Peanuts: Search and Destroy

Sentimentalist that I am, I look for the good even in the later years, though certainly things were scattershot. So I'm useless when it comes to destruction. In terms of search? Jesus, where to begin? Snoopy as empowered Walter Mitty, to be sure. The fact that often what seems funny when younger seems totally and completely harrowing now, all without anything about the original strips themselves being different. The extended storylines (Peppermint Patty training for a skating competition, the various camping trips, Charlie Brown choosing between taking care of baby Sally and a baseball game, tons of others). Joe Shlabotnik, natch.

I have to slightly disallow the 'wah-wah' adults in that they were an invention for the animations, but since those were always written by Schulz anyway and are inextricably tied up with all my memories growing up with Peanuts, I can't really complain. ;-) So many of the TV shows were a kick, as were all four movies, actually, some songs aside -- Bon Voyage was great, and A Boy Named Charlie Brown< /I> survived even Rod McKuen theme songs.

The one I identified with the most -- Linus. But Snoopy wasn't too far behind.

Check out Aaron McGruder's great tribute to Schulz when he retired, originally published a couple of months before he passed on.

Also destroy: big Peanuts figures littering the sidewalks of St. Paul, MN.

Search: all the strips between 1955 to 1970. Some of the most melancholy and downright bleak 'funnies' ever produced; childhood as a time of pain, confusion and rejection.

Destroy: The Red Baron, Woodstock, all of the sports gags, the diminishing of Charlie Brown's existential angst, and the gradual decline of Schulz's wonderful linework and lettering. But almost to the end, Schulz could still produce a poignant picture, a funny gag.

Well that's my search - the annual CB vs. Lucy trust betrayal that goes beyond the running gag into the realms of true tragedy.
Destroy: Most of Snoopy's fantasy sequences, esp. involving the Red Baron.

Also, I love the mwah-mwah-mwah of the out of view adults in the TV shows. When I was a sullen teen, the absolute best way to wind up my mother (besides doing baby-voiced 'I love you, Mommie Dearest' while brandishing a wire hanger) was to block out irritating chore requests/ other nagging with Uberparent noises.

I will put up that article again though Ned, thanks for reminding!

My first evah mail-order purchase (w.money I won on premium bonds, aged 10 or 11) = 40 Peanuts booXoR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I guess at one time I luvd em. Mum was upset when he died, I think becoz she was excited with and for me when Big Box o'Peanutz arrived all those years ago.

Eek.

I suspect neither are as bad as The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet

Peanuts is a classic, I even like the past 5 years' worth.

Search: The seam of tragedy which runs through Charlie Brown's entire existence.

Destroy: Repitition of gags (although kind of unavoidable in a 50 year run).

Peanuts = def. CLASSIC. Surprised no-one mentioned the "Snoopy Come Home" movie, where Snoopy leaves Charlie Brown for his original owner (Leila, was it?) only to come back. Even after all these years and having grown up, it still touches a nerve.

Schulz is also notable as one of very few daily cartoonists who gets much funnier in large doses.

DESTROY DESTROY DESTROY

As far as "Peanuts" is concerned, I wouldn't have learned to read so quickly had it not been for Charles M. Schultz, so CLASSIC. Search: Linus, Peppermint Patty, Franklin (WOEFULLY UNDERUSED BROTHER), Marcie, Sally. Destroy: Snoopy's ugly-ass brother, Spike. And Violet, because she was the poor man's Lucy.

Josh, alas, is confused, poor man. ;-)

Lately I've noticed that a lot of the Peanuts anthology books have slowly become completely unavailable, perhaps even out of print. Hopefully this and the Chip Kidd book are the prelude to the release of a Compleat Peanuts collection of books where every strip Sparky ever did is reprinted, in chronological order and in color (where applicable).

The 70's, 80's and 90's Peanuts strips are nowhere near as bad as anybody says they are. The humor is awfully dry, I admit, but it's there.

I'll have to stick up for the Red Baron sequences, at least the original ones in the '60s. Yes the emphasis on Snoopy and Woodstock in later years and downplaying of Charlie Brown (and Lucy, who pretty much became a nonentity except for the football episodes) was depressing. But, I still think the idea of a dog pretending to be a World War I Flying Ace (flying a SOPWITH CAMEL, yet, and somehow knowing the names of all the French towns he's flying over) is the most bizarre idea ever to hit the comics. It makes Calvin and his pseudo-Buck Rogers fantasies look positively normal.

Wasn't the message of the show A Charlie Brown Christmas about "the true meaning of Christmas" as opposed to commercialism--that is, shopping, for example? Of course, with all the Snoopy dolls, and comic strip collections and games and greeting cards and everything else, we must realize that the "true meaning" is to go out and buy!

I think the strip also began to quit emphasizing the holiday at that time as well.

But the writer (or writers) went through the same plots of Lucy yanking the football from Charlie Brown, of Charlie Brown losing ballgames, etc. even as Snoopy got lost in the desert with his brothers. The new stories didn't make sense and the old ones were worn out. Worse, one wonders if any of the newspapers actually had the guts to drop the strip in favor of newer strips.

The strip had become a narcotic. Had it not been there, perhaps more newspaper editors and readers would have demanded change. But they remained set in their ways--and too many still do. We should be thankful that a few papers have dropped the Peanuts comic strip, but that number is too few.

They are great because they are lame! They make the other ones seem funny.

Am I missing something?

(+ I thought old C&Hs were being reprinted in newspapers, but maybe I'm wrong.)

I sincerely doubt it...newspaper publishers don't like the comic strips in the first place because they take up valuable space that could be used on ad pages. This is why the size of the comics has been shrunken down so much over the past 15 years or so. If the current comic strips were done away with they would not be replaced. Esp. since the readership for newspapers in general has aged so much.

Gil Thorp has REALLY gone in the shitter. It's barely literate! (And no points for the Orel Hershiser guest appearance!)

Zippy is godawful. Sorry.

The same goes for Funky Winkerbean's transmogrification into a Melrose-Place-for-geeks cesspool. And regardless of FBOFW's past, turning into a hybrid of Mary Worth and Hi & Lois didn't do a damn thing for me. There's the "funny" page, and there's the "serious" page - STAY ON THE FUNNY PAGE DAMN IT.

Example of newer Peanuts (as seen on my bathroom wall): Lucy & Charlie on the pitchers mound. Lucy sez, "Here's the roster for the other team: Francis, Horatio, Ludwig, Chandler, Francisco, etc etc etc" - all these "unique" male names. Fourth panel - close-up of Charlie, wistful expression (akin to the "rapturous contemplation" look found in every damn FBOFW strip, but, y'know, Peanuts style), and he says, "No one's named Bill anymore." Um. Five cents, please?

Add to my list: Zits, Monty (PKA Robotman), Liberty Meadows, Soup to Nutz, and Rex Morgan MD (as long as Graham Nolan is the artiste).

Aw yeah, Mutts is nice.

Let me specify -- when humor was attempted, it was of the cheese variety. When soppiness was attempted, it made me want to pound walls down. When prompted to appreciate how wossname knows his comic artists of the past, I reflect on how The Boondocks looks like the first honestly modern strip in years. Etc.

One panel. Linus, Charlie, and Snoopy are lounging in A Forest. Linus & Charlie lean against a tree, Snoopy against a rock.

Linus: "I hear you've decided no to go to summer camp after all..."

Charlie: "When you have a dog, you should stay home, and make your dog happy ... that's what you should do ... you should stay home..."

Snoopy: "Except for those obviously necessary short trips in to buy dog food..."

http://www.citypaper.com/archives/funny.html

As for y'all's Zippy bashing: Interweb mentalists! Interweb mentalists! Interweb mentalists!

http://www.deeptrancenow.com/images/marmaduke.jpg

Martin S - I'd say that the first ten years or so of Johnny Hart's BC are v. underrated; Mort Walker sustained a pretty gd standard on 'Beetle Bailey' for many years; and I love the drawing style of Dik Browne on 'Hagar' and 'Hi and Lois' - crosshatching to rival Crumb's. These are just off the top of my head, but my point is that 'Peanuts' is obv. a work of genius, but it wasn't THAT much better than many of its peers in the post-war gag strip stakes, at least for the first ten or so years of its run...

Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy is indeed a rare and beautiful thing. As is 'Barnaby' by Crockett Johnson, Bill Watterson's main source for 'Calvin and Hobbes'.

http://home.att.net/~k-doyle/Cats/mutts.jpg

besides anything, I mean. but it's so cute!

There. Now even Marmaduke seems hilarious.

Felicity, your cartoon is awesome.

Is that a Bushmiller Nancy? He died in '82, but he was only "supervising" the strip from about '78 or '79. Willie Johnson did the dailies and ex-Superman artist Al Plastino did the Sundays. I really like EB's late Nancy strips, when it was so stunningly codified that there were rumours he used rubber stamps to produce the strip.

good question, Martin. I thought so, although I can't read the date there. It's from here.

and the Dinette Set is the poor man's Non Sequitur

I do like Boondocks.

I am having a spectacularly bad hair day here, if Jazmine could see me now then it'd definitely change her preconceptions of European hair.

Boondocks site

Panel 1:
Charlie Brown, awake in bed, staring at ceiling, snoopy sleeping draped over CB's feet: "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, can my generation look to the future with hope?"

Panel 2:
Charlie Brown, lying on side with very worried expression, and snoopy is now awake with identical furrowed brow:
"Then, out of the dark, a voice comes to me that says, 'Why, sure... well, I mean... that is... it sort of depends... I mean... if... when... who... we... and..."

October 23, 1995

most of them were bad, but every once in a while... pow.

Only things I could give 2 seconds to these days is Mutts and Get Fuzzy.

A press release about this wondrous event.

Re-reading the article above, I see that it says over 50% of the first volume consists of stuff that's never been reprinted.

Sssexy!

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1560976144.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I went to the Schulz museum in Santa Rosa last year and it just busted me in two in a wonderful way.

sorry i'm british. no-one i know would give a sh-t over here.

http://www.fantagraphics.com/peanuts/lilfolks.jpg

I always thought "Peanuts" was kind of a dud, until they started rerunning the old strips after Schulz's death, and I realized how hilarious they used to be. I'm looking forward to more of the "Complete Peanuts" books.

The other thing I noticed looking at the really early strips is just how much Charlie Brown looks like Calvin...or vice versa, really. Just put a bad haircut on some of those early Charlie Brown drawings, and you'd have Calvin.

"who broke into the liquor cabinet and made this mess?" "not me!"

If you guys don't read this, nobody will...

http://www.evilrobots.com/RCFAAR/COMICS/familycircus/cartoons/Family_Circus9-5.gif

I've finished the first volume, and I've got six more months left of Volume II. I miss Schulz more with every strip and count myself fortunate that I got to read his strips fresh and new every day in the newspaper.

Last night, I hit two strips that were a bit different. One had Shermy going through Charlie Brown's comic book collection: "Wow, you've got Revolutionary War stories, War of 1812 stories, Civil War stories, World War I stories, World War II stories, Korean War stories..." to which Charlie Brown responds, "I'm kinda worried about the next issue."

And Lucy being tethered to a rope going BWHAHM! in her imitation of a hydrogen bomb.

In the first volume, Schulz illustrated a comics rack stacked with titles like FEAR and HATE which I found a bit unsettling for a Peanuts strip. However, I do enjoy the fact that the volumes are being published by Fantagraphics, also home to Hate by Peter Bagge.

My box set of the first two volumes just arrived from Amazon today. I am a happy man.

but it's not hard to interpret the strip as eulogising various unhealthy traits - low self esteem, unrequited love, etc. i sometimes joke that i want to be linus but am more like charlie brown, but i've been wondering recently whether reading lots of peanuts strips as a kid might've instilled some subconscious belief that the misery depicted on a day-to-day basis in the comic was some kind of normalcy, that i may have transposed charlie brown's own anxieties upon my own.

that said, just finished the 1955-56 complete book, and getting ready to start on the 57-58 one. These are still really great strips!

In 2000, it became known that a fan of Peanuts had written Schulz a letter requesting that Charlotte Braun be removed. Schulz wrote back, promising to remove the character but asking the reader if she wanted to be responsible for "the death of an innocent child". The letter included a picture of Charlotte Braun with an ax in her head. The letter has been donated to the Library of Congress.

http://static.flickr.com/38/102893701_e6aea87e1a.jpg

LA Locals, currently there is a comics exhibit at the Hammer museum in Westwood. "Chuck" Schultz is on display with many of his contemporaries and even some pre- contemps. Some of it's trite, but others are outstanding in their oblique and darker references. Worth a look since Thursday's admission is FREE! Lichtenstein's Polaroid's are awesome too.

http://wires.thehold.net/files/anime.jpg

Oh, golly, I could go on about a particularly fantastic moment in that most recent volume, but I'm a little too tired to right now. Remind me later.

I've just now completed a crucial rite of passage, after about 13 years in limbo. When I were a nipper, we were given a VCR copy of 'Bon Voyage Charlie Brown (And Don't Come Back)', missing the first five and last twenty minutes. As a kid, I absolutely loved it and watched it time after time, memorising the dialogue, artwork and music as I did so. Tonight I watched the whole thing for the first time. It held up beautifully, although the end was a little rushed. Most of it conveyed a certain kind of accident-prone, angst-ridden early youth that I was all too familiar with, although seeing it now, my sympathies switched to Snoopy and Woodstock, who had by far the most whimsical, philosophical, adult perspective on things. One golden moment I hadn't seen before was Woodstock emerging from a fire hose bearing his violin, which he then proceeded to play. One golden moment I'd just missed as a child was that whilst the boys + animals watched an in-flight movie called 'Happy Bunnies', the girls watched one called something like 'Naughty Esmerelda'! Ahem. And what was all that French swearing in the automobile wreck! 'Oooh le con' indeed...

i regret to tell you that "naughty marietta" (which i'm pretty sure was the movie) isn't quite as naughty as one would hope: http://imdb.com/title/tt0026768/

ILX's JD is a true star for repping for late period Peanuts

I can't imagine how hard I'd lose my shit watching Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown today, I can barely deal with first season episodes of Frasier

And what was all that French swearing in the automobile wreck! 'Oooh le con' indeed...

i always thought they were shouting "oooh! le car!" - seeing as charlie brown's request for un pain was phrased as "une loaf de bread".

the gang visit wimbledon too in this one. i still prefer 'a boy named charlie brown' though.

There's also the bit where they can't understand the guy offering them steak and kidney pie.

and yet they can understand teachers who talk like muted trumpets...

Well duh, those are AMERICAN teachers.

Then again I suppose Othmar could be Lithuanian in background or something.

Trombonian.

This I believe.

Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski

Amazingly, not bad as I'd thought it would have been. Brilliant even.

lolz@"Good grief, he thought. What a cunt. "

goddammit they are putting out these complete peanuts volumes faster than I can afford them! I only have 1-4 and haven't even gotten to the 60s yet :(

search: http://images.skyllo01.multiply.com/image/6/photos/187/400x400/34/tyra_grossaroo.gif?

BAH

search: http://images.skyllo01.multiply.com/image/6/photos/187/400x400/34/tyra_grossaroo.gif

wtf

fuck never mind

buy the boxes Shakey, they're cheaper and you only have to keep up with one a year instead of two.

that's what I did with vol 3-4... maybe I'll get 5-6 for Xmas...

Is the new one out? I thought it wasn't coming out for a few more weeks.

all I know is my volumes end at '59 and now they're like on '66 or some shit.

also watch for huge new biography of schulz by david michaelis, 6 years in the making, next month

am i the only one who's read the michaelis bio yet? quite controversial, owing to its open treatment of schulz's lifelong depression, his shortcomings as a dad, and even his sex life. his kids aren't happy with it.

i finished reading it this morning. it's well researched and not at all as sensationalized as that description makes it sound, but michaelis spends way too much time on rambling, discursive, and frankly unconvincing analysis of schulz's personality. it often reads like a (very) rough first draft, before a sensible editor made him take all that bullshit out. he also leaves WAY too much out - he spends 30 (admittedly gripping) pages on schulz's extra-marital affair, but virtually ignores the last 25 years of "peanuts."

the revelation that schulz reacted to his divorce by having charlie brown kick lucy off the baseball team is worth the price of the book, though.

also the story about him calling garfield "the ugliest, most insulting and hateful character i've ever seen."

Haha! This sounds like a good read for a long flight.

I think on some level Schulz ignored the last 25 years of "peanuts."

Oh my GOD I need to read this. His depression and doubt make him my spiritual kin basically. RIP my dear Sparky.

Schulz gets an "American Masters" on PBS tonight (Michaelis is interviewed and was a consultant).

wau

I saw Chip Kidd speak this summer and he showed (or at least explained) three or four book covers that were rejected before the one they used got picked. Originally I think there were Peanuts characters on the cover until the family started to dislike what they read.

am i the only one who's read the michaelis bio yet? quite controversial,

Just picked it up over the weekend, but haven't read yet.

really been really enjoying the two most recent volumes in the Complete series. some of these books have like 150 strips that were never reprinted!

Yeah I was surprised by how much was new to me in the most recent one.

This American Masters ep is pretty good. It's available thru the usual sources.

Still, it's difficult for me to really express the centrality and importance of Snoopy & Peanuts to my growing up dorkling years.

Am planning to buy the Fantagraphics Peanuts collections only through 1970.

why? they're good through 1975 at least!

also get good again around 1996 or so

My favorite stuff is the, I think 70s material with a lot of long story arcs. The absolute high point for me is when Charlie Brown goes to summer camp and due to some baseball-related anxiety develops a rash on his head that makes it look like a baseball. He covers this up with a paper back and instantly the mysterious "Mister Sack" becomes the most popular kid at camp. Eventually the rash goes away, he takes off the sack, and his popularity dissipates. Absolutely wonderful little story.

From Fantagraphics spamco:

"UNSEEN PEANUTS" Revealed This Friday!

Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, in association with the Charles M.
Schulz Museum and Research Center, is pleased to present "Unseen
Peanuts." This collection of full size, rarely seen Peanuts strips
opens with a daylong preview on Friday, November 23 from 11:30 until
8:00 PM, highlighted by an "Unseen Peanuts" slide presentation by
Fantagraphics Books co-publisher Kim Thompson at 6:00 PM. The public
of all ages is invited to this free event.

Perhaps no American artist is more closely associated with the
holidays than Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. Kim Thompson, co-
editor of the Complete Peanuts series, points out that even though
Peanuts is the most-reprinted comic strip in history, several
thousand strips had never been collected until The Complete Peanuts
project began in 2004. The show includes a companion 32-page "Unseen
Peanuts" comic book catalogue featuring over 150 more of these "lost"
strips. This fully annotated publication is available for free with
any purchase exclusively at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery.

Get an early start on your holiday shopping at Fantagraphics
Bookstore & Gallery, located at 1201 S. Vale St. (at Airport way S.)
in the heart of Seattle's lively Georgetown business district.
Throughout the month of November all comic strip reprints, including
The Complete Peanuts, are offered at 20 % off, and pick up our free
"Comic Strip Masterpieces" tabloid.

"Unseen Peanuts" remains on view through December 31. Fantagraphics
Bookstore & Gallery is open daily 11:30 - 8:00 PM, Sundays until 5:00
PM. 206.658.0110.

A bit of a long shot but here goes...

There was a strip where it's pouring with rain and (I think) Linus and Lucy are looking out of the window and saying something like 'what kind of idiot would be out in weather like this' and then the last frame is CB on the pitchers mound in the rain saying "Where is evertbody?" or something similar. And I really want that last frame to make into a card for someone. If this rings any bells with anyone and they know where to find it (what book, what year even) please to let me know. Thanks.

This might be a frame from the same cartoon...
http://eteamz.active.com/bangoreastll/images/CharlieBrownlookingupatrainJPG.jpg

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/Cartoon-Schulz.jpg

Ned, I believe it's in "The Snoopy Festival", if that's any help. (Maybe "Peanuts Treasury" instead, but I think it's "The Snoopy Festival". Late 60s/Early 70s. If you remind me in a week I might have some time to try to look for it and scan it.

I think "Peanuts Treasury" is more likely than "The Snoopy Festival", because I remember this strip, and I never read "The Snoopy Festival".

it's not "the snoopy festival" because that was pretty much all snoopy strips.

it's pre-66 (i remember it showing up in the second special, "charlie brown's all-stars"), so it's definitely in one of the last two "complete" volumes.

The Snoopy Festival is the book I grew up with the most, and I totally don't remember it as being all Snoopy strips (though it surely had a few classic Snoopy sequences in it -- I think the riot strips are in there?).

If it's in the last few complete volumes, which it might be, then it'll be easier for me to find it. Yay for indexes.

I memorized the Peanuts Treasury when I was a kid. I am still waiting for the Masked Marvel armwrestling contest, it has not appeared yet. Also the doghouse-burning-down series.

By the way, my mom owns two original strips in frames. Her boyfriend in high school in the 50's wrote Schultz and said his girlfriend loved Peanuts, did he have anything he could give her? He sent two originals. She's thinking about donating them to the archives, since she is an archivist herself.

Jesus, dude, she could put you through college with what those two would bring.

a boy named charlie brown is on the family channel right now.

i mean abc family, if there's a difference (is there?)

If it's in the last few complete volumes, which it might be, then it'll be easier for me to find it. Yay for indexes.

-- Casuistry, Friday, 30 November 2007 02:00 (4 days ago) Link

Bump - in case casuistry has found it.

Oh right! I just looked, and I couldn't find it in 63-64 or in 65-66. Only the first of those two has "rain" as an index entry!

Good lord I need to catch up on the books. Maybe with some Xmas cash...

(And yes I am listening to Vince Guaraldi's music for A Charlie Brown Christmas as I type, thanks.)

Got the biography for Christmas. You guys need to check it out. I'm really enjoying it, and the amount of psych-/contextual analysis of what was going on in the strips vs Schulz's actual life is astounding.

I really don't want to know, honestly. Seems strange but I prefer to deal with the image he projected in the interviews than the truth as such -- I sensed a long time ago there was a lot he preferred not to discuss. I don't need to know every nut and bolt and every cross-correlation.

Well Ned, the thing about that is he was so delightfully inconsistent in interviews over the years, and I don't think the bio really contradicts that inconsistency. The only "gotcha" moments are really those that kingfish mentioned. Overall, you get just a small peek into how different people influenced the characters along the way, and what kind of prompted different eras of the strip. The single vision of becoming a cartoonist, sticking to it, and eventually being such a resounding success never really changed his basic outlook.

There are some details that aren't delved into out of respect to his wishes, although I know the family didn't like that other things were left in. There's only a brief mention about how his cousin was the inspiration for a character named Patty, and then another named Peppermint Patty, but he distanced the character from his cousin after the insinuations of the character's sexuality. Michaelis mentions the cousin a few times, but nicely sidesteps the issue since it's a book about Schulz, not the characters.

some of the revelations are charming - all those famous female athletes snoopy loudly crushes on (peggy fleming et al) are there because schulz had mad crushes on them in real life.

my main problem with the book is that DM appears to have no discernable sense of humor, which leads to him interpreting every single aspect of schulz and "peanuts" in the dourest possible light.

<quote>my main problem with the book is that DM appears to have no discernable sense of humor, which leads to him interpreting every single aspect of schulz and "peanuts" in the dourest possible light.</quote>

It's extra irritating when DM lapses into extended DO YOU SEE moments. The book is great and I'm glad I read it, but Schultz was spot-on when he said that "everything is in the strip." It really is.

I am reading the bio right now and I can relate to this guy SO MUCH it is painful. Except I gave up my childhood dream of being a comics artist. That part is the different part.

I don't like that last part of that post. Try again.

it's about time i gave this a reread. the stuff about the midwest in the first third of the book stuck with me more than anything else.

An excerpt from the comics journal roundtable about the Schulz bio-- http://www.tcj.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=836&Itemid=48

The whole issue is great, devoted almost entirely to critique & analysis of the Michaelis book along with personal reminiscence by colleagues & family. Some people reacted very negatively towards the portrayal of Schulz. Highly, highly recommended in addition to the bio. Should still be available from the publisher.

Oily, it's not heresy & I shall not recant.

I've wanted to read this book VERY BADLY since it first came out. I read the first 100 pages in a bookstore this weekend and John finally talked me into buying it. And: I'm really glad I did!

Lately I'm scared of buying things.

That Michaelis book was much too Kitty Kelley. One of the only things I liked about it was finding out how much Schulz despised Garfield and Jim Davis.

do tell! (although I'm going to guess it had something to do with Davis farming out his art to contractors and reusing sketches; I think charles schultz drew every strip by hand by himself until he quit)

It was a library book so I don't have the book to quote from, but basically Schulz thought Davis was a cynical hack and Garfield was this nasty soulless strip created just to sell merch.

"Schulz took every opportunity in private to belittle (Jim) Davis as a cartoonist. Davis's smug cat celebrated laziness and cynicism, and Sparky loathed it; Garfield, he often said in private, was the 'ugliest, most insulting and vicious' character he had ever seen." — Schulz and Peanuts, page 529

Even harsher than I remembered!

That makes Garfield seem like a certain kind of triumph!

FOPP uk selling the complete volumes books for 8 quid a throw. possibly only the first couple/few but hey.

Did Ned ever get his frame I wonder..

wtf@heresy? I just like your drawings and want more.

That makes Garfield seem like a certain kind of triumph!

It is, isn't it?

A triumph over Mondays, amirite? so true.

I have to say Garfield was a big inspiration to me as a kid and I learned to draw cartoons by practicing characters from U.S. Acres and Garfield.

Somehow it seems like Schulz's visual icons are untouchable (the little eye parentheses for disbelief, apostrophe eyes for incredulity, their way of walking, even his squiggly, loose style). Like yes everyone can use exclamation points & question marks, sweat tadpoles, clouds behind them for movement, motion lines, but not anything Schulz invented. I haven't seen his little icons anywhere else, it seems like they're left to him out of reverence & I want to employ some of them but it does feel like lighting a smoke with the Eternal Flame or something.

That's why it was okay to steal from Garfield.

lolz US Acres

How did Schulz feel about "Marvin"?

PEANUTS is some str8 garbage and if you can't admit it then you are lying to yourself and to god

i love how 95 percent of the responses to that are like 'wtf is the matter with you' and then the original dude finally comes around

i'm shocked i took such an extremist BF Skinner/Shakey Mo Collier position on this. i actually like much of it, just have never understood people really, really into Peanuts.

― sanskrit, Tuesday, June 5, 2007 1:33 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wtf I love Peanuts and BF Skinner is a jackass

man i LOVED those "charlie brown super book of questions and answers" books, i probably still have a ton of out-of-date '70s information floating around my brain somewhere because of them.

I have given up on my dream of owning all the Fantagraphics reprints :(
well at least I have the first four volumes.

man i LOVED those "charlie brown super book of questions and answers" books, i probably still have a ton of out-of-date '70s information floating around my brain somewhere because of them.

― J.D., Tuesday, December 2, 2008 3:20 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I threw these away a few months ago as we were moving. :-(

i love how 95 percent of the responses to that are like 'wtf is the matter with you' and then the original dude finally comes around

― J.D., Tuesday, December 2, 2008 4:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

eh i am basically back to 'fuk peanuts' now - reading everyone's responses along the lines of 'well it's not supposed to be FUNNY, duh' just piss me off, like how dare i expect the funny pages to be funny/entertaining!@!!!!! well in conclusion eat shit charlie brown.

those motherfuckers got chocolate in your peanut butter!

ignore anyone who says that, that's just the cute hipster line. peanuts at its best was always funny.

just the name "Joe Shlabotnik" makes me laugh

It's the pure misery of human existence that MAKES it funny.

I'm crazy curious about what those Al Plastino Peanuts cartoons look like.

The bio was a good read though I read it being warned not to take everything at face value. Michaelis does make some good points about how the strip reflected Schulz's real life, like how Lucy kinda went docile and getting hit in the head with the baseball all the time after he left his first wife.

And knowing the backstory of Snoopy's obsession with the girl-beagle's "soft paws", well okay then.

Desecration.

I wonder if Mr. Schulz is doing a stylized grave-spin in time to Charlie B.'s sick beats...

Did Ned ever get his frame I wonder..

― MaresNest, Tuesday, 2 December 2008 14:21 (10 months ago) Bookmark

I did! In the post to-day. From The Complete Peanuts 1961-1962 - I give you my favourite-ist (well one of them) strip ever.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2660/4054758489_5cfa97e935_b.jpg

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llrqi1kxkp1qewxco.jpg

http://peanutweeter.com/

that lattering is gross

so gross it doesn't even deserve to be called lettering

no peanuts parody i've seen has ever been anything less than embarrassing, except maybe that r. sikoryak one that redid the metamorphosis as 'good ol gregor brown.'

i lol'd a bit

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lll045ZxvN1qewxco.jpg

What if you're filling in the thought balloons of an old Snoopy comic with horrible lettering?

Haha, they have everything on the internet now:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2OgpsMgKSls/SkGpB9Qo4rI/AAAAAAAADBs/U3-xLVVUG-E/s1600-h/Peanuts2.jpg

Is it ok that fake 19-year-old Linus is giving me...feelings...?

no peanuts parody i've seen has ever been anything less than embarrassing, except maybe that r. sikoryak one that redid the metamorphosis as 'good ol gregor brown.'

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, June 2, 2011 7:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

love ivan brunetti's schultz-style characters and line, but it's hardly a parody

http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/New-Yorker-Halloween-cover-Ivan-Brunetti.jpg

sikoryak:

http://simplemanblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/good-ol-gregor-brown-comic-von-r-sikoryak.png

Brunetti's current style is not very Schulz-like, and his line not at all

okay, yes, i regretted that "line" bit as soon as i hit submit. chalk it up to poor thinking, all apologies.

nevertheless, i do think his little bulb-head block-body people do look like (and almost certainly intend to evoke) peanuts characters.

I don’t doubt that Schulz was someone he studied while trying to develop this reductive, iconic style – especially in the wake of that tribute strip from Top Shelf #....8? – but I really don’t think it’s meant specifically to evoke Schulz. I see a much closer similarity to Richard McGuire’s work from the last 20 years, if we’re drawing specific antecedents or influences.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6194/6124822796_537b8ae447_z.jpg

would buy a t shirt of 'win with charlie brown'

posters are from '68 election, btw

One day, I'll tell my children how one of my fondest childhood icons was a bullet-ridden doghouse.

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/Peanuts1.png

http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a6/Sprad/Peanuts2.png

I used to love leafing through Peanuts Treasury back in high school. Wish I could remember specific strips well enough to post some.

http://www.squealingrat.org/wit/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/snoopy-vulture1.jpg

the Treasury was great, so many classic storylines... the doghouse burning down, the masked marvel, good stuff.

I wish Baseball-Reference.com would set up a fake Joe Shlabotnik page.

I never pass up an opportunity to post this late-period gem:

http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2369/5815341473_a393981832_z.jpg

i always appreciated Peanuts, and definitely had one of those Charlie Brown t-shirts when i was a teenager and wore it all the time b/c i strongly identified with him.

If you haven't already put http://peanutsroasted.blogspot.com/ in your blog reader of choice yet...

that strip Deric posted is so awesome, Schulz stayed gangsta til the end

I'm about 14 years behind on the Completes at the moment, but if I don't catch up I'm definitely jumping in again for the 90s, love that weird dgaf tone he developed there

I can think of no rational reason for this nightmare to occur. I'd wager that the population-at-large has the lowest interest in Peanuts that they've had in 60 years (unless people are really charmed by those Met Life commercials), and no one who's a legitimate fan is gonna want to see this CGI abortion. But I'm sure it will unaccountably be a box office smash.

""We finally felt the time was right and the technology is where we need it to be to create this film,"

Was this actually said? By a Schulz family member?

This is the worst idea ever.

think of myself as a 'legitimate fan' - but then i think anybody who has ever read peanuts is a 'legitimate fan' - and would go to see this in the same way I went to the Tintin movie, ie more in hope than expectation. not sure why computer animation is any more or less 'legitimate' than hand-drawn cel animation, tho' i can see how the peculiar dimensions of the characters cld look v weird rendered in three dimensions.

Was this actually said? By a Schulz family member?

Reading the Schulz biography gave me a rather low opinion of most of his family members.

My guess is that Stephen Spielberg won't be directing this, so I expect it to be more in the vein of The Smurfs or The Lorax. At any rate, given the general state of computer animated children's movies these days, I thoroughly expect it to be an amped-up and unfaithful and awful adaptation. Like, with a big musical sequence featuring Lucy singing "Lady Marmalade" and Linus doing a little rap interlude.

xp I was about to say the same thing, not so much because of the content of the biography as their reaction to it.

I don't know what a CGI Peanuts would look like - I think it would be a bad idea to make a Peanuts movie regardless of style. But I have a hard time imagining Charlie Brown being hit by a baseball and spinning around in 3D and not groaning.

What'll be 'great' is showing how Snoopy stays on top of the doghouse.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3227/2885793176_32155de961.jpg

I thoroughly expect it to be an amped-up and unfaithful and awful adaptation. Like, with a big musical sequence featuring Lucy singing "Lady Marmalade" and Linus doing a little rap interlude.

― Old Lunch, Wednesday, 10 October 2012 14:16 (20 minutes ago)

I'm gathering that you have not seen the spectacularly awful late-period TV specials? Definitely a rap interlude in one of those.

Seeing the late period tv specials is what makes me very pessimistic about this 3D project.

I hate the way oldschool cartoon greats look w/ even shadows and "depth" in 2D -- I couldn't make it thru that last looney Tunes feature -- but I did have the Peanuts Viewmasters as a kid.

not sure why computer animation is any more or less 'legitimate' than hand-drawn cel animation, tho' i can see how the peculiar dimensions of the characters cld look v weird rendered in three dimensions.

bill melendez told a great story about how schulz once came to his animation studio and flipped through a stack of cels with drawings of snoopy dancing and went 'that's good...that's not so good...ugh, that's awful!' so melendez handed him a pen and asked him to redraw it. schulz's answer was 'i can't, you never see snoopy from that perspective.' then schulz looked embarrassed and never made any comments about the quality of the animation again.

perhaps when the technologically improved Linus says, "Lights, please,"

what strip or storyline is this from?


What'll be 'great' is showing how Snoopy stays on top of the doghouse.

as an ice skater, he has excellent balance. or, if you really need it,

http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2008/12/30/george-michael-cera.jpg

"Lights, please" is Linus's short request before the reading of the Bible passage in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

And I just KNEW someone would post that image.

john hughes tried to make a live-action 'peanuts' movie back in 1992: http://www.variety.com/article/VR100425?refCatId=13

i can't imagine how they'll write the screenplay for this, schulz wrote all the animated specials himself and the ones that aired after his death were all taken verbatim from actual strips. i can't imagine anyone but schulz writing convincing dialogue for the characters.

oh I can totally imagine how they'll write the screenplay

i wish schulz's actual heirs had taken a cue from schulz's (arguably) greatest artistic heir:

It is 1988. The strip has been going for three years. The phone rings at Universal Press Syndicate. It is Steven Spielberg's assistant. Mr. Spielberg would very much like to speak to Mr. Watterson.

Lee Salem, the syndicate's president, is ecstatic. Two creative minds like that getting together! The Wizard of Oz! Winnie the Pooh! Peter Pan! Excited, he calls Watterson at home in Chagrin Falls, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. Would he talk to Spielberg?

No, Watterson says.

"Bill simply was not interested," Salem remembers now, the sound of lost millions in licensing revenue like so much static down the phone line.

Wow, that's classic

Watterson is a hero imho

and yeah he is easily Schulz' greatest heir

(Mutts dude a close second)

Augh (re Mutts dude, who drives me up the wall)

Mutts is pretty to look at but also pretty terrible.

Mutts started out promisingly because the art is so good, but pretty quickly got stuck in mush and will never get out.

Cul de Sac was closest in recent years, but just reached its own sad end.

This film will give us a new medium in which to engage consumers globally and showcase the power of the Peanuts brand.

i was going to say go fuck yrselves but it just seemed totally inadequate

(to be clear tho this is entirely schulz' fault, as he made it quite clear snoopy would do anything for money)

He's a dog, different work standards. Also those Sopwith Camels don't fund themselves.

certainly not at the rate he went through them

Precisely. It's like Berke Breathed and speedboats.

While I agree that Schulz is totally responsible for Peanuts becoming a "brand" in the first place, the branded stuff still maintained the general tenor of the strips (while he was alive, anyway). I have very little confidence that the movie is going to be very faithful to the source material. Thoroughly expecting a frenzied pace, double entendres, farts, and lots of Poochie-style attitude.

yeah, probably true.

plus tremendous poshlost sentimentality, in excess even of post-67ish peanuts' already significant quotient of same

what if wes anderson directs and michael cera gets weird botox to make his head completely spherical?

Thoroughly expecting a frenzied pace, double entendres, farts, and lots of Poochie-style attitude.

Poll: Who Will Fart in the Peanuts Movie?

haha there is a peanuts character named poochie! see:

http://c0389161.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/dyn/str_strip/245714.full.gif

Particularly funny because Snoopy's "Joe Cool" persona may well be a prototype for the Simpsons' Poochie!

Mutts started out promisingly because the art is so good, but pretty quickly got stuck in mush and will never get out.

I have books of the first three years and those are all great. haven't read anything else, apart from a few of his children's books.

Watterson is a hero imho

― stop swearing and start windmilling (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, October 10, 2012 7:49 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm otm otm otm

Mutts looks great, but it's just not funny, not even a little.

not to be all Dr. Morbius to you youngsters but this shit's been in three-dimensions before

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_a_Good_Man,_Charlie_Brown

http://www.tams-witmark.com/images/CharlieBrown.jpg
http://www.tams-witmark.com/images/CharlieBrownRevised.jpg
http://www.hope.edu/hsrt/shows/Past%20Seasons/2000/You
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_A3CZmkLo5mw/Sg3Pqm15NZI/AAAAAAAAGUQ/qjjtSyxTtnc/s400/You
http://www.kidswhocare.org/images/classicmusical/CharlieB2006.jpg
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http://www.bostontheatrereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/TLP_Charlie_IMG_11.JPG

Second from the left in that last one has been on a Barenaked Ladies album cover, I'd stake my life on it.

girl i went to senior prom w was a very vaguely obscene sally in my hometown production of that

lmao whiney

1. "you're a good man charlie brown" is actually kind of a great musical
2. watterson was v good but to mention him in the same breath with the greatness of peanuts is insulting -- peanuts was humane in a way c&h never attained, c&h smarmy in a way peanuts never sunk to
3. agreed there is little chance this movie is good though

opinions registered

Not sure I buy #2 - I get that there's a certain edge or meanness about C&H that Peanuts will depict but not embody...but it was hardly devoid of humanity, and to say that Peanuts lacked "smarm" is to forget the last, what, two decades of the strip? With numerous exceptions, of course! But it's not like Schulz never swung for Hallmark territory - just that in his long heyday he did avoid it by sheer quality and honesty of observation.

this is a little smarmy, but i approve!
http://mikemarsonats.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/peanuts-nov-6-1974.jpg
but besides the social commentary let's look at how ruthlessly peppermint patty just crushes franklin's dreams.
both peanuts and calvin and hobbes are totally of a kind when it comes to the casual cruelty of childhood.

Even though this strip has a happy ending the "I should hope so" is hilarious

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqv7y6Aexa1qe1xvbo1_400.png

Some of the cruelty took on pretty hysterical forms in the earlier strips

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l86ad2czk71qc7rw2o1_400.jpg

hahaha that is wonderfully OTM

50's Peanuts was fuckin' dark as dark ever could get

Although back then Charlie Brown retaliated.

http://c0389161.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/dyn/str_strip/238312.full.gif

love how in that Poochie strip Poochie clearly does not give a shit about seeing Charlie Brown again

50's Peanuts was fuckin' dark as dark ever could get

from the very first strip

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/69/First_Peanuts_comic.png

that peppermint patty/franklin one has always really unsettled me.

Just remembered I had this all-time favorite stowed away somewhere:

http://farm1.staticflickr.com/131/339293034_4f3b1acfa7.jpg

and to say that Peanuts lacked "smarm" is to forget the last, what, two decades of the strip?

Conceded. I guess I have, indeed, forgotten the last two decades of the strip.

"How I hate him!" should be hailed as one of the great last lines in American literature.

I have tried to "tell" that first Peanuts strip so many times to people, it's just so perfect.

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/fantagraphics_launches_peanuts_every_sunday_series_this_fall/

oooh!

yeah been kinda bummed about the b&w sundays in the complete collections

awesome news! have sorta fallen behind on buying the 'complete' books but i'll definitely get a few of these.

sally's expression in the last panel of this one kills me.

http://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Picture24-300x218.jpg

I wrote a post at <i>Music Sounds Better With Two</i> on the UK version of "Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron": http://musicsoundsbetterwithtwo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/underdog-hotshots-snoopy-vs-red-baron.html - was wondering if <i>It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown</i> was ever shown on UK tv.

never saw this before! the first time 'peanuts' was ever animated -- a ford commercial from 1961:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x58TMNiQ_5Y

Search: most of the actual comic strips
Destroy: almost all Peanuts-related marketing and merchandising

but search this!

http://img1.targetimg1.com/wcsstore/TargetSAS//img/p/14/19/14193490_120722183000.jpg

I'm guilty of buying some merch for sure. I just love the look of the characters too much.

Jonathan Rosenabaum into to Sunday '52-55 strips (compares Schulz to Ozu, natch):

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2013/11/peanuts-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow-tk/

can't believe the Ozu comparison never occurred to me before

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1/1621914_10152330196536518_729753250_n.jpg

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/18/peanuts_movie_teaser_our_first_look_at_charlie_brown_and_snoopy_in_the_cgi.html

Doom.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/03/17/little-red-haired-girl-fifi-peanuts-charlie-brown/6384109/

While Charlie Brown has pined for the red-haired girl her from afar at school lunch periods, she has rarely been depicted, appearing only briefly in TV specials. Now she'll truly step out in the film.

"She looks wonderful, but people will have to wait a year and a half to see her," says producer Craig Schulz, a son of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. "We handle it very respectfully. We knew we wanted this movie to be bigger than any kind of TV special. To do that, we had to kind of go to the boundaries of where I would ever let anyone go in the Peanuts world."

They're going to show the redheaded girl? Really? _Really_?

Just hope this turns out to be as good as good as the Sherman and Mr. Peabody movie.

linus builds a universal translator to decode wah-wah-wah-wah. but the military steals it!

We handle it very respectfully. We knew we wanted this movie to be bigger than any kind of TV special.

^^^ horrible, sickening doublethink, these two sentences together. God help us.

I don't have high hopes for this, but after re-watching some of those 1970s "spelling bee" era Peanuts TV specials, I know there's already plenty of precedence for shitty adaptations.

The TV specials aren't all great, but wanting to be "bigger" than them is some serious point-missing IMO.

Yeah, aside from the x-mas special, and maybe one or two others, Peanuts TV specials are pretty awful.

Yeah I'd rather just read the strips but we got some gold like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNVosVTWekA

I'm pretty much down with the original specials up through the late seventies or so, and the four theatrical movies all had their charms. (The special that was the addendum to their European trip was also nice too.) It's almost lizard brain nostalgia -- I tie that up with a lot of good memories in my past.

'a boy named charlie brown' is pretty incredible, not least because it doesn't soften the blow the way most of the specials do: it's pure undiluted schulz. charlie brown loses the spelling bee, the kids treat him horribly, and it all ends badly. but then there's this wonderful moment at the very end, when charlie brown is moping and feeling sorry for himself, and linus says: 'but did you notice something, charlie brown? the world didn't come to an end.'

This looks decent enough. Nice faux stop-motion effect they have there. The voices are pretty spot-on as well!

sounds like they're just reusing existing recordings of bill melendez's snoopy voice, which was prob the smartest thing to do.

Paul Feig should be ashamed of himself

glad they're finally sprucing up this turd of a comic with some epic computer f/x and action scenes

Next thing you know they will be hawking Charlie Brown and Snoopy dolls!

https://www.metlife.com/brandcenter/visual/snoopy/index.html

“Snoopy will not be rapping, no one will be twerking, we're in good hands.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJdGaO1w0eQ

Would've assumed this would be awful, but the animation in the trailer is really charming imo

this looks repulsive

i hear cgi charlie brown turns into a robot in this, just like in the comics

Sorry, ilx, forgot to add /jackie_harvey j/k after my last post

repulsive how sic

It really is a shame they're going to force all adults to watch this just like Ninja Turtles and Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks, so it's important we all have opinions on a peanuts movie in 2014

Never create your own PEANUTS comic strip.

Oh, to have known the insurance salesman who forced the hand of MetLife's legal team on this one.

ninja turtles (post-comics) and smurfs and chipmunks are all pretty explicitly kid-targeted franchises, which peanuts isn't.

repulsive how sic

Plastic-looking modelling, greasy imagery that makes my eyes slide right off it into a puddle of CGI at the bottom of the screenshots. (Luckily the video didn’t load in my browser.) The idea that this is in any way valuable in a year when HUGELY more of Schulz’ actual work is in print and readily available than at any other time in history.

Do not depict characters with alcoholic beverages. Snoopy likes root beer.

ha ha

PEANUTS is some str8 garbage and if you can't admit it then you are lying to yourself and to god

i know you eventually recant but thats one of my favorite thread titles

ninja turtles (post-comics) and smurfs and chipmunks are all pretty explicitly kid-targeted franchises, which peanuts isn't.
--(The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

Peanuts has been a kid targeted franchise since like the 70s

i know you eventually recant but thats one of my favorite thread titles

― slam dunk, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 12:07 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

only a semi-recant, i still hate all the peanuts ive seen except a couple strips

Plastic-looking modelling, greasy imagery that makes my eyes slide right off it into a puddle of CGI at the bottom of the screenshots. (Luckily the video didn’t load in my browser.)

"I wasn't able to watch the trailer but I know that it's awful"

I actually think this teaser looked okay - I was braced for the worst but the animation actually seemed quite charming. I probs won't see it until my daughter is old enough to want to, and I'm a little skeevy at the thought of actually seeing the little red haired girl, but...

Peanuts has been a kid targeted franchise since like the 70s

― open-y, ob-la-da (Whiney G. Weingarten)

No you're thinking of the plushies, not the actual strip. Although I've most frequently seen Snoopy on adult underwear in H&M.

I'm talking about the images, stevie!

schulz museum posted this on twitter today:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BjG0ClBCcAAM5xD.jpg

the trailer isn't too bad sic!

Except for when Snoopy breakdances to Smash Mouth.

"hey dog / you're a rockstar..."

this looks repulsive

― Charles, hatless (sic), Tuesday, March 18, 2014 8:09 PM (Yesterday)

^^^

They're going to show the redheaded girl? Really? _Really_?

― abcfsk, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 3:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

characters from throughout the Peanuts universe will appear, including the Little Red-Haired Girl (who was never seen in the strips, but did appear in one TV special).

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51C5MkqLIuL._SY300_.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjWxzKwic0c

There is btw nothing in this teaser at all that would lead to any of the histrionic pre-condemnation people are making here. Literally nothing.

I do get that it's sort of less offensive that the animation has a friendly, homemade, almost quasi 1950s stop-motion feel that is true-ish to the world/mind from which the characters come. But... it doesn't do any of that better than the cheap crummy TV animation of forty years ago, and in the meantime it acquires a really dubious sheen. The opening Strauss gag is cute, but it's "cute" in the exact way Peanuts isn't, and in a way from which I can't see Charlie Brown benefiting, or getting more human or relatable. In the world of winking meta-gags, it's very mild, but the world of winking meta-gags isn't really Peanuts to begin with. It makes me wonder whether the handlers really 'get' the kind of funny that the strip did so well at its best.

It doesn't look like it's going to be a 'rapping Snoopy' Dreamworks/Fox type animated movie - but why does it need to exist at all? I'm reminded of the Jim Carrey Grinch movie - even if it hadn't been godawful, it would still be a redundant cash-in.

Why does any of pop culture exist at all? Why are we wasting our time w this when we could be curing cancer/exploring space/finding god in our fellow man.

i think ppl are responding more to the idea of a cgi peanuts movie than anything in the teaser (which i found charming and really better than i'd expected). tbh schulz's heirs seem to be showing more restraint and respect for the use of his characters than he often showed himself.

It's just fun to be the backlash to the backlash. Yes, stuff that was relentlessly marketed to you as a child is still being relentlessly marketed. Personally, I think it looks interesting, and plenty of actual young Peanuts fans are super psyched for this.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bg_yafsHd-E/TXsvpsxBQQI/AAAAAAAAAgY/Z1NGcpjUDu4/s1600/11-16-1953.gif

yall just be happy it isnt this

http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=hgpUc6bUagA&p=n#/106;107

Peanuts has been a kid targeted franchise since like the 70s

― open-y, ob-la-da (Whiney G. Weingarten)

No you're thinking of the plushies, not the actual strip. Although I've most frequently seen Snoopy on adult underwear in H&M.

― abcfsk, Wednesday, March 19, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It has been my experience that for most people "Peanuts" = plushies and tv specials.

i know no one reads newspapers anymore but i think peanuts the strip -- which is not particularly geared toward children -- is central to the franchise in a way that isn't the case with smurfs or chipmunks et al.

watched the trailer.
vince g piano grooves.
woodstock.
sod the cynicism.
cant wait.

wolves are making a comeback

animation looks fine but people itt being inappropriately kind to an also sprach zarathustra joke in 2014

remember when it ruined clueless

http://c0389161.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/dyn/str_strip/238434.full.gif

haha, sparky clearly loved that 'gnus' joke:

http://assets.amuniversal.com/980ed1f01dc7012ea5ca00163e41dd5b

Haha, did you do a gnus search?

had to look up the date, but i actually remembered that strip from one of these books, which i read to death as a kid and prob still remember a lot of outdated facts from:

https://p.gr-assets.com/max_square/fill/books/1216182388/697934.jpg

La de dah, we don't care..

(possibly my favourite CB strip)

Peanuts treasuries and 'cyclopedias of all kinds were among the finest of things to seek at yard sales in my childhood.

i had a bunch of those too! wish i still did.

GO GO TODAY
RAIN SOME WAY
AGAIN SOME DAY!

the trailer isn't too bad sic!

OK, I watched it:

1] jaunty, playful tone / bright imagery / zero other content: uh and ehhhhh.
2] presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on designing and animating a 3D Charlie Brown, that at every step decides that each Schulz penline delineating a visible edge of Charlie Brown’s hairline should be translated into thick, floating, tendril-like antennae protruding from his naked scalp: ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE?

I hope half of the movie is just extreme close-ups of Charlie Brown's crown.

one of us! one of us!
http://www.calvin-und-hobbes.com/images/stories/fanart/Calvin_and_Hobbes_by_wender.jpg

Oh crap i should make a fake Calvin & Hobbes one. Has anyone done that yet?

Like, a CGI trailer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkEglfv8a-g

LOLLLL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7Alug6bBM

kinda cool, actually

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqFRe1-m5w

xps yeah the hairline rendered as a single tendril is terrible.

i'm reading 1987-88 and looking at the index i noticed "assault rifle". kind of a surprise to see this:

http://assets.amuniversal.com/23d5b4c01dd4012ea5ca00163e41dd5b

Looks halfway between an m16 and a Bren LMG or something

This one always struck me as pretty fucked up, unless the point is to show what a jerk Peppermint Patty is...but I'm not sure that's the case:
http://www.thesneeze.com/art/franklin/strip.gif

i recall a long and rather heated discussion on the now-gone TCJ message board about what message schulz was trying to convey with that one

whoa! i don't remember that one... yeah that is messed up.

found this:

http://www.thesneeze.com/art/franklin/letter.jpg

back story here: http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/000485.php

Wow.

Well, Schulz wasn't just pointing out that fact; he had Patty use it to discourage Franklin from practicing hockey. "There's hardly any Black NHL players, Franklin, so give up" was how I interpreted it.

i think i come down on the side of the point being 'peppermint patty is being a jerk,' though that is maybe the single jerkiest thing i have ever seen a peanuts character say.

i wrote a fan letter to schulz in the early '90s but got a form letter back; now i'm kinda wondering if i'd have gotten a response if i'd written something to piss him off!

that is all pretty depressing, guilty lols at the little picture of Snoopy typing up defensive responses to people who've accused him of racism that appears at the bottom of the letter, though

i'm seeing it as a clumsy and tasteless punchline that's somewhat uncharacteristic for schulz (and p. patty).

"number one snoopy place".

Later on, when Franklin was introduced into the strip, the little black kid—I could have put him in long before that, but for other reasons, I didn't. I didn't want to intrude upon the work of others, so I held off on that. But I finally put Franklin in, and there was one strip where Charlie Brown and Franklin had been playing on the beach, and Franklin said, "Well, it's been nice being with you, come on over to my house some time." Again, they didn't like that. Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, "We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school." But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin—he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, "Well, Larry, let's put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How's that?" So that's the way that ended. But I've never done much with Franklin, because I don't do race things. I'm not an expert on race, I don't know what it's like to grow up as a little black boy, and I don't think you should draw things unless you really understand them, unless you're just out to stir things up or to try to teach people different things. I'm not in this business to instruct; I'm just in it to be funny. Now and then I may instruct a few things, but I'm not out to grind a lot of axes. Let somebody else do it who's an expert on that, not me.

also, like, ppl have made the point that Franklin was just introduced and one of the gang with no set-up, no big political statement, no nothing; which is pretty radical in 1968, considering, as this piece points out, this is the stuff Dennis the Menace was running two years AFTER franklin was introduced

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/files/2008/11/27/dennis.jpg

I have to say, I didn't know much (any) of Franklin's backstory, either as a character or in Schulz' introduction/incorporation of him into the strip. The hockey strip stuck out in my memory largely because Franklin seemed to be the butt of the joke. But based on how he was introduced, and Schulz' threatening to quit, I can see that strip now as an awkward attempt to say the opposite of how it comes off.

It's totally in character for Peppermint Patty to be that much of a jerk. (It would be for Lucy too, but Lucy's about honing in on people's insecurities; Patty is more accidentally insensitive when aiming to drop truths on people.)

xxp yeah that's the odd thing about this strip. are there any others where the fact of franklin being black is explicitly mentioned?

most unsettling thing about franklin's first appearance is the casual vietnam reference imo:

http://museumofuncutfunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Franklin-5.gif

he was in a war, too, but i don't know which one.

pretty definitive third panel there.

There does seem like a lot of "code" with Franklin's first appearances:

http://museumofuncutfunk.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/pe681016.gif

http://mashable.com/2014/11/26/franklin-black-peanuts-character-history/

http://gothamist.com/2015/10/30/lucy_had_a_lumpy_head.php

Kathie Lee and Woodstock speak the same dialect anyway.

In the behind-the-scenes package, Kathy Lee actually said "Why do I have to be Woodstock? He doesn't talk!" and I kept thinking "you have all the pieces, now put them together"

http://i.imgur.com/WXSQMqP.jpg

I can say, without reservation, that those are the most frightening costumes I have seen or will see this Halloween season. What the everloving fuck were they thinking.

it reminds me of that creepy snl sketch where brendan fraser is charlie brown and gets a severe head injury
http://www.oocities.org/sunsetstrip/disco/6857/brown4.jpg

Holy Jesus

http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/alien-from-talosian-star-trek-1360238035_b.jpg

is there anybody at all that wants to see this movie? do kids even know who the Peanuts gang are these days (apart from those kids of ILX0rs that are way into the Fantagraphics reprints)?

Swear to God, if there's a fart joke in this movie...

... you will see it multiple times in the theater?

this film seems destined to satisfy noone

http://www.bbkingblues.com/inc/artists/606-3.jpg

He certainly looks satisfied.

Mrs. Brown, you've got a lovely daughter.

Hell, PN even looks like one of the new Peanuts.

I got some piece of spam about the movie that blurbed "the Peanuts gang in their FIRST big-screen outing" blah blah...

If it happened before Star Wars, it didn't happen.

If it's genuinely in the spirit of the strip and/or the original movies and animated specials, I'd give it a shot. I'm extremely wary, though (because, yes, potential for farts, and also Black Eyed Peas songs or whatever). And while I love Peanuts, I'm totally in agreement that owning the rights to a 50+ year old property doesn't mean that there's any real reason to adapt it to another medium at this point or that there's any real market for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2AS51xJ9iE

im not sure i trust the favorable reviews that have come out, but this is an interesting look at how they worked to keep the imagery in line with schultz's drawings as possible (keeping the motion lines, etc.) http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/03/movies/08the-peanuts-movie-scene.html

I guess I should clarify: "If it's genuinely in the spirit of the strip and/or the pre-'80s original movies and animated specials, I'd give it a shot."

^^ WHY IS CHARLIE BROWN SMILING AT THE END OF THAT FOOTBALL CLIP?

Because he just farted, beat you all to it.

i would be stunned if they can even muster the spirit of the metlife commercials, but i've been wrong before

There's gonna be turf warfare with the Family Circus clan iirc

For people who get their newspaper comics fix online, comics.com now offers "Peanuts Begins," really early strips, separate from the more recent Peanuts strips.

Maybe I posted these before, but Schultz did some Peanuts ads for the Ford Falcon in the early '60s...

http://spinoff.comicbookresources.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/fordad.jpg

https://triviahappy.com/images/articles/03182014charliead.jpg

http://www.grayflannelsuit.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/1963-ford-falcon-peanuts-ad-charlie-brown-lucy.jpg

https://media2.wnyc.org/i/620/372/l/80/1/charlie_brown_and_lucy_ford_falcon.jpg

The Falcon campaign also boasted the first Peanuts animations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EHtX2FEVyA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u43ExlkXmQs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x58TMNiQ_5Y

Cool. I'm always interested in ancillary Peanuts stuff. Hopefully, since there's only one more Fantagraphics reprint still to be issued, they'll compile a book of extras to fill out a twelfth box set.

Okay, so it appears that two of Schulz's sons are the writers and Paul Feig is a producer and there's no obnoxious stunt voice casting from what I can tell. Aside from a Meghan Trainor song and a Flo Rida song (which I hope good sense will relegate to the end credits), nothing is jumping out as glaringly troublesome. Maybe this will be okay?

Speaking of the Fanta reprints, the 1995-1998 slipcase came out last week. I'm determined to complete the collection at this point, but this is, eh, not exactly top-shelf material. If it needs to be said.

i'm cautiously excited about this but sort of bracing myself bcz i'm not really 100 percent convinced that anyone but schulz can write peanuts dialogue.

^^ WHY IS CHARLIE BROWN SMILING AT THE END OF THAT FOOTBALL CLIP?

― pplains, Tuesday, 3 November 2015 20:48 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

I read an interview with Feig that sounded very promising.

Feig was on The Soup and was surprisingly hilarious

Pretty sure Peanuts is still huge, I have a 4-year-old niece who loves all the old specials and at one point recited the intro to "It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown!" from memory.

Aside from a Meghan Trainor song and a Flo Rida song (which I hope good sense will relegate to the end credits), nothing is jumping out as glaringly troublesome.

this is a very big "aside from..."

http://cdn.someecards.com/someecards/usercards/other-than-that-mrs-lincoln-how-did-you-enjoy-the-play-d74a2.png

xpost Oh, I most definitely agree. Based on the information I can glean from the credits, though, this looks like the one glaring concession the filmmakers made to the studio. Assuming Flo Rida isn't the director's cousin or something.

vince guaraldi ft. flo rida - "linus and lucy (got dem apple bottom jeans)"

The Meghan Trainor song is fine

3D animation looks horrible here.

I slept through most of it but as I recall none of the pop songs from the trailers appear in the actual movie.
Bilge Ebiri's review seems about right I think.

Now will they make a Dog Sees God movie?

so this was alright?

this was actually quite lovely and sweet, i was pleasantly surprised.

none of the fears expressed here and elsewhere came to pass, the voices sound right and the dialogue is authentically peanuts-ish and they didn't tack on any grand quest story. (and no, no crude jokes.) i was basically the target audience to be disappointed or infuriated by this movie and i wasn't, at all. unless you really hate the way the cgi looks, there's nothing here that any peanuts fan is going to hate.

Having a trombone instead of a trumpet for the voices of the adults was a little off, felt like an excuse to feature Trombone Shorty in the credits. Not exactly a BFD though.

Was there an adult in one of the later cartoons who had a voice that was nothing but percussion? Or am I imagining that.

I think adult voices have always been a trombone with a mute.

It was like a coach yelling at Pigpen or something - one of those voices that actually caused the character to lift up off the ground with his mouth wide open, grasping at his chest with his little hands.

Like I said, might've imagined it.

think i'll take my daughter to this, since she is peanuts-obsessed right now. i've got low expectations, but the reviews i've read make it sound like i won't be outraged or anything.
this was a good piece: www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/the-existential-beauty-of-peanuts

I think adult voices have always been a trombone with a mute.

― phở intellectual (WilliamC), Monday, November 9, 2015 2:11 PM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this.

i guess i should see this movie. maybe next weekend.

HERE is the Charlotte Braun letter.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/charlotte-braun-death-of-a-peanuts-character#.ktjajOr8g

I'll definitely see this, even at 38 I still love Peanuts fare.

did anyone see this movie?

wish i had a scanner, but this peanuts I actually had to cut out and save:

Panel 1:
Charlie Brown, awake in bed, staring at ceiling, snoopy sleeping draped over CB's feet: "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, can my generation look to the future with hope?"

Panel 2:
Charlie Brown, lying on side with very worried expression, and snoopy is now awake with identical furrowed brow:
"Then, out of the dark, a voice comes to me that says, 'Why, sure... well, I mean... that is... it sort of depends... I mean... if... when... who... we... and..."

October 23, 1995

most of them were bad, but every once in a while... pow.

― (Jon L), Friday, September 26, 2003 11:05 PM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is actually a LOT of gold in the later peanuts.

i saw it:

this was actually quite lovely and sweet, i was pleasantly surprised.

none of the fears expressed here and elsewhere came to pass, the voices sound right and the dialogue is authentically peanuts-ish and they didn't tack on any grand quest story. (and no, no crude jokes.) i was basically the target audience to be disappointed or infuriated by this movie and i wasn't, at all. unless you really hate the way the cgi looks, there's nothing here that any peanuts fan is going to hate.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, November 9, 2015 6:44 PM (3 days ago)

it seems worth remembering that expectations were not high for the first major peanuts adaptation either:

A Charlie Brown Christmas was completed just ten days shy of its national broadcast premiere. All involved believed the special would be an unmitigated disaster. (Bill) Melendez first saw the completed animation at a showing in a theater in the days before its premiere, turning to his crew of animators and remarking, "My golly, we've killed it." Melendez was embarrassed, but one of the animators, Ed Levitt, was more positive regarding the special, telling him it was "the best special (he'll) ever make (...) This show is going to run for a hundred years." (Lee) Mendelson was similar in his assumptions of the show's quality, and when he showed the film to network executives in New York, their opinions were also negative. Their complaints included the show's slow pace, the music not fitting, and the animation too simple. "I really believed, if it hadn't been scheduled for the following week, there's no way they were gonna broadcast that show," Mendelson later said.

http://i.imgur.com/vkp8ZC8.png

The movie completely embodied the peanuts strips: the characters we love, the exact same situations and quotes, jokes that make us smile but not laugh, and a comforting aura of fluff that is completely foreign to any child that likes to move it move It. Likewise, my excitement subsided by the end of the movie.

B-

Esp loved the part where Charlie and Linus get iinto a heated debate over whether fuel can melt steel

11/16/52

https://twitter.com/Hoganmag/status/666256171444150272

saw this w/ my six year old over the weekend. i didn't find it offensive or anything... too much slapstick-y kinda stuff ultimately, but it was mostly a pleasure to look at, and found an OK middle ground between the TV specials and the strip itself. six year old loved it.

reading 97-98 now and noticed the rifle strip posted upthread being reused nine years later, along with the short sequence leading up to it. the dates on the strips have been changed but otherwise they are reprints. this is the first time in the fantagraphics books that i've noticed schulz doing this.

did he do this at any other time? it's interesting given the unusually pointed nature of the strip.

Huh. I haven't really looked through my copy much yet so I hadn't noticed that. I think they were running some reprints occasionally towards the end of his run when his health was failing but I don't know why Fanta would choose to reprint those strips. They usually run some sort of explanatory text when they make decisions like that.

ah, according to the peanuts faq in 1997 schulz took his one and only vacation and 35 strips that year were reprints.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/07/barack_obama_wrote_the_foreword_for_the_newest_complete_peanuts_installment.html

oh whoa they're almost done!

!!!

awesome

Yeah, this is the final collection of strips, and then I guess there's a book of supplementary material coming out later this year (something to justify the existence of a final slipcase, if nothing else).

Note that volume 25 will also include THE ENTIRE RUN of Li'l Folks, and Volume 26 looks far more interesting than just a slipcase-filler: http://aaugh.com/wordpress/2016/02/you-can-and-should-order-complete-peanuts-26/

Thanks! I hadn't seen much in the way of details for 25 and hadn't seen anything about 26. The Chip Kidd book that came out last year is lovely so I'm definitely down for another volume of ephemera.

I'd love to see a complete set of images from the View-Master slides but it would probably be weird to put non-Schulz work in a Schulz-centric book.

r.i.p. donna wold, the real little red-haired girl:

http://www.startribune.com/obituary-donna-wold-inspired-charles-schulz-s-little-red-haired-girl-for-peanuts/390807911/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/business/media/metlife-grounds-snoopy-curse-you-red-baron.html?_r=0

that piece reads weirdly like an obituary, what w/ the odd use of past tense: "snoopy was the loyal pup..."

I found it really sad and poignant, the end of an era

i liked this bit:

Consumers thought the “Peanuts” characters were friendly and approachable, Ms. Lee said, but did not associate them with traits like leadership and responsibility. Nor did the characters affect interest in buying insurance.

i was never even remotely attached to the idea of the peanuts gang hawking metlife, though i do think it made them seem like somehow the most cuddly and least corporate insurance company, without them having to do anything else. which was the intention. the bigger story of course is the fading popular visibility of these characters. i mean clearly the movie was trying to intervene in that process and maybe it succeeded? my sense is that their time of ubiquitous familiarity could be beginning to fade. but i don't browse the kids' and cartoons' sections of bookstores much - - - maybe they are still widely sold and read. the christmas special i'm sure is still in rotation but i have a feeling the rest of that lot have been supplanted, if TV even shows holiday specials anymore. it's weird, peanuts wasn't THAT huge a part of my childhood but imagining childhood without it is real weird.

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it. I can now read the 60s ones and they're pretty good. I do a scan though, and if I see Snoopy with a thought balloon, or doing anything besides standing, walking, or laying on his doghouse, or a new character like Woodstock, etc, I skip it.

http://i.imgur.com/TQi2CWr.gif

http://i.imgur.com/4qCLWud.gif

all i really remember from jonathan franzen's essay on peanuts is that he uses the phrase "the unhilarious bird woodstock."

great, now i'll never be able to think of him any other way

lol i should add that i think woodstock is a much better character than anyone in anything i've ever read by franzen

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/71/44/05/71440504a330329c37c7cab836d822ef.gif

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it.

so many kids reading the LA Times every day

They may well grab the funnies page like we did in my day. I mean, who the hell else is reading some of those?

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it.

At least a dozen seeders on The Pirate Bay.

Contemporaneous Peanuts always seemed a little stodgy when I was a kid but I was lucky enough at the time to find a stack of my uncle's paperback collections of the timeless and classic '50s and '60s material. That's the stuff the newspapers should be running if they want to build a new fanbase.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids read newspaper comics at all anymore? Abbott?

Lol, exactly the person to ask.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids anyone reads newspaper comics at all anymore?

I do, but not every day

I was the biggest comics page reader as a kid, but that section is shit now.

Worst thing to happen to the comics in the past 20 years? Introducing set fonts into the text balloons.

Hell yeah it makes things easier, but it looks like shit.

That's the stuff the newspapers should be running if they want to build a new fanbase.

That was Bill Watterson's argument: do editors think that fewer and smaller and shittier strips will somehow attract more readers? Wouldn't making a huge Sunday comics section, with one big comic per page, be a relatively cheap and easy way to increase circulation?

I honestly don't even get what the point of the comics section is anymore. With very few exceptions, it's been a cesspool for decades. Which seems increasingly shameful with each amazing old-school strip I discover. At least we're in the golden age of collections of classic strips!

(i read the paper every day but haven't read strip sections in years as they don't exist in the non-tabloid dailies; somebody tell carlos slim to step up his game)

i know my niece was reading and cutting out strips from the sunday paper a few years ago.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids read newspaper comics at all anymore?

i had a daytime server job at a diner and it was so slow we spent most of the time playing cards or reading newspapers, comics was the favorite section next to sudoku.

that was 10 years ago tho. no idea if now people just play games on their phones.

seems likely

I still read the LAT comics (on paper!) but I'm old. I read Bizzaro, Candorville, the Latino one I can't remember the name of now (by Lalo Alcaraz), Doonesbury (they're also rerunning this one, think they're in the late 70s now), even Dilbert, and even after I found out what a tool Adams is, and two single-panel ones that I also can't remember.

What's the name of the fucking sub dilbert pirate one

Overboard! I really liked both Overboard and Dilbert when I was a kid, I think partly because they were poorly drawn enough that I could draw reasonable approximations of the characters from both

don't remember it bring this grim tbh

http://tanis.cso.niu.edu/comics/2009.02.08/Overboard-2009.02.08.gif

wow I had completely forgotten that strip

I had a look at some recent ones, and none of them seem to be about pirate stuff at all, the fact they're all pirates is all never mentioned and completely irrelevant to any of the jokes. I guess this is fairly common wrt long running comic strips once they exhaust all the jokes about their basic gimmick?

I'll stop talking about Overboard in the Peanuts thread now, my apologies to Charles Schultz

I guess this is fairly common wrt long running comic strips once they exhaust all the jokes about their basic gimmick?

Well either that or diving headfirst into overtly Christian themes with a dash of Islamophobia sprinkled in.

Ummm... Funky Winkerbean to thread?

(apologizes to Schultz thread)

Never heard of Overboard before today, but that strip makes me want to check it out.

http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Charlie+brown+transcript+well+what+are+you+doing+here+go+on+home_54f538_4732034.jpg

That up there is the first overboard strip I've read that I haven't hated

Haha Overboard is terrible but I agree that is a good one

"how i hate him" is still how i think about charlie brown.
it was a long slow process from pig pen to charlie brown to linus in my life. i'm aiming for schroeder these days.

in tribute:

which Peanuts character do you most identify with at this point in your life?

i struck a chord!

Just like Schroeder!

I guess this is fairly common wrt long running comic strips once they exhaust all the jokes about their basic gimmick?

One of my favourite examples of this is the "Robotman" strip, which started in the 1980s as an "ALF" style story about a robot from outer space living with a suburban family with two kids... Then the whole premise of the strip was rebooted so that Robotman started living with a nerdy guy named Monty, while the rest of the original cast disappeared, and the title was changed to "Robotman and Monty". Then Robotman himself disappeared, and now the strip is just about Monty. Talk about a ship of Theseus!

ha, perfect analogy. there are a lot of (less dramatic) variations on that theme, like "blondie" metamorphosing from the adventures of a flapper girl, whose boyfriend dagwood was, according to wiki, the heir to a railroad fortune (!)... to being primarily a settled suburbanite sitcom focused around dagwood the put-upon 9-to-5er. "wash tubbs" started out with small-town hijinks revolving around a girl-chasing, flivver-driving up-and-comer, and became a globe-trotting adventures trip propelled by the two-fisted, square-jawed captain easy.

Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

Never in my life did I set eyes on Barney Google in that strip

the ultimate example is thimble theater, which was a strip about scheming ne'er-do-well castor oyl and his sister olive until one day they needed to hire a sailor:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zFdVi5iwEAA/VGkDu3UZGkI/AAAAAAAAEH0/7cRMhua9a-U/s1600/popeye_firstcartoon.gif

Ha someone just explained that particular evolution to me the other day re: popeye

RIP professor whatasnozzle

fuck this half assed bullshit
https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/kawsxpeanuts/kxp

preach

Good grief.

"KAWS is an internationally recognized artist who regularly exhibits in museums and galleries throughout the world. this UT collection features KAWS's unique rendition of the beloved comic strip “Peanuts.” Snoopy and other Peanuts favorites are presented in a bold graphical style with a sophisticated humor."

are the xs for eyes what makes his rendition unique or are they his sophisticated humor?

i have a unique rendition of Hello Kitty if anyone wants to see it.

You should see my Beenie and Cecil, Ohhhhh!

I am quietly grateful

http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/fires/article178281236.html

yeah i've been fretting about the well-being of the schulz museum. awful to even contemplate something happening to it. that stuff is irreplaceable.

given the number of dead, i think quietly grateful is about as far as i'd be willing to go

A good friend of mine of twenty years standing lost her house in the fire. I am well aware of the proper perspective, thank you.

not lecturing you, just agreeing

He had a perfectly legitimate character named Patty and then suddenly he introduces a character called Peppermint Patty and just lets the original Patty die out. What kind of cartoonist does that?

life is cruel

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6d/5d/d5/6d5dd584e9214741e53fdce4d1e9b5c2.jpg

http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/images/Peanuts.gif

i like that last one. year?

1973 http://peanuts.wikia.com/wiki/October_1973_comic_strips

A sad follow up: his home of 35 years, and where his widow Jean continued to live, was lost. She is fine but some personal memorabilia is now gone forever. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/12/peanuts-creator-charles-schulzs-widow-flees-santa-rosa-fire-home-destroyed/

First, the Library of Alexandria. Now this.

v sad news :(

https://i.imgur.com/fRpXZLT.jpg

;_;

Sometimes when I'm alarmed I feel my (psychic) ears stand up like Snoopy's.

I wrote a very short story pic.twitter.com/hSO2nPtxq1

— Jason Ritter (@JasonRitter) December 23, 2017

Really good

Cheers mate

Carry On Charlie

Talk of Peanuts on another thread reminded me that over Christmas I visited the Schulz exhibition at Somerset House in London - highest possible recommendation for anyone with an interest in or love for the comic strip. So many originals all in one place, many of them absolutely key strips, as well as a ton of great memorabilia, personal correspondence, magazine covers, adverts etc etc - a lot to take in! They were totally cool about ppl taking pictures too, which was nice - here's a few panels I couldn't resist:

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/fbd6f0ba-715a-4bb5-8721-a8fe22870457-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/3489e466-271f-4910-84d7-a59d87278399-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/b62a4bff-9ae2-46bd-91c1-c66e2fd55afe-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/9b313ebd-38b9-4d85-844f-a3034ff53039-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

nice

Reminds me that I'm far, far, FAR too overdue for a visit to the Santa Rosa museum. This year if I can help it.

People are complaining about nu-Nancy, but that last one could be its blueprint

the exhibition was glorious. but how expensive were those t shirts???

EVERYTHING at Somerset House was expensive, including all of the merchandising. I sprang for the catalogue and some postcards. I thought that almost without exception, all the modern art pieces were terrible, and unnecessary. They had things like Spiegelman's Schulz strip - wow - and the odd strip by other cartoonists, but I would've like to have had more of the COMIC response to Peanuts - things like the Mad parodies, for example. But that's a small gripe set against the once in a lifetime chance to see so many originals up close and personal - I'm guessing they will be back in the museum after March, when the exhibition closes.

I received the recent Dell Archives book (a collection of the early Dell comic book series) as a xmas gift which, while providing a decent + fun alternate perspective on the Peanuts world, unfortunately contains way way less original Schulz material than I'd been led to believe. But I guess on the plus side for those unaware of its existence, there's some Schulz stuff now available that you might not have seen before.

People are complaining about nu-Nancy

People who like comics are acclaiming the new Nancy as great

EVERYTHING at Somerset House was expensive

God yes. I got a badge. My 4yo got a Peanuts pen, and a massive temper tantrum on the floor of the gift shop because we wouldn't also let her get something else. I looked about the shop and several similar tantrums were also occurring with other people's children around us.

Th tee shirts were lovely. But... £40!!

i never fail to smile at the sight of charlie brown exclaiming "what a beautiful gory layout!"

The peanuts 50 years ago today Twitter feed is a joy btw. The last couple have been peppermint patty and snoopy ice skating.

ward thanks for taking those photos and uploading them! linus sleeping is kind of intense, i love it

Throttle Kill Hi!t Gouge Hate. I relate to insomniac Linus a little too much.

@peanuts50yrsago has jarred me out of a funk-spiral more than once.

EVERYTHING at Somerset House was expensive, including all of the merchandising. I sprang for the catalogue and some postcards. I thought that almost without exception, all the modern art pieces were terrible, and unnecessary. They had things like Spiegelman's Schulz strip - wow - and the odd strip by other cartoonists, but I would've like to have had more of the COMIC response to Peanuts - things like the Mad parodies, for example. But that's a small gripe set against the once in a lifetime chance to see so many originals up close and personal - I'm guessing they will be back in the museum after March, when the exhibition closes.

― Ward Fowler, Thursday, January 10, 2019 3:47 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they should've included Matt/Seth/Brown's You're Short Fat and Ugly, Charlie Brown!

People are complaining about nu-Nancy, but that last one could be its blueprint

― ebro the letter (Whiney G. Weingarten)

people who complain about jaimes's nancy tend to be terrible human beings

i mean, as great as peanuts was, the anti-peanuts brigade back in the day at least had _some_ valid arguments. it's the difference between arguing "comics should be less like 'peanuts' and more like 'the spirit'" and arguing "comics needs less olivia jaimes and more garret gilchrist"

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-peanuts-taught-me-about-queer-identity