🥂Toasting Peanuts: A Charles Schulz Centennial Celebration!🎉
Happy Birthday, Sparky! The man who launched a beloved comic strip about kids and a loveable beagle would have been 100 this week! I'm one of tens of millions for whom his genius was an inspiration!
GOOD GRIEF, THE GANG’S ALL HERE!
November 26, 1922: The birthdate of Charles Monroe Schulz, creator and cartoonist, known for imagining and building a world of “Li’l Folks” that was later called Peanuts (rolling his eyes and groaning “Good grief” was his likely response), and a career, as well as a warm and welcoming universe, was born.
When Schulz died, at age 77, in February 2000, I admit I cried a bit. No heavy heaves or sobbing, but a tear or two for the man who not only brought me joy as a child, but also showed me how to express child-like feelings on paper, as an adult, without being cloying, condescending, or trivial.
Schulz, like another creative and captivating “Chuck”….Jones, created solely to make himself laugh. “Sparky” knew enough about his psyche to write what his heart told him to, knowing it’d rarely be over the heads of his younger audience, and would enlighten and challenge the adults in the room.
In fact, his gentle, yet poignant humor was as profound as it was comforting and familiar.
Similarly, Chuck Jones, the Warner Bros. cartoon director and animator (whose original 1999 artwork is shown above) who gave us Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies at the Studio’s “Termite Terrace,” crafted his toons with a similar knowing nod and a wink as Schulz did so easily for his audience.
See “The Debt That All Cartoonists Owe to Peanuts.”
It would be pointless for me to even try to expound on the master’s art or eloquence; for this Centennial Celebration of the man’s birth and talent, we’ll peruse a few of his best-loved works and characters.
Feel free to share your favorite Peanuts moments (whether in print, on vinyl, onstage, at Knott’s Berry Farm, at theatres, or on TV) in the comment section!
Peanuts.fandom.com: Peanuts Wiki
Sweet post that brings back a lot of memories. I was fortunate to meet Chuck Jones at an event in Houston after he published his autobiography and we talked about storytelling for a minute. He said the crux of his Bugs/Daffy cartoons came down to this: “Bugs Bunny is who we want to be; Daffy Duck is who we are.”
Second story: I grew up across the street from a childless couple who “adopted” me and my sister as their own. Fran was a huge Peanuts fan.
Her brother, Roy Burgold, as it turns out, was the head of advertising for McDonald’s from the 1970s through the 1990s. (He created/refined the Ronald McDonald character and was in charge of the creative for the fast food chain.)
In the mid 1970s, Roy became good friends with Schulz thanks to McDonald’s long-running Peanuts campaign. In 1975, a large form hardback was published to commemorate the cartoon’s 25th anniversary, and Roy sent Fran a copy, complete with a Schulz dedication and a personalized Snoopy.
I was 10 at the time, and I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I spent with that book. So when Fran died, I asked Roy if I could have it. Despite some initial hesitation (personalized Schulz drawings apparently are rare), he agreed as long as I had the page taken out of the book and kept behind museum quality glass.
Fifteen years later, it’s still hanging in my basement.
Nice post. It was fun to read those old comics. The other day NPR ran a special on the music of Vince Guaraldi, who of course wrote and recorded all the music for the Peanuts TV specials. As Lee Mendelsohn, the producer told it, one day, on the way to the airport, he heard something on the radio that completely hooked him. After several phone calls, he tracked down the artist, a jazz musician named Vince Guaraldi, and asked him to write the music for a TV special he was working on. The special became “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.