Peanuts: A Comic Strip For All Seasons & Media
by David Krell
david@davidkrell.com
When Charles Schulz introduced his Peanuts comic strip on October 2, 1950, the characters numbered only four -- Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty, and Snoopy.
The characters’ personalities evolved as did Peanuts -- the strip and the business enterprise.
Since the 1950 debut, Peanuts expanded tremendously with new characters, increased media exposure, and constant maintenance of integrity. No easy task.
Charlie Brown and his friends endured competition, enjoyed popularity, and endeared themselves to generation after generation of children. The impact of Peanuts on American culture goes beyond popularity, though. Schulz used Peanuts characters to examine social issues, establish animation precedent, and instruct children. All the while, Peanuts cemented its fixture status in popular culture.
Charles Schulz: An Artist For All Seasons
After serving in World War II, Charles Schulz returned to this hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. He taught at his alma mater, Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, and drew for Timeless Topix, a Catholic comic magazine.
At the urging of a fellow instructor, Schulz concentrated on drawing children and eventually sold a Sunday feature to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Comprised of one-panel cartoons with captions, Schulz’ Li’l Folks contained Peanuts forerunners and prototypes as did the several cartoons Schulz sold to The Saturday Evening Post between 1948 and 1950.
In the spring of 1950, Schulz submitted samples to United Feature Syndicate in New York. His submission led to an interview. Upon arriving, he also submitted an unpublished comic strip. United actually preferred the strip to the panel cartoons. United titled the strip Peanuts despite Schulz’ opposition.
I still am convinced that it is the worst title ever thought of for a comic strip, Schulz says in the 1975 book Peanuts Jubilee, an autobiography and collection of his work.
The Early Years of Peanuts
The early years of Peanuts introduced several characters, albeit in forms only somewhat resembling their now familiar personas.
For example, Schroeder debuted in the May 30, 1951 strip as an infant. Schroeder prototypes appeared in Li’l Folks, complete with references to Beethoven.
Linus also first appeared as an infant, greatly contrasting with the role he would eventually assume as the strip’s philosophical voice of reason.
Perhaps unknowingly, Schulz created a hallmark in the strip’s formative years. In the May 6, 1952 strip, Lucy reads a dictionary aloud and states, C is for Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown falls for her joke. The incident foreshadows the years of torment in store for Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls away the football as he is about to kick it.
Like any good creator, Schulz utilized elements in his own life for his art. He named the characters of Charlie Brown, Linus, and Frieda after fellow instructors at Art Instruction Schools. A childhood caddying job at a Highland Park golf course in St. Paul with a boy named Schroeder gave Schulz the name for his piano-playing prodigy. A lost love inspired the creation of the famed little red-haired girl, the object of Charlie Brown’s affection.
In addition, Schulz’ childhood dog, Spike, provided the basis for Snoopy. Schulz’ first published drawing featured Spike. It appeared in a 1937 Ripley’s Believe It Or Not installment. Spike ate pins, tacks, and razor blades. Believe it or not, indeed!
Peanuts and its creator gained popularity at breakneck speed during its second decade. The books Happiness Is A Warm Puppy (1962) and The Gospel According to Peanuts (1964) enjoyed household name status. The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) awarded the coveted Reuben to Schulz in 1955 and again in 1962. Also in 1962, the NCS awarded Schulz the Humor Strip of the Year.
A Charlie Brown Christmas
In 1965, three things happened to Peanuts:
* cover of Time (April 9th issue)
* first Red Baron sequence for Snoopy
* debut of A Charlie Brown Christmas
This last entry occurred on December 9, 1965, started a holiday television tradition, and signified a new direction for Charles Schulz’ creation. A Charlie Brown Christmas won an Emmy and a Peabody.
The premise is familiar. Among fancy decorations, shiny ornaments, and Christmas glitter, Charlie Brown tries to find the true meaning of Christmas.
Not an easy task considering his surroundings denote commercialism.
Snoopy enters his dog house (with a rare frontal view) in a lights and display contest.
Sally writes to Santa with an an unusual holiday request -- money...in tens and twenties!
All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share.
Charlie Brown confesses to Linus that he’s not happy even though Christmas is coming. Linus responds, Maybe Lucy’s right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Brownest.
As always, Lucy appears ready, willing, and able to dispense ‘psychiatric help’ from her makeshift office. For her standard five-cent fee, of course.
In A Charlie Brown Christmas, her office sign is a sign of the times: The Doctor is Real In.
Lucy describes several fears, the last of which is the fear of everything.
Charlie Brown exclaims, That’s it! He soon gets to the root of his problem. I just don’t understand it. Instead of feeling happy, I feel sort of let down.
Lucy suggests getting involved with the Christmas play and offers him the chance to direct. The kids need a director and Charlie Brown needs involvement. He beams at the opportunity. So, our hero thrusts himself into the thankless job. Attempts to inspire the cast with Christmas spirit are met with disapproval, discouragement, and disrespect for Charlie Brown and the holiday.
Lucy’s cynicism is particularly striking.
Look, Charlie. Let’s face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.
Charlie Brown, as usual, tries to do the right thing and hangs in there. He and Linus buy a Christmas tree to set the tone, feel, and mood for the play.
Amidst all the aluminum trees, a small, sickly one stands out. This little green one here seems to need a home, Charlie Brown observes.
Although the tree is weak and the needles are sparse, he buys it anyway. Predictably, the kids see the tree as a symbol of Charlie Brown’s loserdom, put him down, and laugh at him.
I guess I really don’t know what Christmas is all about. Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about? Charlie Brown exclaims.
Linus explains the story of Christmas profoundly, effectively, and inspiringly, quoting a passage from St. Luke’s.
That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown. Linus concludes.
Essentially, Charlie Brown represents those who believe in old-fashioned holiday spirit rather than newfangled holiday commercialism. Holiday entertainment buffs will note a similar theme in the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street; a gentleman playing Santa Claus at New York City’s Macy’s Department Store believes himself to be the genuine article and proves the same to the world.
One of the purest moments in the film occurs when a teenage janitor at Macy’s laments all of the -isms in the world and states that the worst is commercialism. Even in his beloved Brooklyn.
Commercialism will not stand in the way of Charlie Brown, though. With newfound inspiration, Charlie Brown takes the tree home. Smiling all the way to the music of O Christmas Tree, he remembers Linus’ speech while looking at the brightest star and vowing not to let commercialism ruin his Christmas.
Taking an ornament from Snoopy’s abundantly decorated dog house, Charlie Brown places it on the tree with great pride. (The dog house won first prize in the contest!)
Alas, the ornament is too heavy for the tree and Charlie Brown fears that he killed it.
Unbeknownst to Charlie Brown, the kids followed him home. Linus uses his blanket to support for the tree’s base. He notes, Maybe it just needs a little love.
The gang uses the ornaments from Snoopy’s dog house to decorate the tree. Needless to say, Charlie Brown feels more than pleasant surprise at his friends’ efforts as they shout, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.
Appropriately, Hark, the Herald Angels Sing is the closing song over the credits.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first full-length prime time Peanuts special. The creative staff took great care in preparing the program, especially the voices.
The special was one of the first to use real children’s voices for children characters.
So we began using little kids voices and we happened to get some real gems, Charles Schulz remarked in a 1984 interview with film critic Leonard Maltin for the Museum of Broadcasting. I think in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Linus voice was a marvel.
Problems particular to children personnel persist, though, in the entertainment industry. A CBS press release dated December 2, 1966 entitled The Moment of Tooth for “A Charlie Brown Christmas” reveals that Sally Dryer, voice of several girl characters in the special, had a loose front tooth concurrent with the voice-over schedule.
The producer and crew opened the studio on a Sunday morning and recorded Sally’s lines, apparently not a moment too soon. Sally lost her tooth an hour later. The press release ends with an appropriate line. Good grief!
In 1985, the Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center for Media) held the retrospective Charlie Brown, A Boy For All Season: 20 Years on Television. Several television luminaries contributed pieces to the retrospective’s commemorative book. They highlighted A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Frank Stanton, President Emeritus of CBS, wrote the introduction.
Although some of my associates felt the story line was too soft, I was delighted by the fidelity in the translation. The Schulz specials radiate a direct, simple warmth and understanding that are rare on the television screen. There is no extraneous detail. The economy of drawing is matched by the words.
Author John Culhane contributed the essay A Boy For All Seasons. He examines the elements of the inaugural Peanuts special.
The first Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which won the prestigious Peabody Award as the ‘outstanding children’s and youths’ program for the year 1965,’ was about the true spirit of Christmas, and many of us still tune in to each rebroadcast to hear little Linus read for a full minute from St. Luke’s story of the first Christmas in the Bible. Lee Mendelson, the producer, has written that two top CBS vice presidents of 1965 were really worried about that first Peanuts special: ‘Too slow...the kids don’t sound pro...the music is all wrong...the story kind of wanders...the Bible thing scares us...the script is too innocent...’
In short, Schulz, Mendelson and [longtime Schulz animation collaborator Bill] Melendez had found the perfect approach the first time out. According to the ratings, almost half of all the sets turned on that evening were turned to Charlie Brown. Viewers loved the leisurely pacing, neatly accented by San Francisco composer Vince Guaraldi’s modern jazz sound; and they appreciated the fact that the kids sounded like real kids instead of That Which Happened to Baby Jane. The reviews and thousands of appreciative letters were mostly variations on the theme of the Peabody citation, which said: ‘Gentleness is a quality that is seldom understood by television writers and directors. A notable exception was...’
Producer Lee Mendelson provided the history of A Charlie Brown Christmas in an interview with curator Ronald Simon.
Mendelson produced a documentary circa 1963-64 on Charles Schulz, but he could not garner interest from the television networks or advertising agencies. (CBS aired the documentary five years later and it won an Emmy.)
Then in April of ’65 when I was just about to give up, the Peanuts characters appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which caused a whole spurt of interest nationally. We got a call from Coca-Cola and they said that they were interested in a Charlie Brown show. I thought I had sold the documentary.
But they said, ‘Oh no, we’re not interested in that, but you did some nice animation in there; could you do a Christmas show for us?’ And I said sure, that Mr. Schulz and I had been working on a Christmas show, which was, I guess, an out-and-out lie; but I was a little desperate. They said fine, send us the outline on Monday, which was two days later!
I called Mr. Schulz on the phone, and I said, ‘I just sold our Charlie Brown Christmas show.’ He said, ‘What Charlie Brown Christmas show?’ And I said, ‘Well, I have just read in Time magazine that you are a genius and now you can prove it.
Anyway, we had a hurried meeting and he came up with the outline for the show. Coca-Cola bought it and that became A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Our troubles weren’t over yet, though, because when we delivered it to CBS a week before it was to go on the air, the two executives at CBS said they didn’t like it: they thought it was a little too much on the religious side, and they didn’t like the real kids’ voices, didn’t like the music, really didn’t like anything.
A Charlie Brown Christmas gained distinction. Variety reviewed the special for its December 15, 1965 issue.
It was a simple show and no doubt the web got a hefty Nielsen bang for relatively small buck. But the simplicity was deceptive. It’s apparent that author Schulz [sic] is in such strong command of his charismatic little characters that it would be successful in any medium. In this instance, the animation was intentionally uncomplicated so that the characters did not lose their basic comic strip identity.
Variety also praised the special’s religious meaning.
It was a religious show, and a good one. It did not deal in the usual Yuletide homilies and euphemisms for Christian faith. Its fundamentalist message was that man can find certitude only in the word of God as revealed in the Bible. But what made the show fascinating and haunting was its intentional sketchiness, an artifice that allowed each viewer to fill in the details to fit his own needs. A more elaborate show on the same simple subject would have been a cliche and a dud.
Charles Schulz also utilized the holiday play theme in the Sunday, December 21, 1957 Peanuts comic strip. The Peanuts kids are describing the story of Christmas at a pageant, only Linus cannot remember his line. Lucy threatens to slug him unless he remembers it. He does.
In 1992, Charles Schulz et. al. revisited the Christmas theme in It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. CBS and Shell Oil teamed to produce the special. Shell sold VHS copies of it at their gas stations.
Some items from A Charlie Brown Christmas repeat. Sally’s greed, for example. She begins her English theme entitled The True Meaning of Christmas with sheer clarity. To me, Christmas is the joy of getting. Christmas is getting all you can get while the getting is good.
Also, when Sally asks Linus to explain Christmas, he recites the St. Luke’s passage from the ’65 special.
A Charlie Brown Christmas paved the way for other holiday specials featuring Peanuts characters:
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown First Aired: CBS, October 27, 1966
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving First Aired: CBS, November 20, 1973
It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown First Aired: CBS, April 9, 1974
Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown First Aired: CBS, January 28, 1975
It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown First Aired: CBS, March 16, 1976
Social Conscience
Social issues contribute to Peanuts product. A 1970 strip artfully poses the abortion debate using Linus and Lucy.
Linus: What would happen if there a beautiful and highly intelligent child up in heaven waiting to be born, and his parents decided that the two children they already had were enough?
Lucy: Your ignorance of theology and medicine is appalling.
Linus: I still think it is a good questions.
The strip triggered responses from both sides of the issue. In Peanuts Jubilee, Schulz clarifies his point.
It was not my intention to get involved in a contraception or abortion debate. My point was simply that people all too frequently discuss things that they know little about.
Another strip features Sally whispering, almost confessing. We prayed in school today. Readers’ responses ranged from funny to sacrilegious.
Two Peanuts specials handle difficult issues particularly disturbing for children.
Why, Charlie Brown, Why? (1990) reveals that classmate Janice suffers from leukemia. It causes Linus to ask the question used as the special’s title. Why, Charlie Brown, Why? thoughtfully, articulately, and effectively explains the disease and its consequences. A difficult feat, to say the least. Depicting subjects like chemotherapy, loss of hair, blood tests, and death, Why, Charlie Brown, Why? handles a terrifying topic with extreme sensitivity. Janice’s treatments are successful. She beats the disease.
What Have We Learned, Charile Brown? (1983) shows the Peanuts gang voyaging to France in a student-exchange program. Linus explains the lessons of history and war, leads a re-enactment of the D-Day landing, and reinforces his position as the group’s voice of reason.
The special features a quote from General Eisenhower’s speech concerning preservation of freedom, the sacrifices of war, and the hope that humanity has learned from the tragedy. (as described by the 1984-85 Museum of Broadcasting companion book to the retrospective Charlie Brown: A Man For All Seasons.
A Success For All Media
Peanuts succeeded in media beyond comic strips and television animation specials. In 1967, the live-action play You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown opened off-Broadway starring Gary Burghoff. It earned the distinction of the most-produced musical in American theater history. Hallmark Hall of Fame presented a version on CBS in 1973. You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown appeared as an animated special in 1975. In 1999, Broadway revived the theater version.
In 1969, A Boy Named Charlie Brown premiered, earning the distinction of being the first Peanuts full-length feature film. Snoopy, Come Home followed on the silver screen.