How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)
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Was he? Maybe this is true inside the US but from outside the US, I've always viewed the character as a peculiarly American artefact – something I was aware of but never really read or watched. This seemed to be reinforced by most major Charlie Brown titles seemingly tied to other American customs like Halloween and baseball.
And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.
It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473
about how Peanuts lost it's edge once the "cute" popular dog was introduced, whereas prior it used to be more subversive, philosophical/theoretical with darker material.
https://medium.com/@celestineriza/how-peter-thiel-took-down-...
Is it that Gawker had lots of ads, so Kotaku would also have ads?
What's relevant (to this thread) about Thiel killing it?
1. Snoopy becoming Flanderized, as in the "Happiness is a warm puppy" stuff from the 1960s.
2. Introduction of Woodstock the bird. That meant Snoopy and Woodstock went off and had their own adventures which didn't involve the human gang at all.
I also wonder whether Schulz participated in any recreational drugs in the 1960s. I don't meant to be disrespectful at all, but some of the stuff he drew was pretty wild.
There's a set of strips where Charlie Brown sees the moon as a baseball (and later, Alfred E. Neuman's head), another where Snoopy dreams of Charlie Brown flying him like a kite and him crashing to the ground in pieces, and a horror-movie-like series where Linus's blanket attacks Lucy. All very strange.
Snoopy shows up in the third strip, by which point the count of total appearances is Patty: 3, Charlie Brown: 2, Shermy: 1, and Snoopy: 1.
He appears again in strip 5, but it takes until his third appearance (in strip 8) before he can be identified as Charlie Brown's dog. He remains somewhat ambiguous:
strip 8: Charlie Brown is reading at home, accompanied by Snoopy.
strip 11: Shermy is eating (presumably at home?), accompanied by Snoopy.
strip 12: Shermy takes Snoopy for a walk, holding him on a leash.
1950-10-21: Shermy, Patty, and Snoopy are walking together when they encounter Charlie Brown.
1950-10-25: Patty is speaking on the phone (at home?); Snoopy is present.
1950-11-07: Charlie Brown delivers a lecture to Snoopy beginning "You don't seem to realize that I'm the boss in this house!"; he is interrupted by a call from his mother.
1950-11-13: Patty receives Charlie Brown at her home; Snoopy is already present.
1950-11-25: Charlie Brown says goodbye to Snoopy before going to bed; Snoopy is shown to be able to hear him as he says "I'll see you in the morning" from his bedroom.
1950-12-05: Patty is walking Snoopy on a leash when they run into Charlie Brown.
1950-12-13: Snoopy is playing on the footboard of Charlie Brown's bed while he tries to go to sleep.
1951-01-23: Charlie Brown is writing in his diary while Snoopy watches.
1951-02-02: Charlie Brown yells at Snoopy to stop following him; Patty intervenes to point out that Snoopy "lives in that direction", which you'd expect Charlie Brown to know if they lived together.
(1951-02-07: Violet is introduced.)
1951-04-27: Shermy is building a birdhouse; Charlie Brown assumes it's supposed to be a doghouse for Snoopy.
1951-05-22: An unknown character calls Snoopy to suppertime.
(1951-05-30: Schroeder is introduced.)
1951-08-27: Schroeder (who is a baby) eats from Snoopy's dog dish; Snoopy gets revenge by climbing into Schroeder's high chair and eating from his tray. Snoopy's dish (which is labeled "SNOOPY") is next to the high chair, implying that Snoopy lives with Schroeder.
1951-09-04: Charlie Brown is assigned (by someone speaking over the phone) to mow the grass around Snoopy's doghouse.
1951-09-12: Charlie Brown has a large portrait of Snoopy hanging in his room.
(1951-11-14: Violet holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick. At the last minute, afraid he'll kick her hand, she flinches away and he goes flying into the air.)
(1951-11-26: Schroeder says his first word, "Beethoven".)
1951-12-15: Charlie Brown repairs the roof on Snoopy's doghouse.
Snoopy is frequently shown in association with Charlie Brown, welcoming him home or hearing him unwrap a candy bar, but an explicit statement of ownership doesn't come up.
We would somehow recognize Charlie Brown, but not by name. The other characters are basically unknown.
The reason is that Peanuts was not part of the mainstream comics books we were reading as children. Threre were two kind of them: proper books such as Astérix, and thick "anthologies" such as Pif which were a set of what Americans call "strips".
I felt that in my bones.
So no idea what the song is about, unfortunately. I don't even know it has animation version.
(And I shouldn't have called it a song, as there are no words).
Linus and Lucy was recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Trio back in 1964.
They're all dead now, which is a shame.
But there's a brilliant modern recording, from 2016, that features the original drummer, Jerry Granelli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OODA_K5hxyc
And it's definitely worth spending some time to give it a watch/listen. There's a lot more to that little tune than most people probably realize.
The genesis of Guaraldi's involvement was a 1963 documentary "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" which has nothing to do with the 1969 animated feature.
This was produced for TV but never aired, and recently surfaced on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UGAs5fZUvBM&t=425s
To complicate things further, Guaraldi released "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (once again, based on the 1963 documentary) but these recordings are not the same as the cues used in the documentary.
I can't get OTA and cut cable TV so I don't get a lot of things without effort that I don't generally go to.
(Sucks about the pbs part though, didn’t realize they’d stopped that.)
Cast your fate to the Wind and Alma-Ville are still some favorites.
I also consider his arrangement of the peanuts music into a cohesive whole to be pretty masterful - its out of print now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charlie_Brown_Suite_%26_Ot...
I know, I'm being something of a Bah Humbug, but I legitimately cannot see the draw of this comic. It reminds me of Family Circus - no story, just vaguely cute things grannies would seemingly like to see?
He said the Andy Capp title was a cockney accent pun for Handicap. Apparently Andy was a cockney horse race fanatic. That tidbit did make the strip any funnier to me.
There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.
I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.
Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.
Watterson wrote:
> “The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.
(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)
Calvin and Hobbes tried to replicate that darkness but were more ham-handed. Still clever, but much less subtle.
I remember around 2nd grade or so Snoopy Joe Cool was a big deal and I had the t shirts and thermos and lunchbox.
There are of course the Peanuts TV specials, they didn’t have much impact on me personally other than to solidify a like of both Snoopy and his side kick, Woodstock.
For me as a kid, Snoopy and Stocky were the only interesting ones.
In fact the comics - especially the older ones are incredibly clever and funny and insightful and there’s long running threads and connections and strong characters.
Peanuts the tshirt/hat/poster/cup is crass.
Peanuts the comic is genius.
It exactly the same with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The commercially exploited imagery is crass and dumb. The comics written by Karl Barks were genius and often really entertaining adventure stories.
They have (as I understand it) challenged and stopped some folks from doing things, but something like the Calvin sticker was pretty ubiquitous. Even then, some later ones were particularly bad Calvins.
I had a vinyl sticker of Spaceman Spiff on the back of my motorcycle helmet. I bought it at a motorcycle race back in the 90s.
(And that's fine by me, nobody is forcing anyone to consume Garfield.)
Wikipedia is a bit coy and trying to be neutral. But even just from there you can see that the author decided to make strips about cats, because Snoopy had already cornered the dog market.
I've had more comments on the snoopy dial, and my casio terrorist watch, than any high-end piece in my rotation/collection. I struggle to think of other snoopy merchandise which is common-place, outside watches.
(I asked my eight year old son a while back if he knew the names of some characters from Peanuts, while showing him a couple of the cartoon strips, the only one he knew was Snoopy. I was sad to learn he didn't know the name of either Charlie Brown or Woodstock.)
https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...
Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.