Subscribe!This Is America, Charlie Brown (1988)
Originally posted on 07 March 2026First episode title: The Mayflower Voyagers
How familiar with the show am I?: Of course I've heard of Charlie Brown, but I wasn't aware of this particular show before.
When I first saw the title of this show, I read it more cynically than it was intended, and thought this was going to be some kind of satire about modern life. Instead, it's the history of the United States with the Peanuts characters plopped into it, starting with this episode that focuses on the journey of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower.
Like in actual history, in 1620, a ship called the Mayflower leaves Plymouth in England to take the Pilgrims to America. Life on the ship is horrible, with many getting sick in the crowded conditions, and a storm tipping people overboard.
Eventually they reach the New World, landing in Massachusetts at what is now Provincetown, and the Pilgrims explore the land but are unable to find a good place to settle, with many of them having to stay on the ship in the unsanitary conditions. The explorers sight some Native Americans but the natives flee from them. They give up trying to find somewhere suitable in that area and sail on to the area now named Plymouth after their starting point. They are able to start building their settlement, but conditions continue to worsen through the winter - a town hall is built and is immediately repurposed as a hospital. The ill health of many of the adults mean that the children have to take over the chores.
After the winter, half the original voyagers have died. The survivors are debating returning to England when a Native American named Samoset approaches, surprises them by speaking in broken English that he learned from other colonies, and welcomes them. He explains that a tribe that had previously lived in this area had been wiped out by a plague, explaining its emptiness, and promises to bring them the one survivor of that tribe, named Squanto. Squanto, who speaks English perfectly, explains to the Pilgrims the story of his life, involving being kidnapped by Englishmen and taken to Spain before finally being able to escape back to America. Then he teaches them techniques for fishing and farming. Life improves for the Pilgrims throughout the summer, and they ally with a native chief called Massasoit, with whose people they celebrate the first Thanksgiving.
And in amongst all this are Snoopy and Charlie Brown and everyone else.
I have to say that this show was a little bit underwhelming - large sections of it consist of narration (from Charlie Brown himself) that could be straight out of a history book, over animation that occasionally includes Charlie Brown characters. It does of course also switch to actual gags involving those characters, but they come too far apart for my liking. Another oddity is that the actual Charlie Brown comic strips and cartoons famously never clearly show you any of the adult characters. So, this cartoon has had to invent adults drawn in the Charlie Brown art style, alongside the much more familiar-looking kids.
I don't know much about American history myself, not being from there, so I had a skim of the actual history to see if there was anything significantly different, expecting this show to participate in the typical whitewashing. It doesn't seem to have been too bad here, and these were certainly some of the friendlier interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, although the real English people did describe the natives pretty poorly in their writings even while they were being all friendly with them.
Like many Peanuts adaptations, the kids are being played by actual kids. Combined with the "acting out real history" aspect, it really gives the vibe of a school play, which does suit the classic Charlie Brown style.
Snoopy (the dog) and Woodstock (the little bird) get a nice lot of playful moments in this. The fact that neither of them speak means that some of it can happen while the narration is ongoing, adding some levity to those otherwise dry sections.
Lucy takes centre stage for a lot of the bits with the kids, being the loud, bossy one - she has a lot of scenes with Charlie Brown and Linus. A highlight is on the boat during the trip, when Lucy tells Charlie not to let the storm bother him, and then it rocks the boat enough for all three of them to topple over cartoonishly.
On land, when things are going badly in the winter, Charlie and Linus have quite a morbid conversation about the amount of deaths amongst the travellers. It's obviously meant to evoke sympathy, but there is something unintentionally funny about seeing famous comic strip character Charlie Brown say "Linus, do you think we're all going to die?"
The most memorable sketch with the Peanuts kids is one with Marcie and Peppermint Patty. If you don't know them, Patty is a tomboy, Marcie always calls her "sir", and they are often interpreted by fans as a lesbian couple. In the scene, as they are gathering wood, Marcie is afraid of everything, Patty tells her to be brave, and then Marcie pretends there is a snake in the grass to make Patty run screaming. Afterwards, Marcie says that she isn't afraid any more because the way they both ran makes her believe they could outrun anything, and Patty calls her weird.
At one point, Lucy and Sally (Charlie Brown's sister) have a conversation about Captain Myles Standish, the colony's military commander, where Lucy is practically swooning over him. This is one part where they are downplaying some unfortunate history - brief reference is made to the idea of him training everyone to fight in case the natives attack, but in reality he led several "pre-emptive" attacks of his own.
Speaking of the natives, because of the time period they are referred to as "Indians" - there are certainly worse things they got called back then. It's historical fact that Samoset's English wasn't as good as Squanto's, but it does result in Samoset feeling uncomfortably like a stereotype in the way he's represented. Squanto is probably portrayed about as respectfully as you could expect.
Anyway, as I said to start with, this show wasn't doing all that much for me. It was hard to find much to write about because so much of the running time is taken up by narration of historical events - the good jokes when they do come are like diamonds in the rough.
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