When she isn't nerding out that the holidays are coming, Jamie is a reader at Monday Night Fan Fiction at Fontana's in Chinatown, NYC (next date: TBA, 7:00 PM). All work is original, written by the readers, so if you have a brilliant fanfic idea stuck in your head, send it via Twitter: @jamielikesthis

  • Jorpho

    It’s going to be hard to top the Robot Chicken “It’s the Great Pumpkin” parody.  (It still seems to be on Youtube.)

    And speaking of parodies, the way, waaay over the top Weapon Brown webcomic recently finished its four-year run, concluding with its epic post-apocalyptic showdown between Weapon Brown and CALv1n.

    • signsofrain

      Here is a much better Weapon Brown link. After I clicked yours it took me 3 more clicks to reach readable comics.

      • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

         OH . . . oh . . .

        He’s the guy who writes / draws Clarissa.

        That . . . THAT is a depressing comic. A molecule thick candy coating of funny around a heart-rending core of sadness and anger.

    • signsofrain

      Btw THANK YOU for linking this. I’m on page 145 and it’s just blowing my mind over and over again.

  • vrplumber

    Family Guy did it ;)

  • signsofrain

    Okay, full series of Robot Chicken is gonna hit my torrent queue because of this. Thank you. I’ll probably buy the show too, in a few months once the Christmas budget hit is past.

    • http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux

       If you are implying that you think Robot Chicken made this, they did not.

      • signsofrain

        I was… oops! Darn… so it’s just a little short they showed? I thought I might find more of this type of thing. Oh well, I’ve still been meaning to watch Robot Chicken ;)

        • http://ae4rv.com/ royaltrux

           I think its worth it now and then.

  • http://evilbobdayjob.blogspot.com/ Deidzoeb

    Q: In the Peanuts newspaper strip, which character said he wanted to stand out in the rain until he caught pneumonia and died?
    A: Trick question. At least three of them did. Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy at different times over the years. (Maybe others. I haven’t read them all.)

    Which is to say, the kids were already depressed and depressing. That’s one reason why it resonated so deeply with kids and adults over the years. … Until the 80s, and Schulz blew it with all the crap about Snoopy’s siblings. Ugh.

  • http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

    I like the credits. (and all of it)

  • Henry Pootel

    Are you kidding?  With that ending?  I call that hilarious victory!

  • http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore

    I really wanted so much more from this, but it felt high-schooly and perfunctory. :( 

    Didn’t do a thing to capture the awkward tenderness that makes Charlie Brown and Louie both so damned funny and profound. They had a great concept and ruined it for me with the gay jokes and stock pessimism — not because those things are inherently awful to joke about, but because they’re so obvious and boring in this context. (By contrast, I love Louie’s poker-game conversations about homosexuality. Those actually strike me as provocative and sincere.)

    Being crass isn’t enough on its own, you know? I think they could’ve made a much better short by keeping the grown-up kids at more subtle and plausible levels of fucked-up. Serial-killer Linus isn’t nearly as interesting as the neurotic kid we had in the first place. :)

    • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

      Now you mention it… yeah.

      Hopefully someone will be inspired by your comment to do a more fitting Charlie/Louie mashup.

    • http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney

      Thanks for nailing this. I felt like this was a promising Louie/Peanuts intro followed by lazy “Charlie Brown grew up and everything is awful” jokes, completed with a Louie-esque credits sequence. There’s a pretty decent amount of unrealized potential here.

    • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

      Yeah I mean, I know it’s a dicey game trying to take on two of the most uncontested genius exemplars of their respective forms, but this video fell far, far short of the mark. Total tonal misfire that missed any of the melancholia present in either Peanuts or Louie, and went in for sophomoric, Seth McFarlane-style “‘dark’ ‘edgy’ subversion of cherished childhood property” tropes (which, of course, uses a middle-school notion of what is ‘dark’ or ‘edgy’…).

  • CaptainPedge

    LOL MARCIE AND PATTY ARE LESBEEEEEUNZ! SO ORIGINAL!

  • Antinous / Moderator

    Every Charlie Brown special is horribly depressing.  Weren’t they supposed to be?

  • TheOven

    This is pretty much what I thought of the original Charlie Brown and gang; depressed fuck-ups. Why or how they ever got animated is beyond me. 

    • Antinous / Moderator

      I assumed that it was driven by parents who could show it to their children and say, “Look at the crap that we had for entertainment, so shut up and be grateful for Scooby-Doo.”

      • http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard

        The fact that they were so bleak is part of the reason why the Peanuts stuff is emphatically not crap. Kids’ media (or popular media in general) with an honest, relatable emotional core is so rare, and the loud, stupid and obnoxious (e.g. Scooby Doo) is so prevalent – there’s  reason why Schulz is lauded as the master of the comic strip, and why the TV specials remain perennial favorites.

  • CognitiveDissident

    Where’s Sally?
    (I hope that she wasn’t one of “bodies” that Linus mentioned.)
    Also, Linus could be on “Hoarders” if he survives the holidays.

  • Karen Sylte-Munson

    Wow.  A lot of people don’t understand the genius of “Peanuts” at all.  That’s really interesting!  I mean, I had no idea this particular comic strip/animated cartoon flew so far over some people’s heads.  I’m not going to even attempt to write about why “Peanuts,” in its heyday, was right up there with the best of the best comics/cartoons ever done.  But I will say that if you think that all the characters were just “depressed fuck-ups” then you are missing the larger point that, in fact, ALL people are exactly that.  And yet, we continue to try to find meaning and to try to forge relationships with one-another.  And sometimes we succeed.

    This parody didn’t work for me, BTW.  Too reliant on overused stereotypes throughout.