Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown-Locations Revisited

In a blog post about 6 months ago, I wrote about the inspiration for the location of the Château du Mal Voisin from the 1980 Peanuts movie “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back).”  With most of my “filming location” posts, I like to go into more detail and include more than just one or two scenes.  However, at the time, I was limited in that Google Street View went no where near the town of Le Héron.  So I was stuck with just a few satellite images of the location, as well as a few pictures found in Google Images.  That, however, has changed.

Using Google Street View on D62 just outside Le Héron, I was able capture this picture of what the entrance to the Manoir de Malvoisine looks like today:

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Compare that to this still shot from the movie:

Obviously, the scenery has changed quite a bit, as the path is no longer lined with trees and a gate was installed at some point.  But this is the same path that the Peanuts gang fictionally drove across in the movie.  Unfortunately, because this is a gated property, the Google cars were not able to go any further.

Now, it’s time to turn our attention to some of the other scenes from the movie.  There are two, in particular, that I’ve been examining:

1.) The school house in the town of Le Héron that the Peanuts gang attend during their time as foreign exchange students:

2.) The tavern down the street

 

Now, starting with the school, I have a couple of candidates for real-life locations.  I’ll start with the one that’s actually in the town of Le Héron:

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The main problem with this is that the school house in the movie appears to be right along the street, right off a sidewalk.  That is clearly not the case with this building.

The second option, which might be a little more likely, is located further down D62, in the town of Morville sur Andelle, which is not the location specified in the movie, but IS the location of Pierre’s farm (see below):

 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Anyway, here is a picture of the building in Morville sur Andelle:

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Another angle:

 

What makes this location a little more likely is that I happened to notice a street number on a post outside this building:

The address of this building is:

1240 rue St Ouen
76780 Morville sur Andelle

Doing a search of this address on Google gave me “Ecole Primaire”, which is French for “Primary School”, meaning that this was (and perhaps still is) an actual school house, and one consistent with the ages of the Peanuts gang at that.  To me, this is a more viable option, when taking into consideration the location of the school and the presence of some of the surrounding buildings, as compared to the screen capture (note the grayish brick building to the right as compared to the church in the above image).  Plus, it looks like the original exterior of this school building was red brick, consistent with the school house in the movie:

 

Finally, there’s the tavern that I mentioned above.

The nearest I could find to anything that looked like this is just outside Le Héron, next-door to my first candidate for the school house.  Here’s the picture for comparison:

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It’s so close, I can almost imagine myself having a root beer there:

 

One of the only problems with my theory on all of the above, and perhaps with the movie too, is that the sites appear to be out of order.  For instance, in the beginning of the movie, Peppermint Patty and Marcie were dropped off at Pierre’s farm in Morville sur Andelle (see A below – couldn’t find the actual farm, but that’s the location of the town).  Then, Charlie Brown, Linus, Snoopy, and Woodstock take the car and drive through Le Héron (see B below), before arriving at the entrance of the château (see C below).  If that’s the case, then they must have gotten lost and driven right past the château without even knowing it.

 

One last note:  The car driven by the Peanuts gang throughout this movie was a Blue Citroen 2CV:

A very basic interior: