Who Are They Charlie Brown?
Posted by Rey
Nailing down the characters on the stage in A Charlie Brown Christmas is an act at ADHD in practice. Without further ado here is an identification of these unsual suspects.
Firstly, lets’ begin by listing the characters that were in the special but not on stage.
Charlie Brown. The namesake of the cartoon who at this point was either about to be introduced as the play’s new director or was being ignored after a speech on how he expects things to be run or was fuming as the play continued applauding commercialism while ignoring the true meaning of Christmas.
Lucy. Who was at this point either about to introduce Charlie Brown as director or was ignoring him with forgotten scripts in hand or snapping her fingers to the tune. She loves Schroeder, is Linus’ sister and takes all of Charlies Brown money and mental health. She has five good reasons why people should listen to her: they usually are summed up by her fist.
Patty. Her disappearance on stage is inexplicable especially since she is obviously part of the group gathering for the play. Perhaps she was controlling the lights that would later focus on Linus as he explains the true meaning of Christmas. She’s also abusive to Charlie Brown and I’m happy that she eventually is never seen on stage again and another Patty becomes famous.
We’ve gotten this far with no complaints. Now, unto the characters on stage and in numerical order.
01. Pigpen. His cloud of dust is distinctive. Charlie Brown would point out that it was perhaps the dust of previous civilizations that gave the young man a distinguished air especially in light of playing the Innkeeper.
02. Schroeder. An expert on the toy piano, he leads the group in that unforgettable song which consists of a Piano, a Percussionist (doing maracas or the drums) and a bass—though no guitar. This begets a question: what exactly is Snoopy doing?
03. Freida. Assigned the role of Innkeeper’s wife and boasts about her naturally curly hair.
04. Either 3 or 4. I’ll explain later.
05. Violet. She’s the one who didn’t give Charlie Brown a Christmas Card—so nasty. She’s fairly abusive and calls him stupid and stuff like that which is unfortunate since I don’t like my son hearing stuff like that so that he doesn’t emulate it too early.
06. Shermy. Yeah, he’s doing something like the Frankenstein. I think people don’t expect much from poor ol’ Shermy since every year he is assigned the part of a shepherd.
07. Linus. He’s a genius with a security blanket that he takes with him everywhere. The only time he let it go was when he quoted the Nativity story and when he was swaddling the small branch of a tree.
08. Sally. She’s Charlie Brown’s sister and she is in love with Linus. She
09. Snoopy. This dog is The Man. He plays guitar, he dances, he flies a doghouse and hunts the Red Baron!
10. 5. He is the brother of 3 and 4 (they’re twins). The information is never divulged in the episode as well as his sisters names but we find out from the comic strip that his father hated how everyone was being labeled with a number in society so he named his kids after numbers not as a protest but as a sign of giving up.
I might as well link to it before MCF does.
11. 4 (or 3). The twin sister of 3 (or 4).
4 Responses to “Who Are They Charlie Brown?”
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December 22nd, 2006 at 12:36 am
Yeah, I didn’t put the link to the numbered children in my previous comments, to give your other readers a chance. That was wild. I have stacks of musty paperback books collecting all the old strips, and what I didn’t own I used to take out of the library, in the days before I got into robots and superheroes. I can’t believe I never came across that obscure family, let alone that they appeared in the Christmas special. I always dismissed them as generic background characters with no other history. And I forgot about that other Patty.
This was good stuff. You should do more of these. Smurfs and G.I.Joe would offer a challenge. I’d (sadly) pwn anyone with a G1 Transformers screencap though.
December 22nd, 2006 at 5:26 pm
But it takes sooooo long to create the thumbnails!
December 23rd, 2006 at 6:26 am
5. He is the brother of 3 and 4 (they’re twins).
Wow. All this time there was a strange, pseudo-political Ray-Bradbury-style agenda lurking in the background of the Charlie Brown Christmas special and I never knew it.
December 23rd, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Wheels within wheels, my friend. Wheels within wheels.