Schulz hated and resented the name Peanuts , which was foisted on him by United Feature Syndicate. Why was this comic strip so wildly popular for half a century? Peanuts was deceptive. The characters, though funny, could stir up shockingly heated arguments over how to survive and still be a decent human being in a bitter world.
Who was better at it—Charlie Brown or Snoopy? The time is ripe to see what was really happening on the pages of Peanuts during all those years. Since , the comics publisher Fantagraphics has been issuing The Complete Peanuts , both Sunday and daily strips, in books that each cover two years and include an appreciation from a notable fan.
The volume series will be completed next year. I n the stone age of Peanuts —when only seven newspapers carried the strip, when Snoopy was still an itinerant four-legged creature with no owner or doghouse, when Lucy and Linus had yet to be born— Peanuts was surprisingly dark.
The first strip, published on October 2, , shows two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on the sidewalk. These bleak themes, which went against the tide of the go-go s, floated freely on the pages of Peanuts at first, landing lightly on one kid or another until slowly each theme came to be embedded in a certain individual—particularly Lucy, Schroeder, Charlie Brown, Linus, and Snoopy. Even Charlie Brown was a bit of a heel. At the center of this world was Charlie Brown, a new kind of epic hero—a loser who would lie in the dark recalling his defeats, charting his worries, planning his comebacks.
His mailbox was almost always empty. His dog often snubbed him, at least until suppertime, and the football was always yanked away from him. The cartoonist Tom Tomorrow calls him a Sisyphus.
Frustration was his lot. Definitely not! I suspect we all did. And luckily, beginning in after Schulz moved from his hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota, to Colorado Springs for a year with his first wife, Joyce, and her daughter, Meredith , there were plenty more alter egos to choose from.
That was the year the Van Pelts were born. Lucy, the fussbudget, who was based at first on young Meredith, came in March. And then, of course, there was Snoopy, who had been around from the outset Schulz had intended to name him Sniffy and was fast evolving into an articulate being.
I like to think that Peanuts and identity politics grew up together in America. By , the main characters—Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroeder, Snoopy—had their roles and their acolytes. Even Lucy had her fans. The filmmaker John Waters, writing an introduction to one of the Fantagraphics volumes, gushes:.
It was a big part of the appeal of Peanuts. Every character was a powerful personality with quirky attractions and profound faults, and every character, like some saint or hero, had at least one key prop or attribute. In this blessedly solid world, each character came to be linked not only to certain objects but to certain kinds of interactions, too, much like the main players in Krazy Kat , one of the strips that Schulz admired and hoped to match.
But unlike Krazy Kat , which was built upon a tragically repetitive love triangle that involved animals hurling bricks, Peanuts was a drama of social coping, outwardly simple but actually quite complex. In fact, all of the characters were survivors. They just had different strategies for survival, none of which was exactly prosocial. Linus knew that he could take his blows philosophically—he was often seen, elbows on the wall, calmly chatting with Charlie Brown—as long as he had his security blanket nearby.
In the child psychiatrist D. From Greatest Movies Wiki. The Peanuts Movie. Loading comments Cookies help us deliver our services.
By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies. More information OK. Top review. Could have been great but got ruined. This documentary about charlie brown and his maker start out great. Then after the first 10min you start slowly to see where this is heading. Is it really impossible to honor anything from another time, without dragging in the lgbtq and feminist with their agenda?
If anything get remaked avoid it as the pest. OpinionGuy Jun 26, Details Edit. Release date June 25, United States. United States. Imagine Documentaries Wildbrain Entertainment.
Technical specs Edit. Runtime 54 minutes. Related news. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. See more gaps Learn more about contributing. Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now.
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