> Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature
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.
Snoopy as a character is popular in Japan, but only as a character design - kind of like Hello Kitty. There is zero awareness of any of the shows or really Charlie Brown himself.
I'm Brazilian, in my middle 40s. When I was a little kid my best friend used to carry a blanket around. Neighbors called him "Linus" for years. But I'm confident it was because of the TV show, not the comic strips.
"Snoopy Come Home" wrecked me as a kid, just absolutely flattened me. Looking back on it now, it’s wild to consider this level of depression was aimed at children. I’m not knocking it; honestly, I kind of treasure how hard I cried over it.
And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.
In France we recognize Snoopy and people would call the whole "world" of the comics "Snoopy". "Peanuts" is unknown. I am 55 for the context.
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".
This goes for much of Europe. 'Peanuts' is hardly known. Everybody over the age of 40 knows Snoopy, mostly by virtue of it being a strong brand with lots of merchandise in the eighties/nineties.
Interestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.
It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
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.
It's too bad that there are probably meant to be so many example comics in that article, judging from how it's written, and what's really there is just ads where the comics are probably supposed to be. Wonder what happened.
I guess I didn't phrase it well- after Thiel killed Gawker, it and all it's affiliated sites (like Kotaku) were sold off for parts and their images were replaced by ads by the new owners, who may have kept the lights on but farmed all the content with a ton of ads.
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 fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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 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.
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.
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!
Does anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute?
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?
As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.
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....)
Here, here! I was born in 1951 - read Peanuts everyday as a kid, still read Peanuts everyday as an adult. It has great humor and insight into relationships.
It touches all the emotions and experiences, somehow being relatable to adults and kids at the same time. Its deepness and universality probably won't be apparent unless you read many of them - preferably the best, maybe one a day.
In the 80s I read all the comics compilations from the late 50s -> 70s, that was the golden age of the strip. It was an amazing comic and you'll see why all the strips creators since then were inspired by it.
It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.
I have a completely opposite perspective to you on this. I find the peanuts very poignantly captures the frailities of the human condition in a humorous manner.
I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.
I totally agree about Andy Capp. The only interesting thing I ever heard about Andy Capp was from Jean Shepherd.
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.
Early strips are very different. Dark, sarcastic, double meaning, lots of depth. They changed as Schulz got older and lighter, and that's what most folks know. But worth reading the earliest entries, and then see how those themes play out in the later strips.
Calvin and Hobbes tried to replicate that darkness but were more ham-handed. Still clever, but much less subtle.
You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.
That's a bold diagnosis to make about someone over the internet. As a kid, I used to buy a magazine that included various translated comic strips, including Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, and Peanuts. Peanuts was by far the least interesting to me and didn’t resonate at all, while Calvin & Hobbes completely blew my mind. Even Garfield left me better memories because it was plain silly and not pretentious.
As a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary.
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.
I think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery.
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.
I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.
It's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers.
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.
Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.
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.
I have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time.
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.)
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'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."
> Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature
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.
Snoopy as a character is popular in Japan, but only as a character design - kind of like Hello Kitty. There is zero awareness of any of the shows or really Charlie Brown himself.
I'm Brazilian, in my middle 40s. When I was a little kid my best friend used to carry a blanket around. Neighbors called him "Linus" for years. But I'm confident it was because of the TV show, not the comic strips.
The BBC published this article. I agree with "all of literature" being hyperbolic though.
It was very popular in Australia. Serialised in newspapers for many years. As a kid, our family owned pretty much every Charlie Brown paperback.
People in eg Germany are mostly aware of the Peanuts, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as in the US.
I'm an American and I've really never related to Charlie Brown myself, but I've heard Peanuts is huge in Japan and other asian countries.
"Snoopy Come Home" wrecked me as a kid, just absolutely flattened me. Looking back on it now, it’s wild to consider this level of depression was aimed at children. I’m not knocking it; honestly, I kind of treasure how hard I cried over it.
And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.
Ha same here, I remember bawling my eyes out watching it on TV, to my parents bemusement as to what was the big deal.
In France we recognize Snoopy and people would call the whole "world" of the comics "Snoopy". "Peanuts" is unknown. I am 55 for the context.
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".
This goes for much of Europe. 'Peanuts' is hardly known. Everybody over the age of 40 knows Snoopy, mostly by virtue of it being a strong brand with lots of merchandise in the eighties/nineties.
Time for Peanuts comeback!!
Interestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.
It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
There was a long read article that came out a few years ago called "How Snoopy Killed Peanuts:"
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.
It's too bad that there are probably meant to be so many example comics in that article, judging from how it's written, and what's really there is just ads where the comics are probably supposed to be. Wonder what happened.
Kokatu was part of Gawker which was killed by Peter Thiel (who went after Gawker media by funding lawsuits against them after they outed him as gay).
https://medium.com/@celestineriza/how-peter-thiel-took-down-...
Honest question here - is this getting downvoted because it’s untrue, or something else?
Maybe people wonder what the point/relevance is?
Is it that Gawker had lots of ads, so Kotaku would also have ads?
What's relevant (to this thread) about Thiel killing it?
I guess I didn't phrase it well- after Thiel killed Gawker, it and all it's affiliated sites (like Kotaku) were sold off for parts and their images were replaced by ads by the new owners, who may have kept the lights on but farmed all the content with a ton of ads.
I think it was a one-two punch:
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.
Same with "Odie" in Garfield.. kindof.
elmo-ification?!
> Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.
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.
I guess Patty part-times as dog sitter
The Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, CA is a must visit if you’re in the area!
https://schulzmuseum.org/
There is also a nice ice rink next door that looks like a Swiss Chalet. I think it’s also part of the museum.
https://www.snoopyshomeice.com/
Is that the airport?
No, there is an airport 10 minutes from the museum but the museum itself is closer to downtown.
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.
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.
It starts about twelve seconds into https://youtu.be/tcHNHRGPkkw .
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
My kids watch and love the Peanuts TV specials. They also love the Peanuts movie that came out a few years ago.
To me nerdy webcomics were the natural shift, from SBMC to XKCD, and some of them in Spanish such as Bilo y Nano.
Does anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute?
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?
As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.
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....)
Here, here! I was born in 1951 - read Peanuts everyday as a kid, still read Peanuts everyday as an adult. It has great humor and insight into relationships.
It touches all the emotions and experiences, somehow being relatable to adults and kids at the same time. Its deepness and universality probably won't be apparent unless you read many of them - preferably the best, maybe one a day.
In the 80s I read all the comics compilations from the late 50s -> 70s, that was the golden age of the strip. It was an amazing comic and you'll see why all the strips creators since then were inspired by it.
You’re not the only one talking about just how wonderful the earliest strips were. I think I’ll be checking those out
It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.
I have a completely opposite perspective to you on this. I find the peanuts very poignantly captures the frailities of the human condition in a humorous manner.
I never enjoyed peanuts but I know Bill watterson the creator of Calvin and Hobbes was a big fan, so there must be something there
I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.
The only comic worse is Garfield. I have no idea how anyone enjoys either of them.
I see you've never met 'Andy Capp' popularly serialised in UK papers, together with Peanuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp
I totally agree about Andy Capp. The only interesting thing I ever heard about Andy Capp was from Jean Shepherd.
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.
He was from Hartlepool, not London, so not a cockney
I’m sure you’re right. I know as much about Andy Capp as I do about Cockney.
Early strips are very different. Dark, sarcastic, double meaning, lots of depth. They changed as Schulz got older and lighter, and that's what most folks know. But worth reading the earliest entries, and then see how those themes play out in the later strips.
Calvin and Hobbes tried to replicate that darkness but were more ham-handed. Still clever, but much less subtle.
its super nihilistic and depressive, its the best on making your feel bad
You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.
That's a bold diagnosis to make about someone over the internet. As a kid, I used to buy a magazine that included various translated comic strips, including Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, and Peanuts. Peanuts was by far the least interesting to me and didn’t resonate at all, while Calvin & Hobbes completely blew my mind. Even Garfield left me better memories because it was plain silly and not pretentious.
As a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary.
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.
I think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery.
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.
I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.
Watterson refused to allow Calvin & Hobbes to be commercialized, other than the books. Those crass stickers are unauthorized knock-offs.
Amazing - these were Circle K chain stores selling these stickers. How was this not enforced?!
It's not like stickers are particularly difficult to make, or Watterson had an army of auditors combing every gas station or car meet looking for sticker makers.
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.
Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.
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.
I have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time.
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.)
For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.
https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...
Speak for yourself, i enjoy both. :)
I mean, even originally, Garfield strips had some substance, but Jim Davis really liked money, I think...
Garfield was conceived from the get go as a cash grab devoid of artistic merit.
(And that's fine by me, nobody is forcing anyone to consume Garfield.)
Interesting, you know more about it than I do, I suppose. Do you know of any source for Jim discussing how/why he started Garfield?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield#History is probably a good start.
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.
See also Bill the Cat https://www.tumblr.com/thebestcomicbookpanels/185186150961/b...
See also: The Moomins.
“I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."
I felt that in my bones.
The best thing the brand has done is put it on the Apple TV screensaver ... I'm endlessly entertained and relaxed by it.
snoopy is the perfect dog name
Thanks. I never thought about the word "snoop" as part of the name until just now.
Snoop is the name of my favourite characters from the later series of The Wire. I like the idea her nickname came from Peanuts.