Good news for those who love Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and all of the gang from the original Peanuts strip or those who grew up watching the Peanuts gang on television, as these popular characters created by Charles Schultz will be returning to television. This is everything known about the Peanuts gang return to television release date and news.
According to The Verge, Charlie Brown and his friends are returning to American TV sets next month. It will appear on Boomerang on May 9th. If you are not familiar with Boomerang, it is the Cartoon Network offshoot that specializes in kid's programming. It was once a commercial-free outlet that ran a lot of the old Hanna-Barbera classics that are now a part of the Turner library. Since Boomerang is a good place to watch nostalgic favorites like Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny, it kind of makes sense that Peanuts is there.
If you are hoping that this uses the 3D animated style that was used with thematic grace from last year's The Peanuts Movie, that is unfortunately not happening. These cartoons use a watercolor style that should please Peanuts fans both young and old. They are similar to the 2D animated short films that appeared every holiday season decades ago, but these new shorts were produced by French studio Normaal Animation, operating under license from Peanuts Worldwide LLC. According to Variety, these cartoons began running overseas in 2014 in advance of the debut of a new movie featuring Sally, Linus, Peppermint Patty, and others which surfaced in 2015.
You can watch a video of the animation used on this Peanuts cartoon below. It appears to be using a watercolor style like the old 2D animated specials, but it feels like it has been touched up with a computer, as the animation looks a lot more fluid than in the non-computer age of the seventies and eighties. Yes, it is in French, and it is odd to hear the American icon of Charlie Brown get frustrated and spout French to Lucy.
It's pretty clear that someone wants the legacy of Peanuts to live on, and that someone is all of us. We reported last year that the Christmas special, which still airs every year, just turned 50 years old, and last holiday's The Peanuts Movie was very well-received by critics and audiences. We also stated that Fox/Blue Sky were only given rights to one film, and the Schultz family are not hard at work writing another.
Perhaps the reason why Peanuts is returning to television is so it can gauge how American audiences respond to it. Chances are, episodes will focus on storylines already done in the strips that ran for fifty years. If the response is positive, then there will be a demand for another Peanuts movie for sure, not to mention a continuation of Schultz's legacy.
