Martianinvader
12-02-2003, 03:01 AM
It's a good thing Gilmore Girls is a repeat, because tonight (Tuesday night, not Monday night...technically I can say that) is the annual airing of Charlie Brown Christmas. Last year, they did something interesting and added an additional half-hour of new material, unrelated to the original special.
It was based on the strips, like all these are(even the original had several gags stolen from strips). One thing that bothers me about these new ones, though, is the fact that the timing of the original strips is something else from what is shown onscreen. They just have kids read the dialogue lines one after another flatly, and it ruins some gags. I remember seeing one scene last year where Lucy suspected Linus of something, and he said he hadn't done it, so Lucy stormed off. Then Linus said, "Off the old hookeroo!"
But THIS Linus said it this way: "Off the old HOOKeroo?" The kid reading the line messed up. There's no way anyone would get "Hookeroo" if the sentence wasn't inflected in the right area, and it really wasn't. Four or five million viewers said, "Huh?"
This year we should be seeing these "new" moments again, as well as a third Peanuts christmas special. Yes, I said third...don't forget 1992's "It's Christmastime again, Charlie Brown." Some things were also done wrong in that one too...many strips were linked together and none of the dialogue was taken out, so some characters repeated the same things two or three times. Producer Melendez, who's always done the specials, shouldn't be so careless...it just ends up looking bad.
It was based on the strips, like all these are(even the original had several gags stolen from strips). One thing that bothers me about these new ones, though, is the fact that the timing of the original strips is something else from what is shown onscreen. They just have kids read the dialogue lines one after another flatly, and it ruins some gags. I remember seeing one scene last year where Lucy suspected Linus of something, and he said he hadn't done it, so Lucy stormed off. Then Linus said, "Off the old hookeroo!"
But THIS Linus said it this way: "Off the old HOOKeroo?" The kid reading the line messed up. There's no way anyone would get "Hookeroo" if the sentence wasn't inflected in the right area, and it really wasn't. Four or five million viewers said, "Huh?"
This year we should be seeing these "new" moments again, as well as a third Peanuts christmas special. Yes, I said third...don't forget 1992's "It's Christmastime again, Charlie Brown." Some things were also done wrong in that one too...many strips were linked together and none of the dialogue was taken out, so some characters repeated the same things two or three times. Producer Melendez, who's always done the specials, shouldn't be so careless...it just ends up looking bad.