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Charlie Brown at the Movies: Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977)

Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown is not based on any particular run of Peanuts strips and that is why it feels so different from the prior two movies. Charlie Brown had gone to camp before, but usually on his own -or with just as Snoopy as a companion. Charles Schulz wrote this original screenplay however based on a rafting trip he took with his family -and being written as a film it is notably less episodic than its predecessors had been, which were working in daily gags and merely expanding on certain scenes and plot beats. And it does feel a little bit like alien territory for a Peanuts movie.
Certainly it is an alien environment -the movie being set in the wilderness of what looks like Utah or Wyoming rather than the humble Minnesotan world the strip usually occupies. It’s interesting seeing these characters against watercolour backdrops of forests and mountains and deep canyons. And this context is the biggest novelty for the movie, the background of an elaborate rafting race with multiple lanes of conflict that is otherwise not especially funny or engaging.
And it gets into the rafting real fast. There are a few little scenes through the bus ride to Camp Remote, including Charlie Brown being left behind at a pit stop by the bus (luckily Snoopy and Woodstock are behind in an Easy Rider-style motorcycle). At the camp, Charlie Brown and his friends contend with a trio of archetype bullies obsessed with being champions. The kids are separated by gender and get their bearings through several rounds of competition -a briefly glimpsed tug-of-war, a sack race, each won by the bullies through cheating before the rafting challenge begins. A multi-day race, it consists of four teams: the bullies, a girls team consisting of Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Lucy, and Sally, a boys team consisting of Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroeder, and Franklin, and Snoopy and Woodstock in a tube. Charlie Brown came to this camp to learn to be a leader and here is given his chance.
As an image of where the strip was at this point in time it is noteworthy that despite more of the main characters having a larger share of screen-time the only figures who really soak up the movie’s attentions are Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, and Snoopy and Woodstock. The Van Pelts are curiously understated in this film, apart from Lucy occasionally barking an objection. Sally expresses an occasional complaint or longing for Linus, Marcie is merely a foil, and Schroeder and Franklin spend much of the film unnoticed. Peppermint Patty was at this time almost a co-lead of the strip, a tomboy equivalent to Charlie Brown wreaked with similar anxieties. Those don’t really come through in this film though where she is merely the girls’ team leader, confidently asserting her authority through democratic process -wherein everyone votes for themselves but she arbitrarily gets the tie-breaking vote. Clearly some point of political satire is being made by Schulz by how frequently democracy is invoked -through their journey Peppermint Patty puts about a dozen small decisions to a vote- almost always with a predetermined or pointless outcome. Perhaps Schulz had a certain disillusionment with democracy as many in the late 1970s did, this being his comment on the absurd extents of the voting process -culminating in a moment of ersatz-authoritarianism presented as good where Charlie Brown, made leader of the united gang of kids, asserts in response to frequent complaints, “you made me the leader so I get to make the decisions.”
Bestowing leadership on Charlie Brown in spite of everyone really hating on him is just one of several strange obligatory choices made throughout. This movie frankly doesn’t have the animation budget to carry the action of the race on its own, and so there are obstacles that hit one team or another, as frequent as they are briefly inconvenient. Like the bullies in their high-powered raft routinely running aground of some rocks or a pier. There is a dramatic rock slide that blocks everyone’s path only for Snoopy to clear it easily in a moment. They all sail past a few different topographical backdrops, including through a village of stilt houses, but even to Schulz and Bill Melendez it’s not enough to keep things exciting -so the plot diverges from the race in several instances, including an extensive beat after a storm in which Snoopy gets lost, and the kids in their respective teams search on land to find him. Eventually everyone converges at a cabin wherein there is some warm fun and the gang manage to forget entirely about the race. There’s even considerable snowfall, both here and before, just to change up the environment a little bit.
The last act and change though refocuses these attentions and in so doing amplifies some irritation -especially the meanness on display. Despite the friendliness in the cabin, the girls vote unanimously that the boys sleep outside in the snow -afterward Peppermint Patty complains at Charlie Brown only having dry cereal for everyone to eat. She makes him the group leader when the bullies destroy one of the rafts and then pressures his every move. But it’s not so much the fact that she and everybody turns on Charlie Brown on a dime -that’s par for the course- but in how frequently it happens in so short a space of time, as he makes two or three decisions in the last stretch that everyone encourages him on before denigrating him for when they don’t go well. It is borderline psychotic. There’s also just a ton of poor and awkward writing for the kids, all through the movie but especially in these instances where they become a monolith -another of those things that works in a comic but can’t on film.
In spite of the varied machinations of the bullies in this part of the race -shrewd for their thinking yet incompetent in how incapable they are of just handily winning without delay, they come up short. Everybody does except for Woodstock and his quick-thinking -crossing the finish in a hastily made tiny raft while everybody else sinks. It’s cute giving Woodstock the victory, but it ends the movie on a trivial note.
Charlie Brown’s desire to be a good leader ultimately came to nothing -it didn’t get him anything with either the competition or his friends, in fact it only brought about bad outcomes for everyone. And there is no real theme to the story or conviction, as Charlie Brown is once again left behind by the bus -a symbol of status quo resuming. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown is an empty distraction of a Peanuts movie -beyond the novelty of its context it doesn’t do or say much of anything, apart from maybe that democracy is overrated. It’s funny in select moments but more often is awkward, visually insubstantial, and even a touch annoying. I would much rather see Charlie Brown and his gang more grounded.

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