A Charlie Brown Christmas: Time for a Blast to the Past

Behold, what now has the title of the oldest thing reviewed on this site. But for a confession, I... never saw it before now. I don't know why, I've heard time and time again that its a classic, yet, somehow I always missed it, to the point where I don't even know if its been aired here since it was first shown back in the 60's. So how well does it hold up now?

Story, I can knock off in a sentence. Charlie Brown is depressed because the meaning of Christmas is being lost to a world of materialism, and he doesn't know what the meaning of Christmas is. Well I've seen far simpler things in half an hour. But I will admit that there is charm in its simplicity, which does go into its visuals as well. It's short, sharp, to the point, at quite a few time blatantly sharp, but still enjoyable.

Visually, while yes this is still a cartoon from the 60's, I do have to admit that it hasn't aged well. If you hate cartoons of the time, then you're going to hate this visually. Bland backgrounds, rough movement in the characters, there was one point where one of the characters fused into her little Psychiatry stand (I have just ruined this for you now haven't I? You will never unsee that). However, the animation goes into the charm as well. It's simple, yet everything that needs to stand out, does stand out, but that may go into the style of animation at the time, where what moves is on a different layer to the background. There are people who can't stand that era of animation, for many reasons, so I do have to count its age as a potential point against it.

I can't really talk about the characters, simply because I don't know them, and Christmas specials aren't meant to be for new viewers, but people already familiar with the show, and I, well, don't. I want to cover the show in more detail next year, so hopefully expect that review next year. I say hope as there were things I wanted to do this year but couldn't. One of them being the Kingdom Hearts Marathon, but that one was part limited time, the bigger part being "I'm waiting for Kingdom Hearts 3 to get a release day". Still waiting Square Enix, just saying. I've got a week off, and a few things planed for the final week of the year, so I'll see you then. For now, "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night". Happy Holidays everyone.