This Is America, Charlie Brown is an eight-part animated television miniseries that depicts a series of events in American history featuring characters from the Charles M. Schulz comic strip Peanuts. It aired from 1988 to 1989 on CBS. The first four episodes aired as a weekly series in October and November 1988; the final four episodes aired monthly from February to May 1989.
Due to the nature of the events portrayed and the historical figures included â such as the Wright Brothers and George Washington â many adults were shown in full view along with the Peanuts gang, something that happened rarely in the animated films and specials and in only one early sequence in the comic strip. These adults were drawn in a style similar to It's Only a Game, another comic strip by Schulz that featured adults, as well other productions that were overseen by Peanuts regular Bill Melendez.
All eight episodes were subsequently rerun by CBS in the summer of 1990. The series as a whole subsequently aired in the U.S. on Disney Channel between 1993 and 1997, then included in the Nickelodeon series You're on Nickelodeon, Charlie Brown between 1998 and 2003. A slightly abridged version of "The Mayflower Voyagers" returned to television in 2008 as companion material to pad the 1973 special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving to a full one-hour time slot, airing in that arrangement until 2019, after which Apple TV+ withdrew the entire Peanuts filmography from traditional television (the airings of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving sublicensed to PBS in 2020 and 2021 did not feature "The Mayflower Voyagers," since the excision of commercials allowed the older special to fit in a half-hour slot).
The series included music by many composers and performers including Peanuts regular Ed Bogas, Dave Brubeck, David Benoit (who would later take over scoring the specials starting with It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown), George Winston, Wynton Marsalis and Dave Grusin. This continued a tradition of using jazz musicians for the musical score; original composer Vince Guaraldi had died in 1976, though several of his music scores were reused, notably his signature tune, "Linus and Lucy". This miniseries featured The Winans, Desirée Goyette, and Lou Rawls as the singing vocals (Goyette and Rawls had previously worked with Melendez on the Garfield TV specials).
Pig-Pen, Violet, and other characters appear a few times but are silent.
The 8 episodes, originally released individually on videocassette, were released in a two-DVD collector's set on March 28, 2006, by Paramount Home Entertainment. However, the DVD set went out of print once Warner Bros. purchased the rights to all Peanuts television specials. Warner Home Video has since reissued the miniseries on DVD as of June 17, 2014, with all the episodes presented in remastered form. It was also released on the digital format.