“Charles M. Schulz was an innovative genius, creating a fantasy world that connected to kids as well as adults and all based on powerful iconic characters who express deep feelings of loneliness and resentment and despair. The feeling that everything is against us. The craving for love. An enormous earnestness for doing the right thing. There is not much in Peanuts that is shallow or heedless.”
Garrison Keillor
Charles Schulz was nicknamed Sparky by an uncle when he was only two days old, after a horse named Spark Plug in the wildly popular Barney Google comic strip. It was a name he chose to keep using, and became prophetic when he began submitting his own comics professionally.
As a child, he read the comics every Sunday morning with his father – Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Skippy – and from early on knew that he wanted to be a cartoonist. When he reached his teens, his drawing of his family dog, Spike was published in the nationally-syndicated Ripley’s Believe it or Not newspaper, and as a senior in high school he enhanced his skills through a correspondence cartoon course with the Federal School of Applied Cartooning.
“Peanuts was originally sold under the title of Li’l Folks, but that had been used before, so they said we have to think of another title. I couldn’t think of one and somebody at United Features came up with the miserable title Peanuts, which I hate and have always hated. It has no dignity and it’s not descriptive. […] What could I do? Here I was, an unknown kid from St. Paul. I couldn’t think of anything else. I said, why don’t we call it Charlie Brown and the president said “Well, we can’t copyright a name like that.” I didn’t ask them about Nancy or Steve Canyon. I was in no position to argue.” Charles Schulz, in a 1987 interview with Frank Pauer in Dayton Daily News and Journal Herald Magazine
Throughout his life, Schulz remained intensely irritated by the title foisted on his creation. Whenever he was asked what he did for a living, he’d only say that “I draw that comic strip with Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown and his dog”. He looked into changing the title to Charlie Brown many times but eventually understood that it would cause a domino effect of problems with all of the licensees.
Of course, all of his devoted fans have known and loved the strip and the books as Peanuts ever since. However, the animated specials invariably used the name of one of the characters, usually the hapless hero of Schulz’s world, Charlie Brown.
The first strip, in 1950, was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other kids, Shermy and Patty. Snoopy appeared in the third strip, but most of the other characters that eventually became regulars were introduced later: supercilious Violet and the piano-playing Schroeder in 1951, irritable Lucy and charmingly laid-back Linus in 1952, the dust-shrouded Pig-Pen in 1954, and so on. My favourite character, Snoopy’s little sidekick bird named Woodstock, showed up in 1966.
All of the Peanuts world was seen through the eyes of the children and the critters. They weren’t idealized. Lucy was often mean to Charlie Brown, and he spent most of his time trying to gain the respect of those around him, with little success. Schulz said that Charlie Brown had to be “the one who suffers, because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than we are with winning.” But, as in real life, Charlie had his happy moments as well.
The formula appealed with its gentle, amusing look at the trials and tribulations of children unfettered by adult issues. Schulz said that grown-ups just didn’t interest him, and indeed, any adults that appeared were only expressed through unarticulated sounds.
By the 1960s, Peanuts comic strip was reaching 355 million readers around the world. In 1965, the Coca-Cola Company approached Lee Mendelson, the producer, about sponsoring a Peanuts Christmas television special showing “the true meaning of Christmas”. Mendelson called Schulz, and the rest is animation history.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was first broadcast by CBS on December 9, 1965. Despite its unorthodox, jazzy soundtrack, and its overtly religious message, which worried some of the execs, it was a massive success – an estimated 15,490,000 homes watched the special, and it ended up receiving both an Emmy and Peabody Award. It’s become an iconic Christmas special for the past sixty years, and the soundtrack is instantly recognizable.
That success led to the creation of a second CBS television special, Charlie Brown’s All-Stars in 1966, followed by probably the second-most popular special, the Halloween-themed It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
In those days, Halloween and Christmas were both eagerly anticipated holidays in a child’s world, so a Halloween special was a natural.
I’m not sure modern viewers understand what time capsules both the Christmas and Halloween specials are. In the 1960s, it was safe for children to walk around after dark by themselves. My aunt, even though she was fairly traditional-European, had a silver Christmas tree, which she decorated with glossy blue balls and which I thought was quite beautiful.
Halloween was equally important, as our chance to run around in costume, on our own, gathering as much candy as we could fit in pillowcases, which held quite a haul. The streets were dark, lit only by a few streetlights and the jack o-lanterns on porches. Sometimes we couldn’t tell if a house was handing out candy, so we’d approach carefully and knock with trepidation, ready to run if an ogreish owner appeared. When we got home, my brother and I would dump out all of our treasures onto the living room carpet and sort through them, trading any we didn’t like.
The party games that the kids play in the Halloween special were classic, although most of the parties I went to also included a séance, usually to summon Harry Houdini (it never worked, although an errant bit of wind blowing through a pop bottle once scared the crap out of us).
But the specials perfectly captured the vibe of the times, much simpler despite Charlie Brown’s feelings about holiday commercialization, and with an innocence that’s been lost. I don’t know about you, but I watch them every year, and lately have been enjoying the clips posted by the Schulz Museum online. I love Snoopy’s attempts to write a book, and his “It was a dark and stormy night” has become immortal in writing circles.
By the time Charles Schulz passed away in 2000, Peanuts had run in more than 2,600 newspapers, had a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and had been translated into 21 languages. Together with its merchandise, the strip and its offshoots earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Not bad for someone who just wanted to “draw funny pictures”.
“I suppose there are some people out there who will think I’m a foolish old romantic, possibly even a little nuts, to have such an association with, even to the point of talking to, an inanimate object [like Snoopy]. Peanuts fans know better. [They] know that the greatest of Charles Schulz’s magic tricks was bringing life to all those wonderful folks with which he peopled our world and brightened our days.”
Walter Cronkite