Snoopy was always my favourite character in the comic strips. All the other main characters made the transition from strip to TV with their essences intact; Snoopy is completely different, as they do not represent his witty thought bubbles in the TV specials.
For many years this didn’t bother me, because I saw the strips as the main place Charlie Brown and gang “lived” on a daily basis, with the specials being unusual events seen fleetingly on holidays, if at all. But without noticing the transitional period, I now recognise that the world has shifted beneath my feet: thanks to the well-documented decline of newspapers especially among those born in the 1980s and later, combined with the rise of DVDs and subsequently VOD, fewer and fewer people are familiar with the comic strip iteration. Thus, Snoopy has been more or less permanently transformed.
This dawned on me when my family and I (four kids, Millennial wife, and me, the GenXer) were watching the Peanuts Thanksgiving special and I murmured something about how I preferred Snoopy’s wittiness in the strip. None of the rest of the family, including my wife, had any inkling of this! As Charlie Brown might say: Auugggh.
Nice one! I dug up a few examples on Google to try to convey to my wife and kids, but this is better than any of the ones I found. I will definitely pass that on, thanks. I note that it comes from the period universally acclaimed as the golden age of Peanuts: some sources say late '50s to mid-'70s or even '80s, others say “late Sixties and early Seventies”, many others say simply “Sixties”. So the sweet spot no one seems to contest would be (channelling another recent thread) essentially the same time period the Beatles were together and a dominant cultural force.
I can see how they might have found it hard to translate Snoopy to the screen. But they should have just kept trying. Garfield faced a similar issue (thought bubbles that are apparently unheard by those around him), and it seemed like they did okay in translating that to an animated TV show. (Not that Garfield is remotely on par with Snoopy/Peanuts artistically, but it just shows it can be done.)
My own personal favourite Snoopy strip has no dialogue from him at all. Linus asks Charlie Brown about vultures (that week’s strips were about them, for some reason). The last panel just has this sheer random insanity, it still cracks me up.
Hmm… I guess I never thought about that much; while I’ve seen the holiday specials, I guess I never paid a lot of attention to them.
One of my favorite versions of Peanuts is actually the songs from the musical, “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” Snoopy definitely gets to keep his witty internal thoughts in a few of those, particularly the Red Baron number and the Suppertime song.
Mine’s a sight gag. Just him on his roof in the middle of a snowball fight. He tries to broker peace but the last panel has a huge snowball passing overhead.
I’m collecting these editions, and I wonder what they’ll do when they get to the final volume, given that the strip ended just 45 days into the year 2000. Will it be a much thinner volume than the others, and perhaps make the last box set a three-volume package, or will they find a way to pad it out to match the other volumes (but then how would they handle the box set series)?
LOL, technically that could make us only a couple years apart; but in fact she is 14.5 years younger. I’m not complaining (except, occasionally, about cultural sacrilege like that described in this thread).
What makes you so sanguine about the latter part? Perhaps both will be mostly forgotten, and they will become iconic images on mugs or posters with maybe a single panel’s worth of dialogue at most.
Someone on Amazon suggested an index to be sold with the final one.
I put a couple of those volumes from the late 1960s on my Christmas wish list.
I like the one where he’s walking through the trenches (presumably after having been shot down again) and suddenly says, “Sorry!” Then he looks out the fourth wall and says, “I stepped on a blighter.”
