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Check out these Updates from Armchair Commentary for December 10, 2009.

Was "A Charlie Brown Christmas" cut for TV broadcast? December 10, 2009 A friend just sent me a post from dorktower.com entitled "An Open Letter to ABC from my friend, Leon."  According to Leon, ABC's Tuesday broadcast of A Charlie Brown Christmas cut a number of classic moments (I'm quoting him here): Gone was Sally's materialistic letter to Santa, which finally sends Charlie screaming from the room when she says she will settle for 10s and 20s. Gone was Schroeder’s miraculous multiple renditions of "Jingle Bells" from a toy piano, including the one that sounds distinctly like a church organ. Gone was Linus using his blanket as an improvised slingshot to knock a can off the fence no one else can hit, complete with ricochet sound effect. Gone were the kids catching snowflakes on their tongues and commenting on their flavor. Gone even was poor Shermy's only line. He thought he had it bad because he was always tasked to play a shepherd. He had no idea. Is this true?  I didn't watch the broadcast myself, but if I look at the DVD and Blu-ray details, both list the special as having a run time of 25 minutes.  Then I watched the Hulu stream below, which lists a run time of only 21:45.  And sure enough, all those moments are missing.  I guess I shouldn't complain about a free broadcast and a free stream, but what about people who don't have this classic on home video? Will those kids grow up thinking this is the real version? Leon goes on to say: And why were all these classic scenes cut? To plug more ads into the show, of course. To sell burgers and greeting cards — and to relentlessly plug the insipid-looking new Disney "soon to be a classic" show immediately following. (I didn’t watch the new show, by the way. I was laid far too low by what had just happened.) Cramming all of these ads into the 30-minute broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" required major edits to a cartoon that has spent 44 years now trying to remind us that Christmas is supposed to transcend crass commercialism. Do you have no sense of irony? Did you see the broadcast? What do you think? --David

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