Hacker Cinema
A Charlie Brown Christmas
1965 · Film · short · 25 min
Directed by Bill Melendez
When Charlie Brown complains about the overwhelming materialism that he sees amongst everyone during the Christmas season, Lucy suggests that he become director of the school Christmas pageant. Charlie Brown accepts, but it is a frustrating struggle. When an attempt to restore the proper spirit with a forlorn little fir Christmas tree fails, he needs Linus' help to learn the meaning of Christmas.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Aha. I'm showing my age. I didn't know there was a "Peanuts" movie. I was talking about the tune "Linus and Lucy" which was the theme for the original animated TV show "A Charlie Brown Christmas."
(And I shouldn't have called it a song, as there are no words).
Terrible.
Imagine that you want to make a film that is an unholy amalgam of Scrooge, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Dead Poets' Society and The Breakfast Club. Imagine that your audience is oblivious to any nuance and you're not so creative, so you will need to employ the standard tropes of bratty prep school kids, mother whose son was killed before his time, bookish professor with a heart of gold and life lessons at the end for all our protagonists.
Trowel on the schmaltz like it's wet concrete and multiply the cringe by 1000. Now you have a decent description of this movie.
That's a timely question with the holidays coming up. A lot of people will be wanting to watch movies from the 1940's and 50's. Many of them don't realize those works are still under copyright.
It's not just hypothetical. In our family we subscribe to 3 or 4 streaming services, but last year we still had to pay $5 to watch It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a movie that was literally in the public domain for 20 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) wasn't available at any price, except with ads that stretched its 25-minute runtime to nearly an hour. We pirated that one. I don't think most people would think there was anything wrong with that.