So, here's an interesting sign of the times. For the first time since it premiered in 1966, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" will not air this season on network television. Neither will "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas." All three specials will be streaming exclusively on AppleTV+, thanks to a new deal with the Peanuts' rights holders. And just so you don't think that Apple is being too much of a grinch, all three specials will be free to stream online for a few days each. You can catch "The Great Pumpkin," for instance, free from October 30th to November 1st. There's no word yet on whether it's just for this year or not.
On the one hand, as an animation fan, this turn of events doesn't strike me as an inherently bad thing. A prime time network broadcast is not the best place to watch these holiday specials anymore. Over the years we've constantly seen the networks mucking around with the integrity of the programs - snipping out scenes to make room for more commercials, shrinking the credit blocks, or experimenting with the format. The accompanying advertisements seem to keep getting more obnoxious and intrusive every year. I continue to loathe those little pop-up style, screen obliterating, animated logo bugs. Streaming has been mercifully free of ads so far. These holiday specials have also regularly been shuffled around to different channels and rights holders - currently AMC has most of the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials after they aired for decades on Freeform/ABC Family.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that while the streaming revolution is in full swing, not everyone has ready access to the internet, and the older audiences most likely to be watching the "Charlie Brown" specials may be the least internet-savvy. As much as I love the Peanuts characters, like the Muppets, they have struggled to connect with younger generations, and play best to nostalgic old fogeys like me. And I admit that I do have great memories of watching many of these holiday specials. "The Great Pumpkin" was not one of my favorites, but I appreciated that it was a constant, one of those TV programs that would come back every year until it became an easy point of reference. For a while it was paired with the "Garfield" Halloween special, mirroring the front page of the newspaper comics section that featured "Peanuts" and "Garfield" together for a good chunk of my childhood. "The Great Pumpkin" not only outlasted "Garfield," but it's also pretty well outlasted newspapers.
Network and cable television losing content to streaming has been a recurring theme lately as the major media companies focus their efforts on improving the libraries of their new streaming services. TV and cable are slowly becoming the second stringers, steadily losing more and more viewers and scrambling for ways to adjust. The number of Comcast subscribers is currently about 15% the number of Netflix users, and less than half the number of Disney+ users. COVID can be directly blamed for some of this fall's network programming gaps, resulting in CBS putting the first seasons of "Star Trek: Discovery" and "One Day at a Time" on their schedules, but this is only accelerating something that's already been happening for a long time. We can view it as a good thing for the Peanuts that their holiday specials are considered valuable enough for Apple to be making a deal like this.
And yet, these older perennials will only retain their popularity if people still watch them, and with a major platform change this is far from a given. Media history is littered with examples. Ted Turner bought exclusive cable rights to "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone With the Wind," and as a result they largely disappeared from popular culture. The old WB and Disney shorts were pulled from network and syndicated stations in the '90s to help pad out cable content, and now they're largely gone too. I can't think of much else that has remained on broadcast television for so long in its near-original state - which begs the question: am I really nostalgic for these old holiday specials like "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" or am I nostalgic for the experience of stumbling across them on network television every couple of years? And when was the last time that happened anyway?
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