Are they or are they not the most neglective parents in the world? I know it's silly but who sends their 8-year-old kid to New York City on a bus all by himself, for a week? And Linus's parents, letting their kid wander the streets of Manhattan at night looking for a blanket alone? Geez.. I know it's ridiculous, I know it has nothing to do with anything, but I just realized that.
It's the end of the post as we know it, and I feel fine.
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Well as we all know, parents don't exist in PEANUTS world and the few adults that do, all speak like this: "Wa wa wa...wa wa....wa, wa, wa wah."
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If you are a Charlie Brown fan you KNOW that adults are never shown. I thought the ice hockey scene was really unusual because they showed real human silhouettes.
shareYeah, the parents are NEVER around, because it's about the kids and what they go through and what they do. I used to think that weird when I saw Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown, I wondered where are Charlie's parents that they're letting him go to France? Of course in that one there was the Baron for an adult but still...
shareIf you are a Charlie Brown fan you KNOW that adults are never shown
In the comic strip, adults have only been shown once--Lucy entered a miniature golf tournament in 1952, and the adults in the crowd were shown from the waist down. Schulz received a lot of complaints about this, realized he had made a mistake and that he had nearly jumped the shark (though this exact phrase was still twenty-something years away.) And adults were never shown again. Schulz himself had not been consciously aware of adults absence up to that point--the strip was incredibly small and he had quite simply never had the room. He would later remark that he got lucky, as most cartoons do not survive such blunders.
Occasionally adults spoke from off-screen, but usually their speech was implied and the message relayed back by the child's response--like listening to one end of a telephone conversation. Schulz needed a way to imply this on-screen, as viewers might not pick up on it, but he didn't want to actually use adult voices. Thus, the trombone sounds.
"Get over it...5ยข, please."
Almost from its inception, the comic strip Peanuts had a tendency to stray into surrealist/absurdist/magical-realist territory; and I think that in this movie's depiction of such young children traveling on buses, staying in a hotel, and wandering city streets at night all without adult supervision, screenwriter Charles M. Schulz went too far. That aspect of the plot has always bothered me, and I wonder whether Schulz himself had any regrets about it in later years. While it's true that back in the sixties children were often allowed freedoms that seem more or less unimaginable today, the above-mentioned activities, as depicted in the movie, were, as far as I know, almost completely unacceptable and in fact illegal.
One possible mitigating explanation is that the strip, which began in 1950, sometimes seems to incorporate elements of even earlier times, such as the twenties or thirties of Schulz's childhood (he was born in 1922) or the time of his parents' childhoods. Perhaps the freedom the Peanuts characters have in A Boy Named Charlie Brown is fundamentally an anachronism, surrealistically importing into 1969 the almost complete freedom children sometimes enjoyed in the early twentieth and late nineteenth centuries.
There was a deleted scene explaining why his parents couldn't go. Sadly I can't find the actual clip, but here was the dialog to the scene:
MRS. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
MR. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
MRS. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
MR. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
MRS. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
MR. BROWN: Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.