We don’t have Apple TV+. It’s nothing personal against the streaming giant; it’s just that we can’t have every platform because that would nullify any savings that we earned from cord-cutting. However, if I were in early elementary school, and had control over the streaming options in our house, Apple TV+ would certainly be in the first two because of Camp Snoopy. Welcome to Camp Snoopy is a graphic novel compilation from Camp Snoopy, the aforementioned show. It’s a collection of short stories, lessons, and vignettes that the campers encounter during their stay at summer camp.
The camp that the Peanuts gang goes to is simply called ‘summer camp’. Camp Snoopy is the Beagle personification that the camp is referred to a couple of times when the narration needs to provide an overview. This is a good thing because it allows ‘summer camp’, which most kids will attend in one form or another, to be generic enough to where any reader can feel at home with. The at-home experience is further sealed when readers follow along with the classic Peanuts characters at camp. It’s characters that they know and love who are in a situation that they probably have been in and enjoyed.
Welcome to Camp Snoopy is not a typical book. It is chapter-driven, but the chapters are narrative in the true sense of the word. Instead of building on certain things that happened in camp and evolving into a climax, they simply show situations that happen in a typical summer camp and how the Peanuts gang deals with them. The camp has awards, sings songs around the campfire, gets letters from home, makes new friends, gets homesick, and has a new group of people that experience these things every week.
Set in between these comic short stories are Snoopy and the Beagle Scouts. They have escapades where they have to earn badges, help their friends, deliver mail or something else that inevitably involves the yellow birds being cute and Snoopy being a leader or saving the day.
The stories and the specific action in Welcome to Camp Snoopy are new, but the vibe is undeniably classic. From the font to the subtle background colors to the font and the varying emotions that each of the Peanuts characters encounter during the stories it’s obvious that this book was crafted with the Charles Schulz love that audiences expect. These are images from the Camp Snoopy show that’s on Apple TV +, could the show have as much soul and enjoyment as Welcome to Camp Snoopy? That’s a big TBD because we haven’t seen the show. However, based on this, it’s a program that’s cut from the same cloth and has the DNA of a patient, bald kid, and his optimistic dog that has to take a bus from the suburbs so that he can chase cars. It’s a summertime read that’s great to consume any month due to the simple, timeless joy that it can bring to ages eight and up.
Welcome to Camp Snoopy is available on Simon Spotlight, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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