41st annual showing of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" on ABC tonight

8 PM. Just a heads up for anyone interested.

Sean Walsh...

The Thanksgiving special was just on last week! Why can't they show the
Halloween and Christmas specials that close to their respective
holidays?!

pepsi...

It's been a long time since I've seen A CB Christmas, but was it
always an hour long? It seemed like the second half was newer. At
least, I don't remember ever seeing it before.

Jeffy3...

I didn't watch last night but I have the holiday dvd set. The original
CB Christmas is about 24-25 minutes long. There is a more recent
Christmas special in the set which was pretty dreadful. I am assuming
that is what they showed in the 2nd half hour last night.

lambertman...

Actually, what they showed last night was a set of shorts they produced
about 3 years ago specifically to fill out the hour after ACBC. The one
on the DVD set, "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown", hasn't been
seen on-air for a while.

Jeffy3...

Well how were the shorts? Have to be an improvement over "It's
Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown". It's amazing how the original
special flies by but when I watched "..Again" it felt like hours!

et472...

A few years back, it must have been when it moved to ABC since I could
see it, they restored a bit of the missing original, which I gather had
been taken out to make space for more advertising. (Well, the ending
that had a sign or something about Coca Cola was never restored, but then
that was an embedded ad at the beginning, not really part of the show.)
But then, they couldn't squeeze it into half an hour anymore with the
ads. It runs just a tiny bit over the thirty minute mark with the ads.

So they added a "making of the special", that had the people behind the
scenes talking about how it came to tv, and some of the kids who did
the voices, and what became of them.

That ran for a few years, and then they replaced it with the current short
bits about Christmas, that seems like it was done as filler and nothing
more.

If you watched the Thanksgiving special, was it just last week?, they
paired it with a second half hour thing, I can't even remember what it
was, and again it seemed like the Thanksgiving special was just a tad
overly long.

728huey...

Yeah, this is exactly what happened with the original Charlie Brown
Christmas. There are two other Charlie Brown Christmas specials out
there. "It's Christmas Time Again, Charlie Brown" and "I Want a Dog For
Christmas, Charlie Brown." "It's Christmas Time Again, Charlie Brown"
came out in 1992, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as their
Valentine's or Easter specials, let alone the original Xmas one. "I
Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown." came out only a couple of
years ago, and that's the one where Linus and Lucy's little brother,
Rerun, takes in Snoopy's brother Spike when he visits Snoopy for the
holidays. This special is the only holiday Peanuts special which was
specifically designed to run a full hour on TV. I'm sure that this
will come on again in the next two weeks. and ABC will probably rerun
the original Xmas special closer to Christmas Day.

Jeffy3...

If I recall correctly ABC showed the Christmas episode more than once
last year, so it's quite possible it'll reappear closer to December 25.

stonej...

Most likely they will show it again before Christmas. I think they
wanted to just sneak
this one in for the November sweeps.

et472...

THere were some years when US Thanskgiving would be the start of the Christmas
special season, with Christmas related movies that night (I can remember there
were years when FOX would run "Home Alone", and I'm sure there were some times
when a special would air the day after US Thanksgiving.

On some level, lastnight was early, but yet it's now four weeks minus a few
days before Christmas. Some special has to be first.

On Friday, ABC is airing "The Polar Express" and the CBC here in Canada
starts airing Christmas specials next week.

And of course, that classic precursor to the holiday season is coming next
week, the one everyone waits so expectedly for and really brings the true
meaning of Christmas to the month of December. Obviously, I'm talking about
the Victoria Secrets lingerie show on tv.

Steven L....

At least, let's have the Christmas specials in December, not November!