Given their perennial popularity, it's perhaps surprising that we haven't seen more of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of Charles M. Schulz' Peanuts gang on screens in recent years. Fox's rather good 2015 movie was the first since the 1980s, but didn't immediately lead to a follow-up. That's all about to change, however, since Apple have now landed a huge deal for new Peanuts series, specials and shorts for their streaming service.
Deadline likens the deal to the recent one struck by Netflix for the entire Roald Dahl canon. The arrangement gives Apple a wealth of Peanuts characters and material that it can cross-pollinate in a streaming TV "universe".
No details of the creative talent that will be working on the franchise have yet been announced. Neither are there many specific details about what sort of elements from the comic strips the shows and shorts will run with. But you can pretty much fill those gaps in yourself: Charlie Brown's hapless baseball and football games; Lucy offering psychiatry from a roadside stall; school travails, and so on. Brown's eccentric beagle Snoopy will also certainly get some elaborate flights of fancy: the one announced story thread so far centers on "astronaut Snoopy", thanks to an existing deal between the Peanuts brand and NASA to get kids interested in space.
Will there eventually be new Peanuts to rival the classic status of A Charlie Brown Christmas (voted #25 by you guys in Empire's 30 best Christmas movies)? Strangely-shaped fingers crossed.
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