Man, I wish my dog was a bad writer or Flying Ace. I love Snoopy, when I was very little, my sister drew a picture of Snoopy. It is old and yellowed and framed with blue electrical tape, but I still have it. It spent about 14 years on the door of my room. I put it up in my daughter’s room when she was born. It just seemed right.
Jim
Schulz (no “t”) loved to play hockey all his life.
Now I wish I had a turntable to play the record.
Both the 1967 original cast recording and the 1999 revival are available on CD. The original 1966 MGM LP has not been re-released. (Before Good Man became a musical, it was originally a “concept album” based on the Peanuts characters.)
There was also another, lesser-known musical called Snoopy!!! done by a different team, with some very catchy songs based on some of the common themes in the strip (Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, Snoopy’s novel, the “looking at clouds” strip, a catchy school number called “Edgar Allen Poe,” etc.) The closing number is a feel-good number similar in tone to Happiness entitled Just One Person, which has a nice message, but one that doesn’t really jibe with Peanuts: If just one person believes in you, someone else will, and then someone else, and so on until perhaps even you believe in yourself, too! (Of course, in Peanuts, nobody believes in anyone, especially poor old Charlie Brown.) The song was used a lot to represent Jim Henson and the joy he and the Muppets brought to people after his untimely death. (I am only familiar with the two musicals through the animated specials based on them produced by Bill Melendez Productions in the late 1980s, which were released on VHS by Paramount Home Video a number of years back and will hopefully be rereleased by Warner Home Video as part of their wide-sweeping Peanuts DVD campaign which begins in 2008.)
thanks!
I have read through the thread, so if I missed it it wasn’t for lack of trying…but I distinctly remember a cartoon sometimes played in the time slot after school when they played Looney Tunes which was a really old-looking cartoon of the comic Nancy. It looked as old as some of the oldest Mickey Mouse cartoons, and was in black and white. A couple I remember were about “Civic Pride Week” and the “anti-noise campaign” - which would lead me to believe they were from WW2.
I also cannot find anything about this on IMDb or Google, but I’m singing the song in my head right now. “The anti-noise campaign…that’s in the book…here’s the whole solution teacher…take a look…” I could be insane, of course.
Well, Lizard did specify “animated as a TV show.” A cartoon of the vintage you mention would have been produced for movie theatres. Otherwise we could call out “Popeye.”
Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy was featured in three animated shorts made by the Terrytoons studio in 1942–43: School Daze, Nancy’s Little Theater, and Doing Their Bit. All were in Technicolor.
Not sure how you found those, but thank you.
I always liked the little quirky things that he eventually came up with, like
[ul]
[li]Linus’ deathly fear of “queensnakes”.[/li][li]Snoopy’s doghouse conceals a luxury apartment complete with pool table and fine art. [/li][li]Charlie Brown’s fandom of the completely unreliable baseball player, “Joe Shlibotnik”.[/li][li]Snoopy consistently referring to Charlie Brown as “that kid with the round head”. (It almost goes without saying that Linus is the one person who can hear Snoopy’s thoughts–he once scolded Snoopy for saying that. Snoopy thought back, “He’s got kind of a complicated name”)[/li][/ul]
One of my favorite episodes had Marcie and Peppermint Patty getting into a fight atop Snoopy’s doghouse, and destroying it in the process. An exasperated Marcie screams, “This isn’t a guest cottage, it’s a doghouse! And Snoopy isn’t a ‘funny looking kid with a big nose’, he’s a beagle”.
An incredulous Patty, asks, “A beagle”. From beneath the debris, you hear, “woof”.
I disagree with Sparky on this one. “Peanuts” is the perfect name for the strip. Peanuts are a tasty snack. Everyone like peanuts. The children superficially resemble in-the-shell peanuts and are roughly the same size on the printed page. “Peanut Gallery” is a concept that enhances the significance of a group of children.
Schultz said that the reason he didn’t like the name “Peanuts” was that it meant “something insignificant”, like “chicken feed”. But peanuts are a tasty snack, simple yet satisfying, loved by young and old. Everyone loves peanuts.
[QUOTE=sqweels]
I always liked the little quirky things that he eventually came up with, like
[list]
[li]Linus’ deathly fear of “queensnakes”.[/li][/quote]
It blew my mind to learn that there actually is such an animal. Some people think the ‘snipe’ is an invention; I thought the same about queen snakes.
[quote]
[li]Snoopy’s doghouse conceals a luxury apartment complete with pool table and fine art. [/li][/quote]
That’s another neat thing about Peanuts: you don’t generally find allusions to Van Gogh or Beethoven in Garfield or Gasoline Alley.
[quote]
[li]Charlie Brown’s fandom of the completely unreliable baseball player, “Joe Shlibotnik”.[/li][/quote]
The story where he tracks Joe down for an autograph is a wonderful little moment: “Don’t cry on the ball, Joe… it makes the ink run.”
I agree, although before everybody in the world knew who Charlie Brown was, apparently a lot of people thought the main character’s name was “Peanuts.” No doubt that’s the real source of Schulz’s lingering irritation, because it’s a fine name otherwise. I mean, c’mon… “Li’l Folks?” That’s transcendentally forgettable. Schulz grew along with the strip.
The characters were developed, and even as a kid reading the 60’s and 70’s strips/books through the 70’s, I took I for granted that kids in cartoons or comics could be so well defined.
You know who Charlie Brown was…and Linus…and Lucy…and all of them.
Snoopy as Joe Cool? Could you really idolize a dog? Kids wanted to be Snoopy. Snoopy didn’t have to deal with a big sister, or worry about being liked, and he wasn’t bogged down by a fixation on Beethoven, and he wasn’t a busy body like Lucy.
A line I still say at least monthly — Linus: “Of all the Charlie Brown’s in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest”
Snoopy and Linus were the glue to me. I always appreciated Snoopy’s friendship with Woodstock. While Woodstock popped up in the later 60’s, you gotta like how Joe Cool had time for the little guy.
Wish there was a full book written by Snoopy via Charles Schulz. That’d be neat.
Just a related note: Around the corner of our place is Charley Brown’s Restaurant. It’s actually spelled Charley, not Charlie, but there’s a giant smiling Charlie Brown face on the sign. The misspelling of the first name is certainly a simple mistake and not an attempt to avoid legal action, because copyright infringement is a total non-issue in Thailand.
Peeps… it’s Schulz not Schultz!
A now out-of-print 1971 book by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Snoopy and “It Was A Dark And Stormy Night”, retells the story of Snoopy’s authorship in picture-book form. Included within the narrative is a replica of Snoopy’s novel, complete with cover (with a bizarre illustration comissioned by Snoopy and drawn by Lucy), copyright page, and author’s biography on the back cover. Here’s the text of the novel itself. Unfortunately, Snoopy’s other works have never been collected, which is a shame- I would especially would loved to have read his biography of Miss Helen Sweetstory, author of the acclaimed Six Bunny-Wunnies books (which, based on the excerpts published, was even stranger than his first book) and his book on theology, Has It Ever Occured To You That You Might Be Wrong?
I just had an epiphany, right here reading this thread.
From the OP down, we’ve had this debate about how relavant “Peanuts” remain. People today don’t get “Peanuts,” or at least don’t like it, or think it hasn’t aged well, despite the fact that back in the day it was all the rage and some still consider it classic. According what some have posted here, the quality and/or popularity started to wane in the '90s.
Of course, it was right around that time that everybody and his brother decided that he was allergic to peanuts, despite the fact that when I was a kid nobody ever seemed to be allergic to peanuts–airlines gave out peanuts to everyone, all kids ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, etc. (Cecil has covered this matter in a column.) Nowadays, peanuts are suspect and many folks try to avoid them.
THAT’S IT! SCHULZ WAS RIGHT ABOUT THAT DAMN NAME ALL ALONG!
AAAARGH!
Actually this has been done. On April Fools Day sometime in the mid-90’s several comic strip artists switched and drew each other’s strips, some with brilliant results. One I remember is Family Circus drawn by the guy who does Dilbert (the mom had the evil boss’s hairdo), and Dan Piraro of Bizarro drew Luann (I think she turned into a cockroach?). And I think the Family Circus guy did Zippy the Pinhead and the Fox Trot guy did Nancy, but that might just be wishful remembering.
I always thought it was a deal worked out among the syndicates but it turns out that it was arranged in secret completely among the artists themselves. I guess there is some legal issue which is why it is hard to find reprints of the strips, but I’m sure resourceful googlers will come up with something. I saved that page of the paper for years, but I don’t know if I still have it any more. Really funny stuff.
As far as Peanuts, count me among those who spent my 70’s childhood poring over my mom’s old 50’s and 60’s paperback collections from practically the time I could walk. One that hasn’t been mentioned:
Linus enters, carrying a sign which reads “Help Stamp Out Things”
Girl (maybe Violet? Or the nondescript one with the bow in her hair?): “You need to be more specific.”
Linus exits
Linus returns, carrying the sign which now reads “Help Stamp Out Things That Need Stamping Out”
So very much of its time!
Heh, I was going to let someone else look for this, but it was just too easy: