OK, everyone is familiar with the fact that Lucy would pull the ball away just as Charlie was trying to kick it. However, why does he then soar through the air and fall on his back? Shouldn’t his leg just “swing and miss”? If he had hit the ball, he likely would have fallen anyway, no? By this logic, every baseball player who swings and misses would end up falling down.
I guess what I’m asking is a.) Does a football offer so much resistance that it, if hit properly, will prevent a body from flying off balance? b.) Why didn’t Charlie just invest $2 and buy a kicking tee? Blockhead, indeed.
A stupid post, I know, but I have always wondered.
Charlie Brown missed the football and fell over each time because … it was a joke. Charles Schulz said that Charlie Brown would never kick the football because that wouldn’t be funny. Falling over was also part of the joke.
As for falling over, experiment with a small child and see if he falls over in the same situation. I imagine that if you pull the ball away a fraction of a second before he tries to kick that he is likely to fall over.
I know I would have. I fell over even when I put the ball on a tee.
If he was working on field goals, he would need a holder. When I was a kid, we didn’t use tees for kicking off either. It was either a holder or punt the ball.
Try staying upright with a noggin that big when a crabby fussbudget pulls the football out from you.
Did anyone catch the very last football strip last fall? Charlie and Lucy are negotiating the kick when the new little brother Rerun tells Lucy to come in for lunch so Lucy tells Rerun to take over for her. Cut to the last panel when Lucy asks Rerun if Charlie kicked the ball or not. His answer was priceless, “you’ll never know.” I think Sparky was trying to tell us something.
Keep in mind that Charlie Brown is taking a long run up to the ball because he wants to kick it far. He isn’t taking a more controlled approach like a field goal kicker.
So, he’s going at nearly full bore when Lucy whisks the ball away from him. Most likely, he tries to stop himself, but he can’t plant both of his feet and
WHOA
There he goes on his back.
I again say that you should try this yourself with a small boy. I bet he will fall over.
I SAW Charlie Brown kick the football once. I really did!
Sort of-
It was one of those weird episodes from “the Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show” from the 80’s.
I never liked these ones too much, but there was this one episode in which Charlie Brown drank some strange substance that made him invisible.
Lucy was holding the ball and Charlie Brown, being invisible, kicked the ball and Lucy was of course shocked.
So no, not really, I didn’t actually SEE it, but Charlie did once kick that ball.
I understand he was going full speed; this shouldn’t make any difference. If Lucy hadn’t moved the ball, he STILL would be going full speed, but presumably would not have fallen.
I also understand that a kicking tee is not used in field goal situations, but it beats poor Charlie’s situation for fifty years.
Oh well. This didn’t go in the direction I’d hope, but it’s still been kind of interesting.
I can’t say that I’ve done it with a football, but as a small child (I was 7-8) I did kick and miss playing kickball (this was not something someone was holding, it was rolling on the ground toward me). I did indeed land flat on my back – but it was on blacktop, so there was a fair amount of blood, a good concussion and a lasting bump.
And Charlie Brown wasn’t necessarily needing to practice football, so a kicking tee wouldn’t have mattered. It was always Lucy asking him nicely to please kick the ball and she wouldn’t pull it away this time, and he hoping as he always did that for once she was sincere.
What I could never understand other than why he kept falling down (and why he was so eager to try to kick that damn ball in the first place) was the height he got on those misses. My god. A good five or six feet each time; at least double that in the cartoons. He seriously risked paralysis with those kinds of spills.
Of course, I’ve never questioned his utter gullibility in falling after one lame scheme from Lucy after another. He really is that dumb.
He is definitely dumb. However, the kicking motion and follow-through are the same regardless of whether there is a ball present or not. If one does not fall down WITH a ball present, one should not fall down WITHOUT a ball present. (Of course, we don’t know what he’d do if there were a ball present, but that’s another story.)
I assume that he wouldn’t have fallen if he connected with the ball… some of the momentum of his leg would be converted into momentum for the ball (God, physics was a long-ass time ago!!)…
But what I want to know is: in the Roadrunner cartoons, whenever Wile E. Coyote ran off a cliff, his feet & legs would begin to fall first! This streeeeeeeeeetched his neck out long enough for him to get a really comical Oh shit!! expression on his face before his head started to fall…
