Charlie Brown and Peanuts gang back with TV special Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical

NEW YORK – Charlie Brown is not known for his successes. One of American cartoonist Charles M. Schulz’s most memorable creations, Charlie is the ultimate clueless kid, never able to kick a football, ace a test or approach his crush, the Little Red-Haired Girl.

But in Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, a new Peanuts animated special, Charlie scores a major triumph. Thinking not so much of himself but of his little sister Sally and of future generations, he devises a plan to save a beloved institution: the Peanuts gang’s summer camp.

The desire to preserve a cherished institution also inspired the creative team behind the production, the first new Peanuts television musical in more than 35 years. The last was Snoopy! The Musical from 1988.

With this special, which is available on Apple TV+, the writers aim both to celebrate the legacy of Schulz, who died in 2000, and to take the indelible Peanuts crew in a slightly different direction. The year 2025 is the 75th anniversary of the comic strip.

“The thought jumped in my mind – wouldn’t it be exciting to see the characters, you know, actually sing and dance?” Craig Schulz said in a joint video interview with Bryan Schulz and Cornelius Uliano, his screenplay collaborators and fellow executive producers. Craig is Charles Schulz’s son and Bryan is the cartoonist’s grandson.

The idea occurred to Craig Schulz while he was home watching movie musicals like Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021) and In The Heights (2021).

He felt musical numbers would give this fresh Peanuts offering an extended life.

“You could tell the same story we told without making it be a musical,” Craig Schulz said. “But when you inject the music aspect into it, it really makes it more enjoyable to watch it over and over and over again.”

The Schulzes and Uliano, who have been collaborating for more than a decade on film and TV properties intended to introduce today’s viewers to Charles Schulz’s sly humour and often poignant wit, are also shifting the audience’s focus from Snoopy, the Peanuts strip’s spotlight-loving beagle, to its human characters.

Although Snoopy plays a pivotal role in the plot – he pitches, naturally, a pup tent at the camp, which is called Cloverhill Ranch – he is not the main character.

Geared as much towards nostalgic parents as it is at young viewers, A Summer Musical does not share screenwriters or a setting with Camp Snoopy, the Apple TV+ children’s series that debuted in 2024.

Instead, the 40-minute special, which is directed by Erik Wiese (Sonic Prime, 2022 to 2024; The Mighty B!, 2008 to 2011), explores the emotions of Sally, who arrives at camp for the first time and hates it (as a young Craig Schulz did), and those of Charlie, who is embarking on his last summer session and adores the woods and the wild (as Bryan Schulz did).

Depicting Charlie as an experienced camper, the writers have avoided including the kind of “downbeat Charlie Brown gag” found in many earlier Peanuts specials, Craig Schulz said. In their collaborations, “we never kind of pull the rug out from under him”, he added.

Charlie’s love of camp and Sally’s loathing – a surprising Cloverhill resident finally wins her over to the place’s charms – fuel the special’s first two musical numbers.

Jeff Morrow, a Peanuts productions veteran and this musical’s main composer, worked with songwriters Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner to create Best Time Ever. It is an upbeat ode that begins with Charlie singing and builds to a powerful – and, to Sally, overpowering – full camp chorus.

Their subsequent song for Sally, A Place Like This, details her every complaint. Both numbers mix pop with jazz, which has been the signature Peanuts sound ever since Vince Guaraldi composed the score in 1965 for A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first and much revered Peanuts special.

The music takes on a different quality, however, after the campers learn of plans to shutter Cloverhill because of diminishing attendance. Singer-songwriter Ben Folds, the special’s music supervisor, wrote three additional numbers, two of which are lyrical ballads.

In the producers’ own quest to maintain the Peanuts legacy, they have insisted on digital animation that matches Charles Schulz’s drawings, and on casting adolescents and children for the young characters’ voices, rather than adults who are trying to sound young.

“There’re certain qualities in each voice and each character that we’re looking for, and that all goes back to the original Christmas special,” Bryan Schulz said. “That’s kind of the template, the gold standard.”

Not surprisingly, the producers have often encountered young people who are completely unfamiliar with the original Peanuts comic strip.

Craig Schulz recalled that during a project years ago, none of the voice cast had ever read it. But by the end of filming, all the actors had delved into the history and become attached to the characters.

He wants the musical’s viewers to feel the same way.

“They discovered a whole world they never knew existed,” he said of the cast. “That’s what we always hope. Once you discover that world, it’s hard to leave it.” NYTIMES

Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical is available on Apple TV+.