Greetings to both a new YEAR and a new YOU if you’ve decided to give up drinking or have decided to go to the gym two times. I know you’ll be great, hell, you’ve already shown up to your mom’s favorite website to read words written by your favorite idiot on the internet! It’s kinda lonely here these days, but I am trying to use this platform to keep my sense of humor intact and hopefully rekindle a little bit of my creative flame that has been all but extinguished for the last year or so. I’ve got some drafts that just need a few more coats of polish, so hopefully I can keep things interesting in here for a while.
With that in mind, I’m going to go for a softball layup this time, writing about one of the best animated films of the 1980’s that doesn’t star Fritz the Cat. If you have any knowledge of this golden era, you already know I’m talking about 1980’s Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!). I agree with you that this is indeed an excessively long title for a film, so I will be abbreviating it to just Bon Voyage for the rest of this article. Bon Voyage is a fun and lighthearted globetrotting story about the kids from the Peanuts universe getting to visit other countries with adults that speak clearly instead of sounding like American adults who only speak in broken trumpet noises. Charlie Brown, Linus, Peppermint Patty and Marcie are selected to travel to France for their respective schools’ student exchange program. They fly from their (unnamed) town to England where they have half day layover until they cross the English Channel to France and become acquainted with their exchange hosts. The girls get to stay in a friendly countryside farmhouse while the boys have to camp out in a stable outside an abandoned chateau, exposed to the elements. The next day, they get a taste of French elementary schools and customs but they are confused why nobody is willing to greet the boys at the chateau or at least let them sleep indoors. Linus eventually catches a young girl delivering food to them in the night and follows her inside to ask her why they have been neglected so badly. She tells them that her name is Violette and her crazy drunk uncle hates people and wants them gone off the property. Once the history of Charlie Brown’s grandfather being stationed at that same chateau in World War II is finally explained, the angry uncle pulls his car into the chateau and Violette drops her candle, setting the whole building ablaze. Charlie Brown alerts the rest of the town that the chateau is on fire and multiple firefighting teams are dispatched to extinguish the flames. The kids are thanked for their heroics and are finally welcome to spend the rest of their time in France indoors. Even though I just explained the entire plot to you, It’s still a fun movie and is definitely worth a watch. This was one of my favorite bootlegged Betamax tapes to watch as a kid, and I still find it just as immensely entertaining today.
Here are a few reasons why:
The movie has a great soundtrack and artwork style. The music has a nice and fun 70’s jazzy feel, and all of the British scenes have a fun little harpsichord tune that plays as the kids partake in the joys of kidney pie and public transit. The music in the French sports bar is fun and is a nice change of pace from the normal Peanuts Vince Guaraldi Trio scoring. The tense scenes have a funky little jam that helps amplify the tension of the story. There’s also a syrupy sweet song played during the train ride about how it’s important to live in the moment and try to hold on to memories as they happen for as long as possible. This is a message I still feel is pretty relevant today. Nobody is promised a tomorrow, so be sure to soak up the good times with everything you’ve got.
Snoopy gets drunk. A lot. While the boys are sleeping out in the cold and the rain in the stable, they assign Snoopy the job of being the watch dog. He marches around for about three minutes before heading off to the bar to get his drink on and beat the shit out of the jukebox. Snoopy is served multiple glasses of “root beer” which has to be either just regular dark beer or root beer schnapps. I think they had to include the root beer detail on the mug to appeal to the kid friendly G rating because the outright reality of owning an alcoholic dog would just be depressing. I have my suspicions that these had to be some boozy drinks since he is clearly hung over and sick when the boys wake up in the morning to a place setting of fresh breakfast with no hosts to be found. Snoopy just can’t seem to get enough of that French “root beer” and he hangs out at the bar every night instead of doing his job. Nothing glorifies world travel like having your dog behaving like a deadbeat stepdad.
The growly blue Citroen 2CV is fucking awesome. While I may have a generally neutral stance on French customs and politics, I have a real problem with a country that will happily rent out a vehicle to four children and a dog. While this is clearly a plot device that keeps the interactions with driving-aged adults to a minimum, I’m glad they picked the French version of the Beetle for the film’s main mode of transportation. The 2CV’s manual transmission gears grind with every shift, the ragtop leaks rain, and every time they merge onto a highway there’s always an element of impending death. The car has a fun and unique personality which adds a feel of authenticity to everyone’s overall French experience. Bonus: The car also plays a pivotal role in the follow up Peanuts special What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown? when the little blue car eventually breaks down into a pile of parts and the kids are forced to camp out for the night on Omaha Beach and are visited by the fluorescent nightmare of the D-Day landings. It’s a visually jarring and uncomfortable experience, brought to you by the pitfalls of utilitarian automotive engineering.
The movie is a love letter to a bygone time and era. The amenities of the late seventies are on full display in this film, mostly revolving around the golden age of air travel. There’s giant ashtrays in the arm rests and there are multiple films to choose from while flying. The airplane even offers a huge prime rib dinner with multiple options and spreads. Today when we are flying in our modern human canning tubes, we consider ourselves lucky to get a bag of pretzels and a $8 can of ginger ale. After landing, they take a train to the hovercraft depot in Dover and ride a giant transport hovercraft across the English Channel to arrive in France. In real life, these lines ceased running in 2000 due to the impracticality of hovercraft travel in general. While hovercrafts are the raddest form of transportation, they are loud as fuck, break down constantly, and are hard to turn a profit versus against the cost of operations. I still get jealous of the gang just nonchalantly riding across the ocean aboard one of these magnificent beasts not knowing the hovercraft was living on borrowed time.
Weird and obvious plot holes and strange dramatic choices you only catch as an adult. On the same day Charlie Brown and Linus are selected by their schools to represent their country abroad, Charlie gets a letter from Violetta expressing the excitement she has for them staying at the Chateau Val Moison. There’s no way that these two things could have happened independently from each other back in the 1980’s. That letter would have taken quite some time to arrive, and how could she have possibly have had previous correspondence with Charlie Brown’s school before anyone in his class even knew what a student exchange program even was? It’s fun to look at a flawed script as an adult and laugh at how stupid we were as kids. As far as the wacky dramatic plot choices? When the chateau is on fire and Linus and Violetta are trapped on the second floor balcony, he throws his prized blanket to the children on the ground to use it as a net. They spread it out and end up catching Violetta, but once she bounces off, they all disperse as a big unspoken FUCK YOU LINUS leaving him on the balcony all by himself. I guess this was done to raise dramatic tension but man, if I was Linus I would be pissed.
“You guys left me up there in the fire while the drunk dog was left to drag over a kiddie pool for me to jump in to? Fuck you guys!”
Snoopy plays a game of tennis against a ghost. On their stopover in London, the kids go out to eat and Snoopy gets out of the taxi at Wimbledon to play a quick game. When he arrives, he finds it completely deserted but he still decides to play a game against an unseen opponent who promptly kicks his ass sideways at tennis. He somehow can’t score a single point against an empty court so he quickly loses his temper, starts a fight with the ghost line judges and gets kicked out. Snoopy has a drinking problem that is bad that he’s playing competitive sports against his hallucinations. For some reason, I still haven’t come across Get Your Dog Some Help, Charlie Brown! anywhere.
All in all, Bon Voyage is a fantastic addition to the Peanuts movies, and is far more memorable than some of the weirder ones released in the 1970’s for all the reasons outlined above. You can find it on Prime video for a cheap rental or you can wait for it to go on Prime (it does that every couple of months). It’s one of the few Peanuts specials that Apple doesn’t completely have a stranglehold on and it’s got a better premise than Race For Your Life. Charlie Brown! which is a summer camp story where elementary aged children participate in an week long unsupervised river race. Where the hell are the adults off doing in this universe??
…probably screaming their dogs who spilled beer on their trumpet collections.
Teh Ben is a weird little guy who is easily entranced by Instagram reels, and also maintains a snarky and nearly abandoned Twitter account. I guess you could go and take a gander at his Threads account but that’s completely up to your sense of adventure.
TEHBEN.COM 