Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie Filmmakers Talk the New Peanuts Special

While the legacy of Charlie Brown and his trusted beagle Snoopy is widely known around the world, thanks to various comic strips, TV specials, and merchandise, the Peanuts gang is full of plenty of colorful and charming characters, all of which come with their own relatable quirks. In the upcoming special Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie, the titular figure who is most known for assisting Peppermint Patty gets the opportunity to be thrust into the spotlight, but her introverted nature means it’s not an entirely welcome showcase. The new special was directed by Raymond S. Persi and produced by Craig Schulz, the son of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie premieres on Apple TV+ on August 18th.

The special is described, “Sometimes the people who make the biggest difference, aren’t the ones who grab the spotlight. In Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie, we get to see first-hand how our lovable introvert, Marcie, makes a monumental difference from behind the scenes both for her friends and her community. To train for the school golf championship, Marcie assists Peppermint Patty as her caddie, offering thoughtful and deliberate advice to help her win. Meanwhile, after coming up with brilliant solutions to her classmates’ problems — from hallway traffic jams to lunchtime pizza shortages — Marcie is unexpectedly elected as class president…a role she never wanted. Suddenly thrust into the spotlight, Marcie struggles to cope with the expectations of her new job and retreats as far from the public eye as possible. As the golf championship begins, Marcie is still in hiding and Peppermint Patty is forced to tee off with Charlie Brown filling in as her caddie. But after some wise advice and a little introspection, Marcie realizes she can still make a difference for her friends and the school — she’ll just have to buck other people’s expectations and do it her own unique way.”

ComicBook.com caught up with the filmmakers to talk developing the new special, its underlying themes, and what could be next for the Peanuts franchise.

ComicBook.com: There’s so many classic specials, so it might be a challenging question, but I’ve got to ask both of you what your favorite vintage Peanuts project is? What’s the most near and dear to your heart?

Raymond S. Persi: I really like A Boy Named Charlie Brown. I just think it’s so special and just, you just don’t see a lot of movies like that. I like that one a lot.

Craig Schulz: Well, for me, I was young when Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown came out, but the special one for me is You’re a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, based on the motorcycles, because I was the inspiration for that show, because I raced motocross for 40 years. And when Lee [Mendelson] and my dad got together to design that show, I had some input in how that show should be done. So that’s near and dear to me. And I’ve always been a Pigpen guy. I’ve always been flopping in the dirt my whole life, too. So between Pigpen and Race for Your Life, and the motocross one, I’m pretty happy. 

Given your legacy, your decades of connection to the franchise, with any of the new specials, any of the new TV shows that come out, what do you feel it is that really sets Peanuts apart from any other animated series, any other animated franchise out there?

Schulz: Well, I really think the key to it is that everybody can relate to a piece of one of the characters. People always ask my dad, “Who was Charlie Brown? Who was that?” Really, every single character was a piece of my dad, and I really think that anybody who watches Peanuts or reads the comic strip can relate to one or more characters, thinking, “That’s me.” And this Marcie special, again, on Apple TV plus that’s going to air on the 18th, there’s many, many kids out there going to feel just like Marcie. I identify with Marcie in that they don’t want to be the class president, they just want to stay in the background. They have something to give, but they don’t want to be out there in the spotlight trying to give it to them. And I think they’re going to enjoy watching this and see that, “Yeah, I can relate to that little girl.”

This goes along with what Craig just mentioned, the overall message of this Marcie special, what was the theme that resonated with you, Raymond, so much? Or what did you even personally take out of bringing this special to life?

Persi: Well, this one, what I really loved about it was … I think, especially in this country, there’s a real push to be a leader, to be the person in the front. And I think there are a lot of people in the world that want to make a difference, want to make change in the world for good, that don’t necessarily want to be in the spotlight and never will want to be. 

When this script was presented to me, I was so excited to be able to tell that story, because that’s who Marcie is in this. She’s perfectly content to stay in the shadows and just help. She’s not looking for accolades, she’s very altruistic. And the other thing that was great was, all the artists I’m working with, they really connected with her, too. So it just felt extra special for all the artists. When I was working with my story artists, it went really easy because they could all relate to a character like this.

Talking about the art and actually developing this special, how do you find that balance of honoring the past, that iconic visual style of those original Peanuts specials, while also bringing it into the future and making it a little bit more contemporary and utilizing new techniques?

Persi: First and foremost, it was looking at the original strips and making sure that anything we did complemented the art or didn’t fight against it, didn’t try to take attention away from it. Working with the characters, we really, for these specials, we wanted to try to replicate Charles Schulz’s line quality. You’ll see these characters have a little rougher line quality to them, and so it has more of a hand-drawn feel. 

Starting with that, and then with the backgrounds, working with our production designer, Pascal Campion, to have these backgrounds that were sometimes soft, so that the characters could take the spotlight. Finding the moments to go abstract, where if we’re just focusing on emotion, the background fades away.

Another way to not overpower the characters is figuring out what compositions works with these characters. There are kids that live in this world, that’s this very safe neighborhood. We realize, “Oh, most of the time, you don’t want the neighborhood to feel more than maybe 15-feet deep. You don’t want them to get too small in the composition unless there’s a reason for it.” So that’s the way we approached it visually. 

Since there’s this special with Marcie, there was the somewhat recent special with Lucy, and there’s the special with Franklin coming out, what is the process of developing a special? Does it start with a message that you want to tell kids? Does it start with a character, and then those things go hand in hand? How does that process ignite in the first place?

Schulz: It’s a brainstorming process between myself, my son Brian, and our writing partner, Cornelius Iliano. We get together and pitch ideas that we think would be relevant, because we wanted to have each of these specials in the Snoopy Presents series to really have a message to them, that when people were done watching them, it would lead to a conversation, starting that with a premise. 

We threw out many ideas. Some of them Apple turned down, which we thought was sad because we thought we had some great story ideas, but we explored other ideas. Along that path, we thought this is the opportunity to really delve into some of the other characters that people are curious about. People want to know more about Marcie, they want to know more about Peppermint Patty and Pigpen.

We tried to craft a story around each of those, given the pieces of the puzzle that were locked within the comic strip. We’d go back to the comic strip and say, “Okay, we can build upon this and expand upon it.” And that’s how we started the building process, and then we would draft a short story and run it by Raymond and the rest of the team and see if they embraced it or not. 

I know it’s tough to say a favorite character, but do you think there is an under-explored character that you would like to see get their time in the spotlight at some point down the line?

Persi: A character I had a lot of fun with on these specials was Shermy. I loved finding little things that he could do in the background and stuff so that he could have these moments to shine just as part of — to give some texture to the world. 

But I think the character that I’d love to see more of is, like Craig mentioned, Pigpen. He’s such an interesting character, he’s so confident with everything. Anytime he speaks, he’s a very confident character. I’d love to see the background of him and how you could use him to tell a really interesting, emotional story. 

Every single year I’m revisiting It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and all these other classic holiday specials. Since those are now 60 years old, has there ever been any talk of, maybe not even necessarily doing a sequel to Great Pumpkin, but another Halloween-themed special, another Christmas-themed special, or Thanksgiving-themed special? Or do you feel like you’ve already covered that ground and look at ways you can expand the franchise into unexplored territory?

Schulz: In all those cases, it’s led to extensive conversations between myself, my son, our group here in Santa Rosa, which consists of over 20 people, and what we think is right or wrong. We have had ideas for a Christmas special, but the three biggies — Christmas, Pumpkin, and Thanksgiving — are so sacrosanct, we just won’t touch anything near that. But we weren’t afraid to go on the edges, so we thought about that. But we like the road we’re going down right now, rather than just trying to play off something like that. So we’ll see where it ends up.

New Year’s is a good example. We did [Snoopy Presents: For Auld Lang Syne], which is a play on New Year’s. And New Year’s had been done probably at least twice in the past, in the animation specials. It was a different take on that, and I think it added a lot of emotion that maybe the original one didn’t necessarily have. It was a good story, but I think we tried to bring emotion to it, and that’s what my son Brian just really, really hammers home. If there’s not emotion, let’s not do it. And he just drives it on every single line, basically, which is good. 

Since there have been so many specials that are either 22 minutes or, now this one’s 42 minutes, and there’s The Snoopy Show and things like that. Raymond, could you ever see yourself wanting to tell a feature-length Peanuts story for Apple TV+? Or do you think that these characters, these stories work better, perform better in these more condensed run times?

Persi: Well, Craig proved that you can make a really great feature with these characters. I think these particular stories work well in this form. It being streaming, we weren’t really given a limit to how long or short they could be, and they all ended up being about this length. It felt like, for these stories, it just fit. 

I think when you do features, what’s great is you can layer in a few different stories that can come together in this bigger way. Just in general, I’ve had so much fun working with these characters. Gosh, it’s been like three and a half years or so, it’s weird. I’ve worked in animation for years and, for me, one of the magic things is, I don’t care how much you’re drawing it, you’re in the weeds about a character’s finger moving this way or that way. When it’s done, the characters are real and alive to me. So these are little friends that I’d love to work with more and more. 

Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie premieres on Apple TV+ on August 18th.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.