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A delightful new 2D show featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang is just what the doctor ordered for the summer blahs.
Aah, the joys of summer — spending endless days exploring the great outdoors, bonding with our animal friends and sharing new adventures with our favorite Beagle Scouts! That’s right: The folks at Apple TV+, Peanuts Worldwide and WildBrain have teamed up once again to bring a new animated series featuring Snoopy, Woodstock, Charlie Brown and the rest of the gang for fans around the globe to enjoy.
The new 10-part series, which premieres June 14, is called Camp Snoopy and is directed by award-winning animation veteran Rob Boutilier and executive produced by Craig Schulz, Paige Braddock, Boutilier, Josh Scherba, Stephanie Betts and Logan McPherson. Boutilier, who also exec produced Apple’s The Snoopy Show and Snoopy in Space and has worked on a long list of toons, such as Dorg Van Dango, Kid vs. Kat and Ed, Edd n Eddy, was kind enough to chat with us about his upcoming series.
Birds of a Feather
The idea for a new show following the summer adventures of Snoopy and his team of feathered Beagle Scouts, as well as Charlie Brown and his friends as they enjoy their time at Camp Spring Lake, came about around the third season of The Snoopy Show. “One of our writers, Scott Montgomery, had pitched the idea of a series based around Snoopy as a Beagle Scout and I was brought on board to develop it with him,” recalls Boutilier. “We had done a few Beagle Scout episodes throughout The Snoopy Show, and they highlighted a very different side of Snoopy’s character: The weight of his responsibilities as a troop leader presented him more like a comically exasperated older sibling. It became clear there would be a lot more laughs to mine from his relationship with this incompetent but lovable troop of birds.”
Once the team settled on the idea that Snoopy and his team would need to earn a minimum number of performance badges to avoid being expelled from the Beagle Scouts, the creative team was confident there would be enough stories to cover a full season.
Boutilier is very pleased that he and his team were able to bring the whole Peanuts gang into the stories in a substantial way. “Camp Snoopy episodes are nine minutes long instead of just seven and the extra time allowed us to experiment with story format,” he explains. “Some episodes are based purely on the adventures of Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts, some are of Snoopy crossing over into the kids’ summer camp to assist them, as a good Beagle Scout would, and some are kid-based stories with Snoopy and the birds in more of a supporting role. Spending just that little bit more time with Good Ol’ Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang made the series feel closer to the classic specials I grew up with.”
Another great aspect of the show is that it falls near the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the Beagle Scouts in Charles M. Schulz’s original Peanuts comic strip. Boutilier believes new audiences continue to respond to these characters’ authenticity. “Schulz’s characters are loaded with emotions and unrequited desires that, while unique to them, still manage to be universal to all ages,” he says. “Everybody can find a bit of truth in Peanuts that they can relate to or see a character similar to someone they know. Life is packed full of Charlie Browns having the football pulled away by Lucys, and Linuses sitting in pumpkin patches, certain this will be the year the Great Pumpkin shows up. These characters are imperfect, like us, but they’re also hopeful, like us!”
Of course, he gives special props to Charlie Brown. “He especially deserves a spot in history as one of the greatest symbols of perseverance,” says Boutilier. “No matter how many times Lucy pulled the football away from him, he’s always gotten up and tried again. For almost 75 years now, he’s never wavered in the hope that this time, things will be different. I can’t think of a better character trait for kids — and adults — to aspire to!”
‘Snoopy has always been my favorite character. I just love his confidence, his freewheeling imagination and stubborn refusal to be defined as ‘a normal dog.’ The older I get, however, the more I recognize that I am much less of a Snoopy and more of a Charlie Brown … I’m somehow at peace with that.’
— Director and exec producer Rob Boutilier
Speaking of challenges, Boutilier admits that one of the new show’s big dilemmas came on the design front. “Moving Snoopy and the Peanuts gang into a completely new environment meant that we didn’t have any kind of reuse library like we had built up on The Snoopy Show,” he says. “We were starting again from scratch, and I’m sure our design numbers caused a few headaches on the production side, but in the end we were able to handle it because of our experienced crew. We’re fortunate in that a lot of our artists have been with us from the beginning of Snoopy in Space through The Snoopy Show, and they have a great deal of respect and understanding of Peanuts animation. That Camp Snoopy looks so great is a testament to their talent and dedication.”
“Some of my favorite Schulz art is found in the Beagle Scout strips, specifically the larger Sunday format, where he took advantage of all the panel space he had to fill them with beautiful, wide-open scenes of nature,” says Boutilier. “I was expressing my admiration of Schulz’s pen and brush lines in those strips with our art director, Joseph Holt, when we asked ourselves the question: ‘What would a classic special have looked like if Schulz had drawn the backgrounds?’”
So, the artistic team studied everything they could find from the strips and applied Schulz’s artistry to the series’ backgrounds. As a result, the Camp Snoopy environments are organic and loose and share the same wide-open feeling of the strip.
An Homage to Schulz’s Legacy
“What I like about working with Joseph is that he treats the camera like a printing press — he wants these backgrounds to look like they’ve been ripped straight out of the comic pages,” notes Boutilier. “Our goal was for it to feel like we’ve brought Schulz’s panels to life in this series, and I hope we’ve succeeded in doing so.”
Like everyone else working on the show, Boutilier hopes audiences of all ages will be entertained by Snoopy’s antics. “I also hope that our themes concerning friendship, perseverance and a respect for the wonders of nature will resonate with them,” he concludes. “I hope that younger viewers will discover the same love for these characters that I did at a young age; I hope that older viewers will recognize the high regard this new work has for the classic specials. We do our best to not only honor Schulz’s strip, but to also honor Bill Melendez’s success in bringing that strip to the screen in 1965. Lastly, I hope audiences will take away a desire to see more of Peanuts, whether it be on screen or on the printed page.”
Camp Snoopy premieres on Apple TV + on June 14.
