mleach said:
nightfly61 said:
Surprised the Royal Guardsmens' label never got with Charles Shultz to make a "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron to complement "A Charlie Brown Xmas".
LOL...actually there is a reason why that never happened. Charles Schulz HATED The Royal Guardsmen and that tune "Snoopy & The Red Baron". Forgot who wrote the book but the title was called "60s" and the author interviewed Schulz and asked him about the band and that tune. Lets say Schulz wasn't a happy camper..yeah it was over money. The band made money over something Peanuts related and Schulz and company didn't received a dime from it at least not with "Snoopy & The Red Baron". Now the other RG Snoopy tunes like "Snoopy's Christmas", I believe Schulz did got some money out of that only because Schulz had got his lawyers in motion. People always talk about how Disney is with copyrights and such, well Charles Schulz was just as bad.
Around 1968 (I turned 7 that year and was BIG on "Peanuts"), I coaxed my mom into buying the album
Snoopy and His Friends the Royal Guardsmen. I kept it for almost 30 years, finally donating it to a yard sale at my church.
The jacket depicts Snoopy in classic pose, crossing legs and using his extended paw to prop up his Sopw..., er, doghouse, around whose other end are peeking the five Royal Guardsmen in Schulz-drawn caricature. Both beagle and band are in flying ace getup. (A photo of the Guardsmen is found on the back of the sleeve.)
As for the slab of vinyl itself, side one featured three Snoopy and von Richtofen songs:
"Snoopy vs. the Red Baron"
"The Return of the Red Baron"
"Snoopy's Christmas"
each preceded by a campy, 2-odd minute long fake radio broadcast (amazing, since radio was in diapers during the Great War
)setting the scene for the song that follows. The radio blurb leading up to "Snoopy's Christmas" includes a couple of questions for one of the Christmas truce negotiators, one "General Pershing Devonshire".
Now, side two included (to my memory):
three songs vaguely WWI flying ace related
"Down Behind the Lines"
"It's Sopwith Camel Time"
"The Airplane Song (My Airplane)"
two conventional and fine love songs
"I Say Love"
"So Right to Be in Love"
and another Christmas tune
"Kinda Looks Like Christmas"
According to the 1996 edition of the Whitburn book, SvtRB peaked at #2 at Christmastime 1966, "The Return..." at #15 in March 1967. Oh, and the RG (from Ocala, FL) recorded for Laurie Records ("Setting the Pace in Modern Music"), the same label that broke Dion and the Belmonts.
As the Red Baron said in "Snoopy's Christmas"... "Merry Christmas, mein friend!". And that goes for all Radio-Infoers.
ixnay
