Credit: Dangerous Minds / Original Poster

Dear reader, it’s hard enough trying to get a job folding clothes in a shop at the moment, so what the hell’s the point in having any ambition whatsoever?! The market seems to have no place for “sandwich artists” at Subway, so dreaming big and imaging yourself as a famous director or animator seems like a pointless idea.

Especially if what you want to make is bizarre. It’s one thing to want to make crowd-pleasing entertainment, but there will seemingly always be a market for artists like though. Though let’s be real here, your chances of making it as a crowd-pleasing entertainer are pretty much also dead on arrival, but that’s beside the point. If you’re a little out there and a little strange, the only option seems to be “put it all behind you and retrain in cyber”.

It doesn’t even seem worth it to put your effort into making it just for yourself. Who’s got the time to focus on personal projects when your rent alone is a fortnight of full-time work or more? It won’t lead to anything professionally, and it won’t fulfil you personally. You’ll just end up like that moment Ben from Parks and Recreation shows off the stop motion film he’s spent a month working on and finds that it’s two and a half seconds long. Just get AI to make it, if you really must. Save yourself the headache.

Except none of that’s true. Especially that last part, God, that felt gross to write. The world needs more folks who are the good kind of crazy and not the “that Nigel Farage really is one of us” kind of crazy. The kind of people with vision and creativity who aren’t afraid of putting in the time and effort to realise it, despite everything going on around us. People like Jim Reardon, who made a fully animated Charlie Brown short in 1986 as a student without permission from Charles M Schulz or any of the rights holders.

Which is just as well, because if he’d asked them, they’d have turned his pitch down flat the moment he started talking about all the death in it.

An animated ‘Charlie Brown’ action thriller? Y’what!?

Yeah, the idea behind the short is that it’s a trailer for a full-length Charlie Brown movie.

The premise is this: The Great Pumpkin has placed a bounty on the head of Charlie Brown, and the Peanuts characters all try to cash this bounty in by taking him dead. Linus tries to strangle him with his ever-present blanket. Lucy finally lets him kick the football, except it’s a bomb. Even Snoopy, Charlie’s beloved dog, gets in on the act, biting off his owner’s arm in a quite shocking display of brutality.

So far, so edgelord. Taking the original joke of the Peanuts comic and adding more blood and guts, ho-ho-ho. What happens next develops the joke, however. After that, finally, Charlie Brown gets even. He cuts his hair into a mohawk, adopts a Schwarzenegger accent and tools the fuck up. Getting his blood-soaked revenge on his fellow Peanuts characters at first, before taking the fight to characters like Godzilla, Popeye, Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler. Again, edgelord shit, what are you gonna do?

Now, I didn’t want to blow your mind or anything, but this was a passion project. Reardon made this because he was tickled by the concept and put it together without a budget with a bunch of his friends. So why does this matter today? Because Jim Reardon was noticed as a result of this short film, he got his first writing jobs in animation because of it. He then went on to become one of the most respected figures in American animation.

He directed several of the best episodes of The Simpsons ever before. Then he started working as a writer for Pixar. This culminated in securing a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the 81st Academy Awards for his work on a little picture you may have heard of called Wall-E. A career that began two decades before with a no doubt deeply stoned idea of “what if Charlie Brown became Arnold Schwarzenegger?”

So, make that weird shit no one will watch. You never know what might happen!