Merry Christmas! Are you having a wonderful day? I am already a little hung over. So–one of our Christmas traditions is watching that “Charlie Brown Christmas” animated movie. I have been watching this since I was a kid (along with the Halloween special), and I just this year realized—“Hey, those kids are totally mean to Charlie Brown.” This year, the young nephews of the family (ages 4 and 7) were watching, and they cleverly pointed out the flaw in the story that I have never been able to quite put my finger on. “Everyone in that town is a bully.”
With that in mind, we went over it again and made a list of abnormalities in the Charlie Brown series.
Lucy is a complete bitch. Charlie Brown is enabling her and he is her apologist. The football is a metaphor for their relationship, which will always end up in Charlie with a black eye.
Every other kid in that community is a bully, except for Linus, who also gets bullied. Lucy wants to give him “five good reasons” to do what she wants. She’s going to punch him the face.
Even Snoopy is mean to him.
Why does no one call social services for poor pigpen? That kid has lice at the very least. Further proof that this is a toxic vortex filled only with adults who sound like muted trombones
Charlie Brown knows he is depressed, so he reaches out to LUCY, who frankly is the # 1 cause for his depression. This is like the battered wife in Sleeping with the Enemy paying her obsessive and weird husband to tell her that she’s the problem. Get a new doctor, Charlie Brown—he will tell you to break the abuse cycle and move out of that environment.
Don’t get me wrong—we’re probably not going to stop watching these, but it’s interesting to think of them in a different way, don’t you think?
