With today’s Apple TV+ debut of ‘One-of-a-Kind Marcie,’ executive producer Craig Schulz and director Raymond S. Persi continue the franchise’s recent focus on lesser-known ‘Peanuts’ characters, this time in a charming, all-new story of the gang’s shy, kindhearted introvert who finally finds her own, unique way to help her friends.
Premiering today, August 18, on Apple TV+, the newest of 50 Peanuts TV specials, Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie, proves once again that the venerable franchise, launched as a comic strip by Charles M. Schulz back in 1950, continues to entertain new audiences while holding in a warm embrace everything fans have always loved about the “gang” for more than 70 years.
Executive produced by Charles’ son Craig Schulz and directed by Raymond S. Persi, the fifth Apple Original Snoopy Presents special follows Marcie, a kindhearted introvert with many brilliant ideas to help her friends. During the school golf championship, Marcie caddies for Peppermint Patty, offering thoughtful and deliberate advice to help her win. Back at school, Marcie finds herself nominated for class president; she also sees other friends and classmates needing help - from traffic jams in the hallway to not having enough to share with everyone at lunch. The shy Marcie wants to offer help but struggles to share her great ideas in a way that doesn’t push her into the spotlight. Eventually, she’s empowered to buck other people’s expectations and embrace her own, unique way of helping her friends.
For those of us who shun that spotlight, content to inhabit the background, Marcie’s journey beautifully illustrates how you don’t always need to boldly charge out front to be respected as a leader. And as a true friend.
While seemingly every day we find another animated franchise “reboot” or, better yet, “reimagination,” the recent Peanuts animated series and specials have stayed remarkably true to Charles’ vision for his creation. “I can go all the way back to the comic strip,” Craig shares. “It was back in the 1970s when they were talking about my dad retiring. Or replacing my dad. The family got together and decided, ‘Well, nobody will ever draw the comic strip again.’ We take keeping his legacy alive very strongly. So, the gatekeepers these days, really are myself and my son Bryan, who's a co-writer on these specials, and his writing partner, Cornelius Uliano. We oversee everything and make sure it stays within what we feel is the correct universe of Peanuts. And we try to go right to the edge of that box, but not over it, as Raymond will attest to. We've drawn the line on numerous things and trying to stay within the boundaries of what he [Charles] would've wanted.”
He continues, “We also feel that we've elevated the animated stories to have much more messaging than perhaps some of the stuff my dad, Bill [Melendez] and Lee [Mendelson] had done later on. They were fun shows to watch, but there really wasn't any kind of deep messaging that a child and adult could discuss afterward. And in this series, under the headline Snoopy Presents on Apple TV+, these really are unique that way. Each one of them has a deep message that we're reflecting on the ecology, or teachers, or in this case, introverts.”
“What's great about these too is that you'll have these serious stories about a subject, but what gets you engaged, I think, is that there's always an emotional through line too,” Persi adds. “You can connect with the characters going through these experiences, so it doesn't feel like you're learning a lesson, you're just experiencing what they're experiencing.”
Recent Peanuts animated show development has focused on exploring some of the franchise’s background characters. Typically, the focus has centered on Snoopy or Charlie Brown. “Many characters in the background really don't get as much time as we would've liked to have seen him [Charles] do,” Craig notes. “So, we have drafted stories on Pig Pen, and the Franklin story is coming out later next year, which we're really excited about. And again, exploring Marcie and her universe. You look at each of the kids' different perspectives of what could be happening. You can tell a whole new story just based upon Sally's perspective of the same thing versus Marcie, or Peppermint Patty, or whomever. They could be in the same scene, but they each have a different perspective on what's going on and that's what makes it fun. It's fun to explore their world through the other characters' eyes.”
What started as a small creative team creating the franchise’s early, classic animated specials, development has evolved into an expansive, multi-faceted production engine. According to Craig, “Back in the day it was my dad, Bill and Lee. There were three people with no other gatekeepers. Now we deal with oversight from Apple, we deal with WildBrain [who produces the animation], and we deal with Raymond's team. We have a whole studio team at our offices here in Santa Rosa that consists of probably 20 people that kind of oversee stuff and will comment on things whether they feel it’s right or wrong for the property. So, we do have a lot of oversight, and the decisions we make are reviewed by a lot of people before we latch onto them.”
Visually, the most recent efforts remain remarkably consistent in look and tone to the classic Peanuts shows, capturing everything that made them so enjoyable – and memorable – while pushing the production value wherever possible. Character posing, background treatments, scene simplicity, they all feel so familiar… in a good way. “For me and for my team, we always look at the strip, even when it comes to expressions,” Persi explains. “There are so many great drawings of all these characters that we want to use them so that it feels accurate. Finding poses that feel like something you've seen before so that there's that familiarity with it. We work with Craig, and Paige Braddock, and they give us notes about like, ‘Oh yes, maybe adjust this, or that, to make it feel a little more accurate.”
“We also kind of keep the world in this sort of '60s, '70s era, so we are not going to see a laptop computer or anything like that,” he continues. “They still use landlines when they talk, which is really interesting. I'll show this to my niece, who doesn't have a landline and I'll say, ‘Do you know what that is that they're talking on?’ She’ll go, ‘Yeah, that's a phone.’ Young kids just inherently know. So, there's still that connection. You don't lose anybody by keeping the characters in their own little special universe that's kind of almost frozen in time.”
It’s not easy moving from simple 2D comics to animation. In the Marcie special, characters sport thick 2D line work, backgrounds feel watercolor-ish, often blurred to isolate foreground characters within the frame. The overall design, while feeling simple, doesn’t feel sparse; scene composition expertly propels the pacing and tone of the story, with a lack of clutter or frenzied action that can bog things down. Everything moves along nicely.
“That's so funny,” Persi laughs about the idea of the show’s simplicity in design. “It's actually very expensive to make it look so simple. It takes a lot of research and development, a lot of trial and error. Each of the different types of Peanuts properties has a different yet familiar look. The Snoopy Show looks different than the Snoopy Presents specials. With those specials, again, we went back to the strip and looked at the line weight. We picked an era, maybe early-mid or late '70s, and looked to recreate the line weight of Charles Schulz's pen line. A lot of work was done to get that line feel, to let the line have this sort of wiggle to it, so it felt more hand-drawn.”
Persi goes on to share that they worked with Pascal Campion, “a great production designer and prolific artist” who works with The New Yorker among many other outlets. “He really worked hard to create the look of the world where basically the characters are so strong and iconic you don't want to overshadow them. You want the world around them to compliment them, to keep them in the forefront all the time. So that's why we landed on that simpler sort of impressionistic, almost watercolor look.”
“Sometimes we let the world get really abstract when we just want to focus on the characters,” he adds. “When you watch the specials you'll notice sometimes, if you freeze-frame, they might not even have a background. It might just be blotches of color, because that will subconsciously let the viewer focus on the characters and their performance at those moments.”
No talk of Peanuts animation is complete without acknowledging how incredibly important music has been to the franchise. Jazz maestro Vince Guaraldi’s compositions for the classic Peanuts specials includes his seminal theme, “Linus and Lucy,” arguably the most recognized, “signature” melody of the franchise, or any animated franchise, to date.
“Our composer is Jeff Morrow,” Persi reveals. “He's done all these specials, and I think he even works on The Snoopy Show [he does]. Just an amazing composer. And we all know that on these specials, you want the soundtrack to be jazz based, because it just fits in with the established Peanuts world. When we’re making these films, we’ll put in music from other specials as a temp soundtrack. So, when we talk to the composer, he'll start to understand what feeling we’re looking for here or there. And then he'll put something together that's just amazing. The musicians he works with, they are so excited to work on these specials… that they get to just do a jazz score… they're beyond thrilled.”
Asked if he feels any pressure to protect, serve, and expand his father’s legendary legacy, Craig shares that indeed, he does. “When you mention the word pressure, yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of pressure on the family side. Because my dad had five kids. And Jeanie, his second wife. Decisions comes up like with the comic strip. Do we just end it? When my dad died [in 2000] there was discussion of, well, maybe we should just let it all end.”
“But” he continues, “what people don't realize is that my dad was like the tip of a giant iceberg. He was the one that created it all, from the pen line, to the text, to everything. And then below him were literally hundreds of thousands of people whose lives survived on Peanuts. And I take that as a great responsibility.”
Craig explains that his focus on The Peanuts Movie, the 3DCG feature produced at Blue Sky Studios that came out in 2015, was “similar to dropping a rock in a pond.” “I wanted to drop a rock in the pond with ripples that spread out to support all those hundreds of thousands of people that worked for Peanuts, and to spread the Peanuts message throughout the world again, and hopefully get a new generation watching Peanuts and drive them back to reading the comic strip. Because my goal was always to drive them back to the comic strip. This is the essence of Peanuts.”
And when his son Bryan graduated from film school, they began talking about what the future generation of Peanuts fans would be. “His partner in film school, Cornelius Uliano, Bryan and I got together and said, ‘We need to create specials that really talk to the public and create a message that they can understand.’ So, that's why we've covered the love letter to teachers, the environment… with Sally dealing with the environment, Marcie being the introvert, Franklin, this kid coming out of the inner city, going to this little neighborhood and meeting Charlie Brown, they're all stories that, when they're over, you don't just simply say, let's go get an ice cream cone. You sit down and you talk about it. How did Franklin meet these new kids and deal with them? And why does poor Marcie do all this great stuff, but never get recognized for it?”
“So, the bottom line is, yeah, we take great responsibility,” Craig concludes. “There's a lot of pressure, day in, day out. But I get to enjoy the fun of working with people like Raymond and his team of animators that continually put a smile on my face because they don't let me down. There's nothing worse than going with a team that lets you down. And Raymond and his team continue to create above and beyond my expectations on so many levels that I get to enjoy every day.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
