You're a Lousy Cook Charlie Brown

After the success of A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966) the next big Peanuts holiday special was A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973).  Well two out of three isn't bad.  Seriously, do they even still air this one?


Nevertheless it was popular enough for Scholastic to publish a cute little picture book in 1975...

The text in the book follows the television script almost verbatim. The art looks like it came directly from the TV special as well, but it has some slight differences. For example check out the side-by-side comparisons below...

... on the left side is the book and it shows Peppermint Patty's phone as white and Charlie Brown's phone as red, but in frames on the right taken from the TV special the color of the phones are reversed.

Oh wait folks, I've just received an email...  It's from the Guinness World Record people, and because of that bit about the phone colors it seems I've won "Blog with the Most Pathetic Piece of Trivial Information." Wow, I didn't even know that was a category.

Anyways in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Charlie Brown has a predicament of course, and when he's advised that he prepare a special Thanksgiving meal for his friends he says...

You're damn right Chuck.  You can't cook a Thanksgiving dinner, and you can't make a kid-friendly cookbook either...

Let's get real, the recipes in the Peanuts Lunch Bag Cook Book obviously weren't written by Charlie Brown, but they were written by someone completely out of touch with what most children want to eat.  Just take take look at this "Linus Loves Liverwurst Sandwiches"...

Who even eats liverwurst much less a kid?  Hey, I'm not just cherry picking a recipe for maximum child objectionability (well, maybe a little),  the recipe before this one is "A School of Tuna Sandwiches"  (OK it's possible a kid might eat a tuna fish sandwich, but it's that weird kid who carried his lunch in the brown-paper bag that had a giant grease stain on it), and immediately following are "Some Salmon Sandwiches" and "Lucy's Crabby Sandwiches." So here we have tuna, liverwurst, salmon and crab sandwiches - how many kids are going to go for this?  If you don't understand what I'm getting at maybe watching this recent Domino's Pizza commercial will help...


As a kid, I practically lived on peanut butter sandwiches, and so one may think when I got to "Stick-To-The-Roof-Of-Your-Mouth Peanut Butter Sandwiches" I'd finally find something I'd like to try, but no, not really...

There's nothing here that improves on a simple plain peanut butter sandwich, or a PB&J. The very fist recipe calls for finely chopped celery and catsup on a PB sandwich.  I know of the famous "Ants on a Log" kids snack so I guess that's were the chopped up celery comes from, but catsup?  Did Shaggy and Scooby come up with that?  Another Shaggy and Scooby-like PB variation was the suggestion of pickle relish.  Hmmm, peanut butter and pickle relish - these don't at all seem like two great tastes that taste great together...


Now who the hell walks down the street eating straight out of a jar of peanut butter...