It's to emphasize that they're going back to the strip rather than slavishly reproducing the (crummy) animated series. I don't know why everyone's having so much trouble understanding this.

What "templates"?

I said Schulz was "possibly" the greatest comic strip artist ever; I don't think that's debatable.

Well, then they have to get over it because this new stuff is better. That's all there is to it.

Come on; the hair is a totally valid extrapolation of what the drawings are intending to get across with those wavy lines.

What do you mean? That's perfect. Look at the forehead curve and the nose. It's exactly the same.

Yeah, but that's stupid. We're talking about possibly the greatest comic strip artist ever to work in the medium, and some of the most indelible characters ever created (whose identity is fundamentally connected to the precision of the drawings).

Why is everyone so enamored of the animated TV specials? They destroy the sublime comic-strip Peanuts vibe.

They're not true to the cartoons; they're true to the newspaper strips (which the cartoons never were; see my comment directly above).

It adds accuracy. You can frame by frame through both trailers and the head shapes and facial geometry is constantly a dead-exact match to Schulz' drawings (which had an incredible, crucial precision to them). No Melendez TV-special animation of Peanuts passes this test. The characters in the old cell-animation…

Yeah, that's exactly how they did it, with a technocrane and then added enhancements to the background with what must have been a fairly detailed 3d projection of the plate. (See video link above.) I figure the zombies in the back of the shot were added, too. Lots of roto-work.

Not that it's directly relevant, but I've always found Cosby's personae absolutely unbearable.

Sure he can.

The point was that she saw yet another column of smoke; it was a literary device

I agree completely. I found myself actually trying to figure out how certain things were done (which almost never happens on television, because the vfx are usually so cheap).

George W. Bush used to do that silent-head-shake routine, too.

With those little dots fighting each other?

The eagles did a fantastic job of pwning the Nazgul (on their flying "fell beasts") in those aerial shots over the Mordor gate. (And I'm looking over the sentence I just typed and wondering about my life.) They just swooped in and took them out, no problem at all.

They didn't create Gareth and "the asshole" just to have them die like this. I would put serious money on Rick killing Gareth with his machete, just like he promised.

But none of the characters know this. Everyone keeps forgetting this point.