NEW GRAB BAG: "A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF 'IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN'"

[mburbank]

Not kids, just Charlie Brown. For several years the special aired with the "I got a rock" scenes cut, as whichever network was running ti thought it was just too brutal.

While this article was a lark, I think 'Peanuts' is one of the great newspaper comic strips, right up there with 'pogo' and 'Krazy Kat', and it's precisely because of it's entirely bleak outlook, softened only by CB's dogged determination to just keep going.

When I was a kid, there was a week long piece that featured Lucy, in her role as the five cent therapist putting together a slide show of Charlie Browns faults. You never saw what the slides depicted, only CB's reactions. It was beyond brilliant.