How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20241205-how-charles-m-schulz-created-charlie-brown-and-snoopy

by 1659447091 • 8 months ago

173 93 8 months ago

bbc.com

AntiRush• 8 months ago

The Charles Schulz museum in Santa Rosa, CA is a must visit if you’re in the area!

https://schulzmuseum.org/

arnonejoe• 8 months ago

There is also a nice ice rink next door that looks like a Swiss Chalet. I think it’s also part of the museum.

https://www.snoopyshomeice.com/

kridsdale1• 8 months ago

Is that the airport?

mikeg8• 8 months ago

No, there is an airport 10 minutes from the museum but the museum itself is closer to downtown.

andrewstuart• 8 months ago

I think many people have seen only the commercially exploited peanuts imagery.

In fact the comics - especially the older ones are incredibly clever and funny and insightful and there’s long running threads and connections and strong characters.

Peanuts the tshirt/hat/poster/cup is crass.

Peanuts the comic is genius.

It exactly the same with Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. The commercially exploited imagery is crass and dumb. The comics written by Karl Barks were genius and often really entertaining adventure stories.

lurking_swe• 8 months ago

Speak for yourself, i enjoy both. :)

antonymoose2• 8 months ago

I would think the closest comparison to my eye is the Calvin and Hobbes commercialization? As a child of the 90s, I almost exclusively knew of Calvin stickers pissing on Ford and Chevy logos growing up. The great comic was a pleasant surprise for my teenage self.

jdlshore• 8 months ago

Watterson refused to allow Calvin & Hobbes to be commercialized, other than the books. Those crass stickers are unauthorized knock-offs.

MPSimmons2• 8 months ago

I mean, even originally, Garfield strips had some substance, but Jim Davis really liked money, I think...

eru3• 8 months ago

Garfield was conceived from the get go as a cash grab devoid of artistic merit.

(And that's fine by me, nobody is forcing anyone to consume Garfield.)

stevekemp2• 8 months ago

I have approximately one meter of snoopy books - collections of the comic strip - dating from the 70s and 80s. Now and again I read a few strips, but at least once every month I wear my snoopy watch, and seeing Snoopy on the dial makes me smile every time.

I've had more comments on the snoopy dial, and my casio terrorist watch, than any high-end piece in my rotation/collection. I struggle to think of other snoopy merchandise which is common-place, outside watches.

(I asked my eight year old son a while back if he knew the names of some characters from Peanuts, while showing him a couple of the cartoon strips, the only one he knew was Snoopy. I was sad to learn he didn't know the name of either Charlie Brown or Woodstock.)

baobun2• 8 months ago

See also: The Moomins.

JoeDaDude2• 8 months ago

For the dedicated fan, the complete collection of Peanuts strips is available in several volumes.

https://www.fantagraphics.com/collections/the-complete-peanu...

throaway54• 8 months ago

Peanuts is also a product of Jazz-era America (50's & early 60's). Joe Cool is a beatnik, not a hippie or a rocker. So a lot of that context & content gets lost as the decades go by.

Case in point being the name Peanuts itself, which even to me as an elder Millenial was obscure. No one actually said Peanuts, always Charlie Brown.

gilgoomesh• 8 months ago

Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature

Was he? Maybe this is true inside the US but from outside the US, I've always viewed the character as a peculiarly American artefact – something I was aware of but never really read or watched. This seemed to be reinforced by most major Charlie Brown titles seemingly tied to other American customs like Halloween and baseball.

solarmist• 8 months ago

I'm an American and I've really never related to Charlie Brown myself, but I've heard Peanuts is huge in Japan and other asian countries.

mttpgn• 8 months ago

The BBC published this article. I agree with "all of literature" being hyperbolic though.

eru3• 8 months ago

People in eg Germany are mostly aware of the Peanuts, but it's nowhere near as central to the culture as in the US.

kalleboo• 8 months ago

Snoopy as a character is popular in Japan, but only as a character design - kind of like Hello Kitty. There is zero awareness of any of the shows or really Charlie Brown himself.

locao• 8 months ago

I'm Brazilian, in my middle 40s. When I was a little kid my best friend used to carry a blanket around. Neighbors called him "Linus" for years. But I'm confident it was because of the TV show, not the comic strips.

emmelaich2• 8 months ago

It was very popular in Australia. Serialised in newspapers for many years. As a kid, our family owned pretty much every Charlie Brown paperback.

konfusinomicon• 8 months ago

snoopy is the perfect dog name

phkahler3• 8 months ago

Thanks. I never thought about the word "snoop" as part of the name until just now.

stevekemp2• 8 months ago

Snoop is the name of my favourite characters from the later series of The Wire. I like the idea her nickname came from Peanuts.

analog313• 8 months ago

I'm a musician, and something I've noticed is that children no longer recognize the "peanuts" theme song.

karlgkk• 8 months ago

Newspaper comics haven’t been relevant to anyone 30. By the time you were old enough to read them or care about reading them, smartphones were in the scene.

pastor_williams• 8 months ago

My kids watch and love the Peanuts TV specials. They also love the Peanuts movie that came out a few years ago.

kaladin-jasnah• 8 months ago

I'm college age and grew up reading newspaper comics. Then we stopped getting the newspaper since it became too expensive and then our local paper stopped doing print copies...

xp84• 8 months ago

Sad, but true. I was born in the 80s and had a dad who read the paper religiously, so getting that section with the comics every morning was super important to me!

anthk• 8 months ago

To me nerdy webcomics were the natural shift, from SBMC to XKCD, and some of them in Spanish such as Bilo y Nano.

thrdbndndn• 8 months ago

Snoopy or Peanuts in general is (was) very famous in my country (at least for my age) but I only read it in comic.

So no idea what the song is about, unfortunately. I don't even know it has animation version.

maxlybbert• 8 months ago

It starts about twelve seconds into https://youtu.be/tcHNHRGPkkw .

tjr• 8 months ago

The earlier Peanuts animated specials had marvelous jazz soundtracks by Vince Guaraldi (and later others, after Vince's passing). Not sure if jazz trio is the most obvious music to accompany cartoons, but somehow this music blended exquisitely with the characters.

analog313• 8 months ago

Aha. I'm showing my age. I didn't know there was a "Peanuts" movie. I was talking about the tune "Linus and Lucy" which was the theme for the original animated TV show "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

(And I shouldn't have called it a song, as there are no words).

phkahler3• 8 months ago

The Thanksgiving and Christmas specials aired every year, and might still. But who has an antenna any more? I do.

ghaff• 8 months ago

The combination of cable-cutting and the fact that many people either can't access OTA (or don't bother) probably means that a lot of the content that people reflexively tuned into over various holidays just doesn't happen any longer. Even if some of it is on streaming, it's not an automatic holiday thing.

I can't get OTA and cut cable TV so I don't get a lot of things without effort that I don't generally go to.

clydethefrog• 8 months ago

Apple bought the rights years ago, PBS cannot show them anymore, they are now behind a paywall.

Aloha2• 8 months ago

I wish Vince Guaraldi had lived longer, I really like his style of Jazz, its both the kind of thing you can leave on in the background, and its music that takes you places.

Cast your fate to the Wind and Alma-Ville are still some favorites.

I also consider his arrangement of the peanuts music into a cohesive whole to be pretty masterful - its out of print now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charlie_Brown_Suite_%26_Ot...

bsenftner2• 8 months ago

My wife, as a teen, had the job of being Vince Guaraldi's chaperone / guide for a series of concerts during the 70's. She's got great stories of hanging out and partying with his people.

mmkhd• 8 months ago

I quite fond of Winton and Ellis Marsalis album Joe Cool's Blues https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0_gYNtTTgA&list=PL9KZ1X7EqS... which of course also includes the classic Peanuts theme song.

amiga386• 8 months ago

I only heard the Peanuts theme song as an adult. As a child in the UK, the The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show was on TV, not Peanuts, and it had the theme song Let's Have A Party With Charlie Brown and Snoopy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-zKKAyLJP4

FiddlerClamp2• 8 months ago

Interestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.

It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.

randycupertino3• 8 months ago

There was a long read article that came out a few years ago called "How Snoopy Killed Peanuts:"

https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473

about how Peanuts lost it's edge once the "cute" popular dog was introduced, whereas prior it used to be more subversive, philosophical/theoretical with darker material.

PakG1• 8 months ago

It's too bad that there are probably meant to be so many example comics in that article, judging from how it's written, and what's really there is just ads where the comics are probably supposed to be. Wonder what happened.

gjvc• 8 months ago

elmo-ification?!

cmos• 8 months ago

Same with "Odie" in Garfield.. kindof.

FiddlerClamp2• 8 months ago

I think it was a one-two punch:

1. Snoopy becoming Flanderized, as in the "Happiness is a warm puppy" stuff from the 1960s.

2. Introduction of Woodstock the bird. That meant Snoopy and Woodstock went off and had their own adventures which didn't involve the human gang at all.

I also wonder whether Schulz participated in any recreational drugs in the 1960s. I don't meant to be disrespectful at all, but some of the stuff he drew was pretty wild.

There's a set of strips where Charlie Brown sees the moon as a baseball (and later, Alfred E. Neuman's head), another where Snoopy dreams of Charlie Brown flying him like a kite and him crashing to the ground in pieces, and a horror-movie-like series where Linus's blanket attacks Lucy. All very strange.

thaumasiotes• 8 months ago

Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while.

Snoopy shows up in the third strip, by which point the count of total appearances is Patty: 3, Charlie Brown: 2, Shermy: 1, and Snoopy: 1.

He appears again in strip 5, but it takes until his third appearance (in strip 8) before he can be identified as Charlie Brown's dog. He remains somewhat ambiguous:

strip 8: Charlie Brown is reading at home, accompanied by Snoopy.

strip 11: Shermy is eating (presumably at home?), accompanied by Snoopy.

strip 12: Shermy takes Snoopy for a walk, holding him on a leash.

1950-10-21: Shermy, Patty, and Snoopy are walking together when they encounter Charlie Brown.

1950-10-25: Patty is speaking on the phone (at home?); Snoopy is present.

1950-11-07: Charlie Brown delivers a lecture to Snoopy beginning "You don't seem to realize that I'm the boss in this house!"; he is interrupted by a call from his mother.

1950-11-13: Patty receives Charlie Brown at her home; Snoopy is already present.

1950-11-25: Charlie Brown says goodbye to Snoopy before going to bed; Snoopy is shown to be able to hear him as he says "I'll see you in the morning" from his bedroom.

1950-12-05: Patty is walking Snoopy on a leash when they run into Charlie Brown.

1950-12-13: Snoopy is playing on the footboard of Charlie Brown's bed while he tries to go to sleep.

1951-01-23: Charlie Brown is writing in his diary while Snoopy watches.

1951-02-02: Charlie Brown yells at Snoopy to stop following him; Patty intervenes to point out that Snoopy "lives in that direction", which you'd expect Charlie Brown to know if they lived together.

(1951-02-07: Violet is introduced.)

1951-04-27: Shermy is building a birdhouse; Charlie Brown assumes it's supposed to be a doghouse for Snoopy.

1951-05-22: An unknown character calls Snoopy to suppertime.

(1951-05-30: Schroeder is introduced.)

1951-08-27: Schroeder (who is a baby) eats from Snoopy's dog dish; Snoopy gets revenge by climbing into Schroeder's high chair and eating from his tray. Snoopy's dish (which is labeled "SNOOPY") is next to the high chair, implying that Snoopy lives with Schroeder.

1951-09-04: Charlie Brown is assigned (by someone speaking over the phone) to mow the grass around Snoopy's doghouse.

1951-09-12: Charlie Brown has a large portrait of Snoopy hanging in his room.

(1951-11-14: Violet holds a football for Charlie Brown to kick. At the last minute, afraid he'll kick her hand, she flinches away and he goes flying into the air.)

(1951-11-26: Schroeder says his first word, "Beethoven".)

1951-12-15: Charlie Brown repairs the roof on Snoopy's doghouse.

Snoopy is frequently shown in association with Charlie Brown, welcoming him home or hearing him unwrap a candy bar, but an explicit statement of ownership doesn't come up.

baobun2• 8 months ago

I guess Patty part-times as dog sitter

c420• 8 months ago

"Snoopy Come Home" wrecked me as a kid, just absolutely flattened me. Looking back on it now, it’s wild to consider this level of depression was aimed at children. I’m not knocking it; honestly, I kind of treasure how hard I cried over it.

And that’s before you even touch the whole anti-segregation angle running through the story.

gedy• 8 months ago

Ha same here, I remember bawling my eyes out watching it on TV, to my parents bemusement as to what was the big deal.

golson_kindmind• 8 months ago

“I'm talking only about the minor everyday problems in life. Leo Tolstoy dealt with the major problems of the world. I'm only dealing with why we all have the feeling that people don't like us."

I felt that in my bones.

BrandoElFollito• 8 months ago

In France we recognize Snoopy and people would call the whole "world" of the comics "Snoopy". "Peanuts" is unknown. I am 55 for the context.

We would somehow recognize Charlie Brown, but not by name. The other characters are basically unknown.

The reason is that Peanuts was not part of the mainstream comics books we were reading as children. Threre were two kind of them: proper books such as Astérix, and thick "anthologies" such as Pif which were a set of what Americans call "strips".

Freak_NL• 8 months ago

This goes for much of Europe. 'Peanuts' is hardly known. Everybody over the age of 40 knows Snoopy, mostly by virtue of it being a strong brand with lots of merchandise in the eighties/nineties.

larodi• 8 months ago

Time for Peanuts comeback!!

kulahan2• 8 months ago

Does anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute?

I know, I'm being something of a Bah Humbug, but I legitimately cannot see the draw of this comic. It reminds me of Family Circus - no story, just vaguely cute things grannies would seemingly like to see?

DuperPower• 8 months ago

its super nihilistic and depressive, its the best on making your feel bad

emmelaich2• 8 months ago

It touches all the emotions and experiences, somehow being relatable to adults and kids at the same time. Its deepness and universality probably won't be apparent unless you read many of them - preferably the best, maybe one a day.

j_m_b• 8 months ago

It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.

nick_• 8 months ago

The only comic worse is Garfield. I have no idea how anyone enjoys either of them.

Angostura3• 8 months ago

I see you've never met 'Andy Capp' popularly serialised in UK papers, together with Peanuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp

samirillian• 8 months ago

I never enjoyed peanuts but I know Bill watterson the creator of Calvin and Hobbes was a big fan, so there must be something there

bsenftner2• 8 months ago

You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.

ivm• 8 months ago

That's a bold diagnosis to make about someone over the internet. As a kid, I used to buy a magazine that included various translated comic strips, including Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, and Peanuts. Peanuts was by far the least interesting to me and didn’t resonate at all, while Calvin & Hobbes completely blew my mind. Even Garfield left me better memories because it was plain silly and not pretentious.

cowmix• 8 months ago

In the 80s I read all the comics compilations from the late 50s -> 70s, that was the golden age of the strip. It was an amazing comic and you'll see why all the strips creators since then were inspired by it.

kulahan2• 8 months ago

You’re not the only one talking about just how wonderful the earliest strips were. I think I’ll be checking those out

garyrob• 8 months ago

As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.

There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.

I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.

Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.

Watterson wrote:

“The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.

(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)

noefingway• 8 months ago

Here, here! I was born in 1951 - read Peanuts everyday as a kid, still read Peanuts everyday as an adult. It has great humor and insight into relationships.

billfruit• 8 months ago

I have a completely opposite perspective to you on this. I find the peanuts very poignantly captures the frailities of the human condition in a humorous manner.

JoeDaDude2• 8 months ago

I remember my grandmother saying that Peanuts characters look like children but spoke like adults and that was what she liked. Apparently, kids saying "good grief" was unheard of back in that time, as were kids generally being disappointed and sad.

mwexler• 8 months ago

Early strips are very different. Dark, sarcastic, double meaning, lots of depth. They changed as Schulz got older and lighter, and that's what most folks know. But worth reading the earliest entries, and then see how those themes play out in the later strips.

Calvin and Hobbes tried to replicate that darkness but were more ham-handed. Still clever, but much less subtle.

Scubabear68• 8 months ago

As a child of the 70s and 80s, Snoopy was a very big deal, but Peanuts was kind of secondary.

I remember around 2nd grade or so Snoopy Joe Cool was a big deal and I had the t shirts and thermos and lunchbox.

There are of course the Peanuts TV specials, they didn’t have much impact on me personally other than to solidify a like of both Snoopy and his side kick, Woodstock.

For me as a kid, Snoopy and Stocky were the only interesting ones.

LightBug1• 8 months ago

The best thing the brand has done is put it on the Apple TV screensaver ... I'm endlessly entertained and relaxed by it.

How Charles M Schulz created Charlie Brown and Snoopy (2024)

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