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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a musician, and something I've noticed is that children no longer recognize the "peanuts" theme song.

I wish Vince Guaraldi had lived longer, I really like his style of Jazz, its both the kind of thing you can leave on in the background, and its music that takes you places.

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...

My wife, as a teen, had the job of being Vince Guaraldi's chaperone / guide for a series of concerts during the 70's. She's got great stories of hanging out and partying with his people.

He died so very very young too. He was only 47 when he passed.

Snoopy or Peanuts in general is (was) very famous in my country (at least for my age) but I only read it in comic.

So no idea what the song is about, unfortunately. I don't even know it has animation version.

It starts about twelve seconds into https://youtu.be/tcHNHRGPkkw .

The earlier Peanuts animated specials had marvelous jazz soundtracks by Vince Guaraldi (and later others, after Vince's passing). Not sure if jazz trio is the most obvious music to accompany cartoons, but somehow this music blended exquisitely with the characters.

Indeed from what I've read, the network was originally skeptical that jazz trio made any sense in a children's animated show, but it was remarkably successful. A couple of other tunes from the show, "Skating" and "Christmas time is here" are recognizable jazz standards to this day.

Aha. I'm showing my age. I didn't know there was a "Peanuts" movie. I was talking about the tune "Linus and Lucy" which was the theme for the original animated TV show "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

(And I shouldn't have called it a song, as there are no words).

Perhaps-fun stuff:

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.

It's debatable whether it was first recorded in '63 or '64.

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 only heard the Peanuts theme song as an adult. As a child in the UK, the The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show was on TV, not Peanuts, and it had the theme song Let's Have A Party With Charlie Brown and Snoopy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zKKAyLJP4

I quite fond of Winton and Ellis Marsalis album Joe Cool's Blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0_gYNtTTgA&list=PL9KZ1X7EqS... which of course also includes the classic Peanuts theme song.

The Thanksgiving and Christmas specials aired every year, and might still. But who has an antenna any more? I do.

The combination of cable-cutting and the fact that many people either can't access OTA (or don't bother) probably means that a lot of the content that people reflexively tuned into over various holidays just doesn't happen any longer. Even if some of it is on streaming, it's not an automatic holiday thing.

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.

Apple bought the rights years ago, PBS cannot show them anymore, they are now behind a paywall.

They used to (a year or two ago?) host them for free so you didn’t need a sub, is that no longer true?

(Sucks about the pbs part though, didn’t realize they’d stopped that.)

Apple has streamed the Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas specials for free about a week before the holiday each year. This year Thanksgiving was free November 15-16 and Christmas will be free December 13th and 14th.

Do I need AppleTV? If so it ain't free.

No - Apple TV the streaming service is available on any device that has the TV app available, which includes Samsung, Sony, Vizio and LG TVs, Android TVs, Roku devices, Xfinity, Google TV and Play Station. You can also play in a modern web browser.

Newspaper comics haven’t been relevant to anyone 30. By the time you were old enough to read them or care about reading them, smartphones were in the scene.

My kids watch and love the Peanuts TV specials. They also love the Peanuts movie that came out a few years ago.

I'm college age and grew up reading newspaper comics. Then we stopped getting the newspaper since it became too expensive and then our local paper stopped doing print copies...

Sad, but true. I was born in the 80s and had a dad who read the paper religiously, so getting that section with the comics every morning was super important to me!

To me nerdy webcomics were the natural shift, from SBMC to XKCD, and some of them in Spanish such as Bilo y Nano.

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