I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown (2003)

I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown is, technically, a Christmas special about a child who wants a dog. But spend any time with it and you realize it's actually about something more uncomfortable: what happens when the thing you desperately want shows up, and turns out to be more trouble than you imagined. That's a real theme. It's also pure Peanuts, and it's more satisfying than the premise suggests.

The 2003 ABC special is the 43rd prime-time Peanuts animated program, and the first to run a full hour rather than the usual 30 minutes. It aired on December 9, 2003, drawing 10.2 million viewers. For the record, it lost that night's ratings battle to a rerun of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on CBS, which pulled 13.7 million. There's a small, appropriate irony in a Peanuts special losing to a rerun.

Rerun Van Pelt, Finally Gets His Due

The real subject of this special is Rerun Van Pelt, the youngest of the Van Pelt children and one of the most underused characters in Peanuts history. He was introduced in the strip on March 26, 1973, when Lucy dismissed his birth as "a rerun" of Linus -- a name that stuck. For most of the 1970s and 1980s, Charles Schulz had so little idea what to do with him that he publicly admitted regretting the character's creation. Then, in the early 1990s, Rerun began to take over the strip. By the late 1990s, according to Schulz himself, "Rerun has almost taken over the strip."

That late-career resurgence means the 2003 special is, in a real sense, drawing from the richest vein of Rerun material available. The plot adapts strips from the final five years of the comic, assembled after Schulz's death in February 2000. Rerun wants a dog. His mother won't allow it. He latches onto Snoopy, who promptly receives a letter from his gaunt, desert-dwelling brother Spike, and Rerun decides that Spike might be the answer to his Christmas wish.

Spike Arrives, and the Special Finds Its Heart

Spike is one of the genuinely strange characters in the Peanuts universe. He first appeared in the comic strip on August 13, 1975, living alone in the desert near Needles, California, wearing a battered fedora and sporting droopy whiskers. He's thin in a way that suggests the desert is not treating him well. He began as a character who lived with coyotes until they mistreated him, so he moved out and took up residence with a cactus. Schulz named him after his own childhood dog.

When Spike shows up at the Van Pelt house in this special, the comedy is immediate. He looks terrible. He smells, presumably. Rerun's mother takes one look at him and, out of pure pity, refuses to let the dog stay -- because clearly he needs to go back to where he came from and be taken care of properly. This is the kind of plot logic only Peanuts would deploy: the child's Christmas wish is denied not out of parental cruelty but out of concern for the dog's welfare. It's a small, mean twist, and it lands perfectly.

What the Music Does Right

The score mixes Vince Guaraldi's original compositions -- the ones every viewer knows from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) -- with new material by David Benoit, the Los Angeles jazz pianist who spent over a decade composing for Peanuts specials after Guaraldi's death in 1976. Benoit's job is essentially to write music that sounds like it could have existed already, and he does it well. The combination means the special never sounds generic, even when the visuals are doing something fairly routine.

Bill Melendez directed the special alongside Larry Leichliter and also performed the voices of Snoopy and Woodstock, as he had since 1965. Melendez's Snoopy voice is famously not a voice at all: he recorded gibberish, sped it up, and the result became one of the most recognizable sounds in American animation. Melendez died in September 2008 at age 91, making this one of the later entries in his long run with the franchise.

Does It Work as a Christmas Special?

The honest answer is: more than it should. The premise is thin, and stretching it to an hour requires the pageant subplot, some Snoopy business with a sled, and the kind of leisurely pacing that Peanuts can get away with because the visual style is so consistent and the music is doing real work. Charlie Brown barely registers. Schroeder, Franklin, Pig-Pen, and Sally all appear, but none of them drive anything.

What saves it is Rerun himself. He's a more modern Peanuts child than the original cast -- less neurotic than Charlie Brown, less aggressive than Lucy, more curious and more openly disappointed when things go wrong. The ending, where he helps pull Snoopy on a sled and quietly concludes that "maybe a dog is too much trouble," is not a resolution. It's a shrug. And for Peanuts, a shrug delivered with that kind of timing is about as good as it gets.