YMMV / You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

• Awesome Music:
  • The musical is best known for the song "Happiness", which gained a life of its own outside of the Peanuts universe.
  • "My New Philosophy" is also a popular performance piece, which basically launched Kristin Chenoweth's career.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Once you've heard "Schroeder", try listening to a performance of the Moonlight Sonata without imagining Lucy singing "Do ya know something, Schroeder?". Or after hearing "Glee Club Rehearsal," try listening to "Home on the Range" without Lucy interjecting "Give me my pencil!" in your mind.
• Funny Moments:
  • "Rabbit Chasing" is punctuated with several quick scenes at the brick wall of the other Peanuts characters. These scenes generally have nothing to do with Snoopy and Sally's activities... until the final part, where they pass by to the Hawaii Five-O theme, causing Lucy, Schroeder, and Linus to do a Double Take, and for Charlie Brown to merely shrug it off.
  • The whole song "The Book Report", as Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and Charlie Brown go through the travails of being assigned to do a book report on Peter Rabbit. Lucy pads her word count, Schroeder dives completely off-topic into a report that is mostly about Robin Hood, Charlie Brown endlessly procrastinates, and Linus reads between the lines on all sorts of deeper meanings in the book — to the point where his lengthy essay has absolutely nothing to do with the actual story of Peter Rabbit.
  • Glee Club Rehearsal, which starts off as nice rendition of "Home on the Range" before descending into utter chaos.
    Glee Club: Oh, give me a home
    Where the buffalo roam
    And the deer and the antelope play
    Lucy: [sotto voce, still singing] Give me my pencil.
    Glee Club: Where seldom is heard
    A discouraging word
    Linus: [also sotto voce and still singing] Not on your life!
• Harsher in Hindsight: The 1999 version adds a passage to the title song where Charlie Brown sings "Nothing lasts forever, all good things must end/I've memorized that phrase by heart." That passage quickly seemed to take on a harsher meaning with the end of the Peanuts comic strip just a year later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: As in all Peanuts media, Lucy pursues Schroeder with the goal of future marriage, which he eternally resists. Skip Hinnant and Reva Rose, who created the roles of Schroeder and Lucy in the original 1968 stage production, would go on to voice an unhappily married couple in The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Snoopy has a few of these.
    • In the Broadway staging, it shows him running alongside the bus until it gets to school.
    • He is the best player on Charlie Brown's baseball team thanks to his teeth being used to bite runners and catch balls.
  • Charlie Brown, despite his insecurities, simply refuses to give up.
• Nightmare Fuel: In the Animated Adaptation, before "Suppertime," we actually see Snoopy's Imagine Spot of himself starving to death and Charlie Brown finding only his skeleton. It's brief and Played for Laughs, but still, it's a beloved cartoon character reduced to a skeleton onscreen!
• Retroactive Recognition: Kristin Chenoweth played Sally in the 1999 revival, a few years before Wicked catapulted her to stardom.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • The show loomed large over composer Clark Gesner's career and he never did anything near as successful afterwards. He even had the dubious distinction of a Broadway musical that closed after one performance (The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall).
  • The follow-up, Snoopy! The Musical, was written by a different team and is largely considered inferior, though it still gets performed by school and community troupes.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Some fans don't care for the fact that Snoopy's thoughts are verbalized (and sung) out loud in the show (or its Animated Adaptation), much preferring the more common Speechless/Silent Bob portrayal of Snoopy seen in the animated specials. Ironically, this is Truer to the Text, since Snoopy does have dialogue in the comic strips in the form of Thought Bubble Speech and is quite verbose.^note The reason why Snoopy does not have dialogue in the animated specials was that Charles M. Schultz forbade him from having dialogue (outside of this and the later animated adaptation of Snoopy the Musical).

  • However there are some fans who really loved Robert Towers and/or Cam Clarke’s portrayal of Snoopy in the two musical tv specials, and thought it was a shame neither were ever used again for his voice, even if Schulz never wanted Snoopy to have dialogue in the cartoons.

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