Not to mix my classic Holiday Specials, but I feel like a real Grinch giving this one a mediocre score. I mean, c’mon… it’s Chuck and Snoopy and Woodstock and the gang with archival interviews with Charles Schultz. What kind of Lucy with a Football would give that a bad score?

Well… this is a pretty bare-bones, surface-level overview of the Peanuts story. It gives a little backstory for Mr. Schultz as a lonely child, joining the military in WW2, writing the first successful Peanuts strips, and that sort of thing. It then talks broadly about the cultural impact of Peanuts, giving very basic backgrounds of, for example, the televised holiday specials. It covers most of the core Peanuts characters and what they meant to various celebrities who are interviewed. Not everyone gets a segment… Justice for Marcie!

But very little of this goes into any real depth. It was interesting to see how transgressive adding Franklin was in 1968… and that Shultz put him in school with the rest of the kids despite what the newspaper publishers demanded. That’s interesting. What else? Nothing even about Woodstock? The scandal!

A big portion of this barely 50 minute documentary is taken up with what I think is a new animated short about Charlie Brown having to write an essay of who he is. In other words, a cartoon commenting upon the documentary itself. At least I think this is new but I’m hardly a later-day Peanuts expert. All I know for sure is that it took up a lot of running time that could have been spent on more detail, more depth.

Oh well. It’s free if you have Apple TV+ and who doesn’t have Apple TV+? Sigh.

Score: 72