatest of holiday extravaganzas like the Christmas episode of Family Ties where Alex gets the Christmas spirit at the last possible second and ends up doing his shopping at the 7-11 or the Fat Albert Halloween special, but I was hoping for some point to things, beyond Chuck demonstrating his distinctly invertebrate origins.

Knowing that the holidays in America are all about football, the show wisely starts us off with a sequence involving Lucy and Chuck. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the Peanuts gang knows exactly what to expect here: Lucy wants Chuck to kick the ball that she’s holding, but Chuck is reluctant because she’ll just pull it away at the last second, leaving Chuck lying in the dust feeling like he just fell out of the stupid tree. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to sympathize with a guy who is such a slow learner. Just once I want to see Chuck’s foot slip and end up wedged in Lucy’s ugly puss.

After this rather pointless, predictable, and pernicious prologue, we get the holiday stuff going. I don’t know, maybe it’s because of the browns involved with the holiday, but I’ve never gotten excited about it like Halloween, Christmas, or Easter. Maybe if we started to get stuff beyond a free meal, this holiday would seem more like real holidays instead of like Veterans’ Day, but on a Thursday. (Except for the years when V.D. falls on a Thursday and I end up down at the VFW demanding a turkey dinner from guys still recovering from the Bataan Death March.) Heck, at least on Independence Day, you get to play with explosives. The only thing you can hope for with T-giving is that somebody comes down with food poisoning.

Like a lot of wieners, Chuck’s plans for T-giving involve him going to his grandmother’s house for dinner. His plans do not involve getting a call from his lesbian friend Peppermint Patty. Here’s what I’m going to recommend to Chuck in lieu of him actually growing some nads and telling P. Patty where to go: Caller I.D. If that phone rang and he could look over and see that it was P. Patty and he knew it wasn’t baseball season (because we all know that say what you want about P. Patty not being true to her sexuality, which is a shame, but she can play some mean baseball), then he could just let the answering machine pick it up and he could go back outside to continue to allow himself to be debased by Lucy so that his sick, repressed, masochistic desires can be satisfied. (Yes Mistress! I am such a Blockhead!)

But Chuck is perhaps the pussiest main character to grace the comic pages next to the Born Loser, so he dutifully answers the phone and P. Patty immediately invites herself over for Thanksgiving dinner. And even though she strenuously tries to maintain her heterosexual cover, she can’t help but invite her mousey girlfriend Marcie over as well. And I don’t know about you, but if I was P. Patty and trying to hide my same sex love from everyone, I would probably instruct my gal pal not run around calling me “sir.” How butch can you get?

Even though Chuck is set to go to granny’s later that afternoon, he lets P. Patty run him over and doesn’t let on that he won’t be around for Thanksgiving dinner. Linus steps in though to save the day. My plan would have involved recognizing that Chuck couldn’t say no and just telling everyone to show up at his house after he had already left for Granny’s and then laying the blame on his parents. I mean, what with all their “wah, wah, wah, wah” who knew what the hell we were doing for Thanksgiving, right? Linus though goes into classic sitcom mode and suggests that they could just have two Thanksgiving dinners, one at Granny’s and one for all the neighborhood freeloaders before that. Sure, I guess that would allow for a maximum amount of wackiness. Without batting an eye, Chuck agrees to this debacle, I mean plan.

This is where Snoopy and his little buddy Tweety really get to shine. This involves them setting up a ping pong table in the backyard for the big dinner, but not before they get a game in. Linus gets them back on task and then it’s off to the kitchen where Snoopy and Tweety are in charge of preparing a feast of popcorn, toast, and jelly beans. Once the big meal is ready and P.Patty and her posse have arrived, P. Patty is aghast at the meal. Outraged because she was expecting turkey and stuffing and ended up with Jiffy Pop and Jelly Bellys, she dumps all over Chuck who runs away in a huff, leaving me to look under my sofa cushion to see if I could find the world’s smallest violin. Dude, you had your dog and his itty-bitty bird friend cook the dinner! The bird got the dog’s ear stuck in the toaster and buttered it! Where you expecting a four star review from P.Patty?

Sometimes a butch gal like P.Patty doesn’t realize how abrasive she can be, especially when dealing with sensitive sissy boys like Chuck Brown so Marcie has to be the voice of reason and let P. Patty know that she was really mean to Chuck. So P. Patty sends Marcie in to patch things up and of course Chuck is all forgiving and the next thing I know, Granny is on the phone wah, wah, wahing about how Chuck can invite his sponge-like friends over to her condo for a real Thanksgiving dinner. Once they leave, Snoopy and Tweety bust out their real Thanksgiving dinner with turkey (which Tweety is only too happy to ingest!) and all the trimmings.

I found all this rather boring and I didn’t even learn a lesson about life like in do in those Santa specials where some evil guy realizes that it don’t do no good to fight city hall, especially when you’re up against the king of the goody-goodies or like how in that show with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer where we learn that we should treat freaks who look different than us okay, because they might turn out to be famous. Where were the lessons for the kids in this Chuck Brown turkey? Granny’s going to bail your spineless ass out every time a mannish woman takes advantage of you?

Heck, that cartoon ain’t even the worst thing on the DVD though! We’re going to bestow that honor on the “Bonus Feature” they include. It’s called The Mayflower Voyagers and has Chuck and the gang back in the time of the pilgrims. I think they must have cut the first five minutes of this one because I didn’t see anything about the gang accidentally getting into Pig Pen’s time machine and Chuck bumping into the gear shift or anything. It’s probably for the best though, since this particular twenty four minutes felt longer than the sixty-five days these cry babies spent on the Mayflower.

Linus over-narrates everything in this one and dumps tons of snooze-inducing historical facts on us like how the boat had to be all jacked up after some main beam busted or how they had to use their sails a certain way when sailing or how the Indians stole all their women. This is like the trash your teacher would show in grade school when she didn’t feel like teaching and wanted to sneak out of the room to try and nail the P.E. teacher. I thought I had seen the last of these educational cartoons after those G.I. Joe “And Knowing Is Half The Battle” spots ended twenty years ago. (At least those taught me that no one can touch what my swimsuit covers and that imperialist adventurism can be good for the economy.)

Since The Mayflower Voyagers can’t carry any of the load on this DVD (Good God! We have to see Chuck’s ugly feet in this one!), we have to grade this particular Chuck Brown affair on the first cartoon alone. Let’s see: wimpy hero who pisses and moans after letting everyone run him over, utterly pointless story, way too much P.Patty and her girlfriend, an embarrassingly token appearance by Chuck’s black pal Franklin (mysteriously absent in The Mayflower Voyagers!), no Red Baron (Snoopy does dress up as a pilgrim though), and no Pig Pen! I think I saw him make a cameo appearance on the Mayflower in the other episode, but that could have just been sea-sick induced delirium. Chuck this Chuck disc out with your leftovers before you get Salmonella.

© 2008 MonsterHunter