She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown

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She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown is one of many prime-time animated TV specials based upon the popular comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. It was originally aired on the CBS network in 1980.

Peppermint Patty is practicing figure skating with her coach Snoopy (in a role modelled on real-life skating coach Carlo Fassi) for a major competition coming up, but the many days of getting up at 4:30 in the morning are starting to take their toll, and she falls asleep constantly in class.

One day after school, Patty and Marcie go to Marcie's house, and Patty notices that Marcie has a sewing machine. Despite Marcie's protests that it's her mother's machine, Patty commissions her to make a dress for the competition. Naturally, it does not look very good (lacking, among other things, sleeves) so Snoopy comes over and makes some alterations.

The day of the competition, Peppermint Patty's tape with the music she is skating to breaks as she's about to begin. Fortunately, Woodstock steps up to the microphone and whistles the song as Patty skates to first place. Snoopy not only runs the music player for each skater, he also drove the Zamboni (ice resurfacer).

This program was written from a series of Peanuts comic strips originally published in 1974. In the comic, Patty arrives at the competition and finds out that it is a roller-skating competition, not figure skating. This program is also one of the few specials (if not the only) in which the teacher has an actual voice instead of the modified trombone sounds that were normally used.

Although the plot line is implausible (as are many children's cartoons), the actual skating portrayed in the film is quite accurate for the time. For example, Peppermint Patty is seen practicing compulsory figures and her free skating routine uses realistic figure skating jumps,spins, and choreography. The skating scenes were animated using the rotoscoping technique, using Schulz's own daughter as the model. Woodstock's whistling in this special was done by Jason Serinus, a professional bird whistler.

[edit] Trivia

The song on the tape that Peppermint Patty plays for her warm-ups on skating, and used for Woodstock's whistling, is the notable aria O mio babbino caro from the one-act opera Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini.
The other three songs, one on each tape (before Peppermint Patty's tape), are: Dance of the Mirlitons from The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; First Movement of Symphony No. 5 (Allegro con brio) by Ludwig van Beethoven; and the first part of the Bridal Chorus from the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner.