Review: You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown

(Another election special, for a review that originally appeared on GreenCine Guru.)

You're Not Elected Charlie Brown

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Ratings (out of 5): ***

You're Not Elected Charlie Brown, just released on DVD for the first time, followed A Charlie Brown Christmas, It's the Great Pumpkin and A Boy Named Charlie Brown (their first feature) but came before the also well-known Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (my personal favorite) and Easter Beagle. In this somewhat forgotten short, animated, as with the other classics, by Bill Melendez, Charlie Brown wants to run for class president but he has no hope of being elected (which Lucy, of course, makes abundantly clear), so he helps Linus run instead. His ambitious promises would seem to doom his candidacy, but like modern candidates his biggest worry is sticking his foot in his mouth. Here Charlie Brown actually takes a slight backseat to Linus but is still heavily involved. (Linus' opponent is a character who never appeared before or since, a nondescript blonde, curly haired kid, who doesn't seem to impress the student body much either.)

Lucy preps Linus on the campaign issues: "What about recess?" she prompts him. "Longer recess I say!" Linus retorts. "What about water fountains?" "I'm for them!" And in an amusing, and different for Peanuts, scene, Lucy even gets him on a radio talk show. Hey, no one ever said Peanuts was 100% realistic.

Since Charlie Brown and Sally apparently don't have actual parents, they take care of themselves but Snoopy serves as a sort of surrogate parent to them, even making them lunch before school. Snoopy also seems to think he's in school, too; You're Not Elected features the first appearance as far as I can tell of Snoopy's Joe Cool persona -- there's even a nice little jazzy "Joe Cool" tune to go with him. Vince Guaraldi created another wonderful little score for this one, perhaps not up there with his most famous and beloved Charlie Brown compositions, but quite lovely nonetheless.

And that's how it is with this amiable short as a whole; it's not up there with the best of the animated Peanuts shorts, Christmas and Thanksgiving, but will still leave Peanuts nostalgists as happy as a warm puppy. 

The DVD also features the very recent Peanuts short "He's a Bully Charlie Brown," which is set in a summer camp, where the youngest Brown sibling Rerun is cheated out of his marbles by a bully and Charlie Brown must put the cheat in his place. It's passable enough for young children, but is not nearly in the same league with the best shorts; in fact, it's quite weak. While it tries to recapture the feel of the originals, the backgrounds look worse than in the older shorts, and the story is uninspired. The 1977 feature Race For Your Life Charlie Brown was a far superior Peanuts gang-in-summer-camp story, though that one is inexplicably not available on DVD.

The DVD includes an abundance of subtitles, too -- in 7 languages. Good grief!