Red and Rover by Brian Basset for December 15, 2012

LOL – funny how that works!

I guess even Charlie Brown is not averse to a Christmas bonus!

That’s nothing compared to 40 years after the original air date.

They had to ‘pad it out’ to fill a 1/2 hour time slot.

Memories.

Somehow, it wasn’t Charlie Brown Christmas without those Dolly Madison commercials.

I remember seeing it with mostly ads for things you wouldn’t buy as presents, like Mounds. (That might work as a stocking stuffer, but still.)

Back in the day — when it first premiered, when I was a kid (about 260 pounds ago) — there weren’t all that many commercials in it, really. But over the years as the almighty ad dollar has become more the focus than the program it’s supposed to support, it’s reached a point where any given show is practically half advertising. Star Trek suffered from some horrible editing in syndication so that more ads could be squeezed into an episode; that line of thinking hasn’t gotten any better, either in syndie or at the networks.

To bad they had to cut out some of the scenes to fit in today’s amount of commercials.