7MMO
Moderator
Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts have been a mainstay of Christmas going back decades. And now, more than 60 years after the debut of the A Charlie Brown Christmas, the gang is back for a new round of holiday mischief. Snoopy Presents: 12 Days of Snoopy, a half-hour Peanuts holiday special, hits Apple TV on November 13 and IGN has a brand-new exclusive preview of the animated show.
As you can see in the player above, 12 Days of Snoopy focuses on the loveable beagle ending up on Santa’s naughty list. With just 12 days until Christmas, Snoopy “sets out to prove he’s not such a bad beagle after all, discovering along the way that the season is about more than gifts.”
The special is executive produced by Mark Evestaff and directed by Rob Boutilier, who also developed The Snoopy Show for Apple TV along with other entries in the Peanuts universe like Snoopy in Space. I spoke with Evestaff and Boutilier ahead of 12 Days of Snoopy’s release about creating a “companion piece” to the beloved holiday classic.
How Everyone’s Favorite Beagle Ended Up on Santa’s Naughty List
IGN: In the exclusive scene we’re debuting, Snoopy finds out that he's going to be on Santa's naughty list. Why did you guys decide to go in that direction?
Mark Evestaff (Executive producer): It was just sort of looking back into Snoopy's character and his mischievous nature. Sometimes he's a little self-centered, but he's also kind and caring and a good friend. And so we want to explore those emotions and basically see how the neighborhood would rally around Snoopy knowing that he would mess up when he's trying to do good. But that effort and that commitment is a bit of the takeaway from this show, getting a little help from your friends and then just trying to do the right thing.
IGN: Is it fun to get to explore Snoopy's mischievous side?
Rob Boutilier (Director): Yes, always. It's fun in the scripts, it's fun in the writer's room, but it really comes alive when we get the storyboards because that's when the artists can really go to town on it. I mean, Peanuts, I kind of always look at the classic specials. They have a fairly simple story, a simple idea to them, but it's the emotions of the characters that make it more complicated. So that idea of the naughty list and Snoopy trying to do good, we kind of knew visually there's a lot of territory we could cover there for funny and for emotional bits.
The Biggest Challenge of Following the OG Charlie Brown Christmas
IGN: It's inevitable that people are going to reflect back in one way or another on the original 1965 special. Is there anything that's particularly challenging about creating a Peanuts Christmas special when the original is so beloved?
Boutilier: When we started on Peanuts, I kind of took the viewpoint that everything we ever did is always going to be compared back to Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown’s All Stars, Great Pumpkin, the Thanksgiving special, all those big ones, because it's so generational. So the challenge is, “How do you bring a new viewer into Peanuts and also satisfy everyone else?” You can't think about it too much because it'll just overwhelm you.
So the best we can do is just make sure that we're being true to [Peanuts creator Charles] Schulz. We're being true to the characters so that 12 Days of Snoopy can sit as a companion piece to A Charlie Brown Christmas. And if you watch them both back to back, hopefully you're not going to see a lot of difference in how characters are reacting to things.
Why 2026 Is the Right Time to Combine Peanuts and Christmas Once Again
IGN: Why did you guys decide that now is the time for another Peanuts Christmas special? It’s been 60 years since the original and nearly 30 years since the last holiday special.
Evestaff: We did explore a couple of Christmas episodes in [The Snoopy Show] and honestly, we had a lot of fun just because it's so synonymous, Peanuts and Christmas. The idea was rumbling about in the writer's room that we knew had legs. And then when [Peanuts content partner] WildBrain and Apple TV approached us, they were like, "Do you have any ideas?" and we jumped at the opportunity. We knew this was sacred ground, but we also knew that with the resources we had, we could do something special.
The important thing is we didn't want to tread on anything that had been done. This really was from Snoopy's lens, from Snoopy's point of view, as a companion piece to the original.
What 12 Days of Snoopy Owes to the Original
IGN: Was there any particular scene or moment in that original Charlie Brown Christmas that you guys took direct inspiration from?
Evestaff: There are certainly inspirational moments because it's such a classic. There's certain things that just don't get done today from a voiceover point of view. When Sally talks, you could tell they would splice together [cuts] and it was just adorable and charming and they don't do that [anymore]. And so part of casting younger kids was an homage to that idea of having younger kids in these roles that are not trained actors, that are genuine and authentic kids in that performance.
IGN: How did you update the animation style while still remaining true to the original?
Boutilier: I would love it if we could make it look even more passive, but I just don't think people would [accept it]. It'd be nice to put cell shadows on stuff every so often as a joke, but it just wouldn't fly in terms of standards for what we watch. But when we developed The Snoopy Show, part of it was to not only honor Schulz's work, but to also honor [A Charlie Brown Christmas director Bill] Melendez's work because we wanted to make sure that there was a comfortability of it where people would watch it and go, "Okay, this is the Peanuts I remember. They haven't wrecked it." So we kind of approached it that way, even with storyboards like, “Okay, how would they have done this in the '60s?”
Sometimes we follow it, sometimes we'd break new ground, but it was always thinking like, “Okay, it's got to be the way it was before, before we can gently push it forward.”
Why the Peanuts Holiday Specials Are Still Popular
IGN: Is there any one thing that you can point to as to why these Peanuts Christmas stories still endure?
Evestaff: There is that universal appeal to these characters that we see ourselves in one of these kids or in Snoopy. It goes back to Charles Schulz and the design of these characters and how, over the years, he was able to battle test them through his strips and evolve them. They're so whittled down and so pure of design. [There’s] just something that's universal when you see it.
Boutilier: I think there's an emotional attachment that comes with the Peanuts and it extends beyond the strip. So even if it's as simple as someone cutting out a strip and putting it on the fridge, they're putting it on the fridge for a reason. And same goes for the specials. Charlie Brown Christmas is a tradition. Every year people are wondering, “Where is it? Where can I watch it for free?” Hopefully something like 12 Days of Snoopy can be annual viewing for younger generations..
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