Episode 23: The Cheeriness That We Are Expected to Feel

Young Adult Movie Ministry

Details, credits, errata: Hello! This week’s guest is the wonderful Emily VanDerWerff, critic at Vox alongside Alissa, the first TV editor of The AV Club, author with Friend of the Pod Zach Handlen of Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, available at a number of fine booksellers, and host of her own mystery-comedy podcast, Arden. She is great!

Our film for the week is the 1965 CBS holiday special A Charlie Brown Christmas, an important film for a lot of Christians and a perfect evocation of a remarkable artist’s seminal and work—a difficult task indeed when you consider what an ingenious minimalist its author, Charles M. Schulz, was. Emily wrote beautifully about A Charlie Brown Christmas and Christianity here. Sam rarely links his own writing but this time he’s going to make an exception for his essay on Schulz and Peanuts from 2015, when the not-very-good Peanuts Movie came out. A Charlie Brown Christmas is available to watch on Apple TV; Emily wrote about the frustrating decision to wall off shows originally produced for the public here. PBS briefly made the show available; Sam recommends, no kidding, the blu-ray, which comes with all kinds of great bells and whistles.

Also of note, as Emily mentions, is Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, available here and an excellent read, if not a comfortable one for Schulz’s admirers. He was a messed-up guy! As are many great artists.

Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. A Charlie Brown Christmas is copyright 1965 Peanuts Worldwide, as are all Peanuts comics. The two frames above are intended for purposes of review. It and brief audio excerpts are used herein for purposes of review, and no other copyright is intended or implied. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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