March 19, 2024 • 45 mins
Today we pay tribute to one of the most iconic pieces of American culture. Listen in to hear us gush about Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Ben's
here sitting in for Jerry. It's Ben h Week in
the producer's chair, and this is stuff you should Know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I got a slide whistle in my Christmas stocking.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Do you realize you got me this slide whistle?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I know, but I got my own. Now.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Oh okay, I thought we were talking about me.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
No, no, no, I guess you're still enjoying it. You
brought it out, yes, yeah, I love it. Would you
use it for with peanuts?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I just thought it kind of fit the motif a
little bit comics, you know, so sure, I've been looking
for an opportunity to bust it out, and here we go.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I thought you because not everyone knows this, and this
almost never happens. We started to record. Josh said, hold
on a second and left, and I was pretty convinced
you were going to come back with a trombone and
a plunger.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
It was close. That was close, man, that would have
been something. Now I suddenly am ashamed of my slide whistle.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Wah wah, wah, wah wah.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Exactly that was a pretty good one.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
NICs.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Hey, while we're on that, Chuck, what you're talking about
is the adults in the Peanuts universe. You never see him.
You saw him once and it was just strange. You
can hear them off camera and they're discussed and talked about.
You just don't see them. But in the specials when
they talk, they talk like that, and it's a muted trombone,
(01:35):
like you said, a plunger and a trombone. And that
was the idea of Vince Giraldi, who was the guy
who created the soundtrack for the Peanuts Christmas.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Special, Dang Straight one of the I think that's a
number two best selling jazz record of all time, right.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, after Miles Davis is kind of blue, of course. Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Is it Giraldi? I thought it was Giraldi? Is it Giraldi?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I think it's kind of like that whole Gift Jiff argument.
The only person who can say is Vince Giraldi.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That's about to say his families like, it's not like
that at all.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So we're talking today about Peanuts. In case you didn't know,
it's funny. I was researching Peanuts and I came across
at least a couple results that were actually about peanuts
the food. It was a little confusing for a second,
but for the most part, there's a lot of really
interesting stuff out there that people have written about peanuts.
And I think the reason why is because it's really cerebral,
(02:32):
like surprisingly disarmingly cerebral, and people have gotten so much
out of it over the five decades that it was around,
or more than that by now almost seventy five years
since it started, that everyone just kind of loves it
and has some sort of emotional connection to it. So
(02:53):
there's been a lot of like good written analysis about it,
essays and odes and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Totally, and you know, one thing that I'm sure you
can verify, speaking for both of us, researching peanuts is
a hard thing to stop doing.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
It really is.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
You can just it's just one of these topics you
can just keep going and going and going, because it's
all interesting beyond the nostalgic love. It's interesting as an
adult to look back on some of this stuff, Yeah,
because it's really has you know, the way it's framed
in my mind at least, is a lot different now
than it was when I was a kid. Yeah, just
(03:31):
a landmark comic strip in every single way, one of,
if not the biggest and best ever.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, it's it's a very deceptive comic in that all
of the characters are kids, grade school kids. But it's
not a kid's comic. It's a comic for adults. And
I remember being a kid and like the extent that
I appreciated it was, you know, Charlie Brown flying through
the air, Lucy calling somebody a blockhead, or Snoopy doing
his thing. That was it. I didn't get any of
(04:01):
the existentialism associated with it. Nothing like that was totally
lost to me, and I think that's the way it
was meant to be. You know, sometimes people can create
works like The Simpsons are a good idea or a
good example where it can be enjoyed on multiple levels.
And that's true of Peanuts too. But the proportions are off.
(04:22):
It's not even like the adult enjoyment of Peanuts is
far greater and deeper than the kids appreciation of Peanuts.
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, I mean I think it's definitely four kids. Yeah,
I agree. I think it's just the proportions off.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, that's what I said.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I know, but at the beginning you said it's not
a comic for kids, it's for adults, and I disagree.
I think it's for kids too, but I think adults
can definitely gain more insight.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
You know what, I have to say that what Peanuts?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
All right, So you mentioned that Peanuts ran for almost
fifty years. She said five decades, and I know math
from October second, nineteen fifty to February thirteen, two thousand. Yeah,
and for almost all of that that five decades, one
Charles Schultz drew seven Peanuts comics a week. I think
(05:15):
the Sunday started in nineteen fifty two for seventeen eight
hundred ninety seven comic strips. And he didn't farm these out, No,
he did them himself. And he found that one thing
that was like he also generally did them in pen
as well, because he was just so sort of decisive
in his work.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah. I saw somebody say, like, the average comic artists couldn't.
We would have trouble keeping up that level of dedication
for a decade, let alone five. Yeah, Like, just the
amount of dedication it takes to do that. Like, apparently
Charles Schultz was completely cut out for that kind of thing.
(05:57):
He wasn't a big fan of holidays because they got
in the way of his work. Like that's what he
was dedicated to. I saw one of his family members,
either a widow, ex wife, or a child, I can't
remember who said like, oh, I think it was one
of his daughters who said, like, his family was not
his everything, that the Peanuts comic strip was his everything.
That was his life, and he built a life for
(06:19):
himself and for his family outside of that. But I mean, like,
that's what that guy's purpose on earth was, and he
fulfilled it to the nines.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah. I mean, one thing I can relate to, I
think both of us a little bit, is doing something
with consistency over a great deal of time. We're in
year sixteen, right, Can you imagine fifty years? No?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I really can't. But we've said stuff like this before,
so it's entirely possible we'll end up in year fifty.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
I won't be around my friend.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That's not true. There's going to be all sorts of
great breakthroughs in medicine in the next decade or two.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm a ninety something year old podcaster. Than something went horribly.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Wrong, So there's a glitch in the matrix.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Huh, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
So one of the things about peanuts is that it's
universally loved because it was basically available throughout the universe. Yeah,
twenty six hundred newspapers. Is that it's peak, and it
was at a peak pretty much from the seventies onward,
twenty six hundred newspapers in seventy five countries and twenty
(07:29):
one different languages, and its readership was about three hundred
and fifty million people around the world. And I think
one of the reasons why it was so so widespread
is because the thing about peanuts, from all the research
I did and just kind of coming to understand what
the whole thing was about, is that it's about the
(07:50):
universal human condition. It's not just about Americans and what
Americans go through. It's not just about Canadians even and
what Canadians go through. That's about what every human alive
goes through. Its very basic human condition stuff. Is what
they're actually talking about and what are behind a lot
of the gags, And so that to me is pretty
(08:12):
much the explanation right there for why it's so universally loved.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, and the human condition thing generally with Peanuts, wasn't
the thrill of victory but the agony of defeat. Yeah,
time and time again. These characters suffer setbacks and failures
over and over and over, and even when they're not
doing that, there are very few grand victories at all.
(08:36):
And it's amazing to look at it now that it was.
I mean, I guess people do connect with that, but
it's amazing to look at a comic strip in the
funny papers about these kids with such pathos and with
such failure and such, you know, sometimes clearly depression. It's
just it's really a remarkable cultural staple I think.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah, and it's much easier to think of now because
it's so widespread among comics. But at the time in
nineteen fifty, yeah, this was There was nothing like it.
I mean, there have been some stuff about little kids
and kid groups that like comics that had focused on that,
some of which inspired Charles Schultz, but it was just
(09:20):
groundbreaking in every single way.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, totally. So should we go to the man himself? Yeah,
let's all right. So Charles M. Schultz was born in
November twenty six, nineteen twenty two, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
He got the nickname Sparky when he was a kid,
well when he was a baby in fact, because his
uncle saw him and thought that he looked like this
(09:43):
character from another cartoon called Barney Google named Sparky, so
he nicknamed him Sparkplug. That became Sparky, and apparently everyone
who knew him and was close to him in his
life called him Sparky for his whole life.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Yeah, and apparently he always wanted to draw comics, even
from a young age. It was his aspiration that he
got to fulfill and then some. But his dad, Carl,
was a barber and he was I think a German immigrant.
His mother, Dina, was a Norwegian immigrant, so Charles was
a full first generation American kid. And he and his
(10:20):
dad loved to read the funny papers together, so that
was just kind of like his training came from just
enjoying it with his father, which is pretty neat. And
then his mother also, and this is fairly rare among
Western European or Northern European immigrant families. His mother encouraged
his drawing too. It wasn't looked at as just some dumb,
(10:41):
idle thing that was a waste of time. Like he
he was encouraged to follow his destiny.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I guess yeah. I thought I was hanging there. I
was wondering what was going to be dream destiny is perfect,
you know, slide with. So he was drawing, like you
said he was. He wanted to be a cartoonist from
a very young age, so he was drawing from a
very young age. He got published for the first time
(11:11):
when he was fourteen, which is remarkable in a newspaper
comic and a Ripley's Believe it or not comic. And
it was an image of Spike, the family dog, not
that Spike. We're going to get to Spike later. One
of my favorite characters in the Peanuts Cannon.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Oh yeah, you like that, does Stash?
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I love Spike. He was a desert hippie, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, he totally wasn't he.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Was the best, But Spike was their family dog. It
was signed drawn by Sparky, so that was like his
first little cartoon signature was Sparky and Spike was a Pointer,
not a beagle. This wasn't Snoopy yet, but it was
the inspiration for Snoopy. I believe Spike was black and
white but was a pointer.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, so we've got like, this is a really good
example of what Charles did. He drew from his life,
sometimes drew people's names for the characters that he introduced.
Sometimes he would base characters and like their looks or
their demeanor on people he knew. And so Spike or
Snoopy being based on Spike is like pretty much par
(12:17):
for the course for what he did. And so fourteen
he gets his first cartoon published and Ripley's Believe It
or not, Believe it or not like you said. And
then as a senior in high school, he took a
correspondence drawing class from what was originally called the Federal
School of Applied Cartooning, a division of the Bureau of Engraving,
(12:37):
which happened to be located in Minneapolis, where he lived, essentially,
and that later went on to become Art Instruction Schools, Inc.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And for those of them, great name wise.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
No, but I know for a fact that you're familiar
with this because you were a kid growing up in
the late seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Oh, I know what's coming in those TV ads?
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Do you remember?
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Oh? I remember ads in magazines and comic books.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
You're slightly older, so my age group had the TV ads.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
We didn't have the picture box.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
This was what you're talking about, were like magazine ads
that had Tippy the turtle, Tiny the mouse, or pirate
and you could choose which one to draw, and you
send it in and maybe you want a prize. But
really what you were doing was inadvertently sending your information
to art instruction schools who would try to recruit you
(13:29):
for their art correspondence course. And this is in the eighties,
I think they were still going into like the twenty tens.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Essentially, wow, really.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
But that's where Charles Schultz received his initial training and
the cost for that was about thirty eight hundred dollars
in today's money. And don't forget like his dad's a barber.
Like barber's have never been particularly rich, so it was
like a big deal that his parents were helping him
out with this, this this correspondence course so that he
(14:00):
could go get formal training as a cartoonist.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Totally. He graduated from there, saw it all the way through,
went to work doing some various jobs here and there.
He was, you know, drawing cartoons, drawing comics, submitting them
ever he could. As you know, many stories like this goes.
He was rejected by everybody. Basically, the night before he
ships off for World War Two, his mother, Dina passes
(14:28):
away from cervical cancer. And this was a real sort
of lifelong scar for him. And you know, some people
say that, you know, sort of the pathos and the
deep loneliness that all the Peanuts gang felt was sort
of him getting this out. And as we'll see, you know,
everybody from his wife to people that have studied him
(14:50):
have confirmed and even Charles Schultz himself that like, each
of these characters is a little piece of him in
some way.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Right, So, yeah, he was he had to grab with
like basically a one two punch of trauma because after
his mom's death, like and he shipped out, he saw combat.
He was in combat, so he's dealing with combat. Well
he's also you know, dealing with the grief from the
loss of his mom. Yeah, so that's I mean, that's
gonna have a pretty big impact on anybody, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah, for sure. He makes it through the war, though
obviously goes back to Minneapolis, goes back to the art
school that he graduated from and got a job there.
So he was an instructor there and for about five
years he was still drawing still, I guess, looking at
pictures of pirates and turtles and things, and he was,
(15:42):
you know, he was getting his own style together. He
was learning about comics and how it all worked and
the business side of things. Right, and you said he
often named people after people in his reel life. Three
of his colleagues. There was one Charles Brown, a Linus Marr,
and Freda Rich.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, Freda was a minor character with curly red hair,
but she wasn't the red haired girl that Charlie Brown
had an endless crush on. That was based on another person,
a woman named Donna Johnson, whom Charles Schultz dated when
they both worked at the Art Instruction school, and she
turned him down, and he forever, I guess, kind of
(16:24):
pined or kept a flame or something for her. At
the very least, she became the red haired girl that
Charlie Brown could never have.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Can you imagine being the inspiration for one of these characters.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
I know, it's pretty cool. The guy was like the
Taylor Swift of his era.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Hey, she's got heiress.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And then also a little known fact that was a
good one, by the way, Donna Johnson who turned down
Charles Schultz and inspired the red haired girl went on
to marry instead a firefighter named al Wald, and al
Wald turned out to be the basis of the character
Gargamel in Peyo's Smurf's cartoon.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Amazing. So in nineteen forty seven he got his first
big sort of career break when he had his cartoon
litl Folks l i Apostrophel, which is weekly comic. He
got it in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and then
when he was twenty seven, in nineteen fifty, he got
a syndication deal for Little Folks and seven newspapers, not
(17:29):
one hundred. Yeah, and they had to change the name.
There was already a Little Folks and there was also
Lil Abner, and so they said, you know, we can't
really do this. We got to change it. So they
changed the name to Peanuts, reference to Howdie Duties Peanut Gallery.
And Schultz evidently never liked that name, even though it's
(17:50):
hard to imagine anything different now.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Oh no way. Plus also he's like, Peanuts is too
schmaltzy and sachrein give me Little Folks any day, right,
But yeah, he carried that around the whole career. He
hated the name Peanuts. He never came to like it,
which is bizarre. And then I guess with that syndication deal,
one of the really big things that happened was he
(18:14):
moved from this space filler section on like the women's
page in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press to the comics
page in addition to getting like a huge bump and pay.
So now he'd made it as a comic, his comic
was now on the comics page, which was a huge
deal to him.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, huge bump and pay. So he went to like
thirty dollars a week.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, he had been making ten. And the editor of
the Saint Paul Pioneer Press was like, I'm not giving
you a dime more than that.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So the first Peanuts comic strip came on October second,
nineteen fifty and I think that is a pretty good
place for our first break, eh.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
I think.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So, all right, we'll be right.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Back, softy jaw soff.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
All right, So the first Peanuts is October second, nineteen fifty.
Snoopy the Dog appeared just two days later on October fourth,
nineteen fifties, for Snoopy's first appearance. Snoopy on four legs.
I don't think if you're not, you know, a big
Peanuts officionado, you might not know that Snoopy started out
much more dog like, and Charlie Brown would teach Snoopy
(19:44):
to walk on two legs, and Snoopy's character really more
than any other character in Peanuts changed over those fifty years. Yeah,
for sure, even though a lot of them changed quite
a bit. Because you know, like with anything with any
even television sitcom, like the characters really grow, like you
(20:04):
cast your cast, whether it's TV or it's a cartoon
or a graphic novel, and then as you write, they've
become real and they change, it evolved just like real people.
And that's certainly what happened to Peanuts.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yah, that's pretty awesome. One of the other things about
that's widely recognizes about Peanuts is the style of the drawing,
of the writing, of the lettering, all that stuff. It's
just immediately recognizable as Peanuts. And Schultz's style was described
as a formal minimalism, and he had the four panel format.
(20:41):
I guess foisted it on him at first. Wow, there's
a lot of F's alliteration and he had to work
within it. And a lot of times just being constrained
by rules can actually produce the best art. You know,
sometimes when you don't have any rules, it's tough to
find your way or your direction where you're starting in
a structure can help a lot, and he really thrived
(21:02):
in that, even though he apparently didn't like having that
foisted on him. But this minimal style and the proportions
between the lettering, the like the the speech bubbles and
the kids and the panels, there is a study that
called it Schultze and symmetry, which makes a lot of sense,
(21:25):
and that what Charles Schultz did first was draw the panels,
then he wrote the dialogue, then he drew the characters.
And there's a writer named Ivan Brutelli who wrote in
the Parish Review that pointed out, like if you if
you look at a Peanuts cartoon, you're on like eye
level with them. You're not looking up, you're not looking down.
You are on their level. And in that way, it
(21:47):
draws you into the cartoon and you can imagine yourself
like in there with them. It makes it that much
more like it makes you part of that world and
vice versa.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, that's the one thing I didn't get because that's
in that comic in the world.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Uh so before him, yes, now, before him, that was
not the style.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Did they draw like they were looking down on top
of someone's head.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
They did whatever they wanted, and each one was giant
and took up huge amounts of the newspaper, and they
were masterpieces, like they were works of art, oftentimes really surreal.
They were all over the place, all sorts of different perspectives.
This was new, and it was part of that formal
minimalism that it was this one that you looked at
(22:32):
it the one way from the side, at the in
these these specific proportions. It was it was something new
that he introduced.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Uh a little while ago, when you were saying that
those constraints can really lead to great things, I thought
you were going to say, unless it's family circus.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Oh do you not like family circus?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
When was the last time you looked at family circus?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Let's see age seven?
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Okay, it's terrible. Oh, I mean I loved that family
because I was a little kid that read the comics
like incessantly, but like humor in a family circus cone
just a single square was like, you know, Jeffy tripped
over the book.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Poor Jeffy, Jeffy.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
The other good thing about getting Peanuts going was that
it was known and marketed as a space saving comic,
so those four panels could be arranged however you wanted.
If you wanted to draw a square, you could, If
you wanted them up and down, you could. So that was,
you know, a real benefit to a newspaper who were
when you do newspaper layout is a big part of
putting together a newspaper, making everything fit on the page.
(23:44):
So that was that was a big plus for him
as having that flexibility. I imagine Family Circus even more
flexible just the one square. But because of this minimalism,
it really the character is what shown. Because it wasn't like,
look at this outstanding art, it's art we grew to love,
but it was look at these characters and look at
(24:06):
these emotions that these characters are feeling, and how they're
insecure and they're frustrated, right, and they're sad. But that's
also coupled with the fact that they were also very smart.
At times they were it could be very funny, but
a lot of times it wasn't funny at all as
far as just like you know, an lol type of funny.
It was something meaningful, right, but there was always a
(24:26):
lot of hope, I think, and you know, Dave helped
put this together. And he points out which Gas and
other people have pointed out that no matter how many
times Lucy holds that football, Charlie's gonna try and kick it.
And it's not because he's dumb.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
No, And that's I mean, that's part of a gag, right,
that he's she's going to pull the football away at
the last moment, he's going to go flying through the air.
But the bigger part of the gag is that he's
going to keep trying, and you know that she's not
going to let him kick that football, and yet he's
going to keep trying and trying. You know, Like that's
the dual level that Peanuts exists on. It's a good
(25:02):
example of that.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Who was the uh? When Peanuts turned one hundred, there
were some of the most major comics did tributes me
and you sent along. Some of those was that Mark
Trail who let him kick the football?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Close?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Who was this?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It was Gil Thorpe.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
I did know Gil.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Thorpe, so if you want to, I actually tears were
brought to my eyes. I'm not gonna I was crying
the If you want to just feel incredibly moved, wait
until the end of this episode and then go look
up the November twenty second, twenty twenty two comic strip
of gil Thorpe and you will be moved. It's amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
All the tributes were amazing. Yeah, and it was so
cool to see Snoopy in a garfield and high and Lois,
even though I didn't like them, go in for marriage
counseling with Lucy, like, oh yeah, it's it was a surreal,
like amazing tribute mash up and pretty wonderful thing.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah. It was part of this drive for basically every
comic artist working at the time to create a tribute
comic on November twenty six, twenty twenty two, which was,
like you said, Charles Schultz one hundredth birthday, or would
have been had he lived to one hundred.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Family circus didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
They did.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
No, they said, Jeffy's gotta flush his pencil down the
toilet instead.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
No, they did something I don't remember, but it wasn't
like it wasn't dead on. It was a little off.
Now that you mentioned it, although so Family Circus has
one of the sweetest single panel comics I've ever seen
in my life, though I saw years ago when it
came out, and still to this day, I think it's
one of the sweetest things ever.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
It's did Jeffy's step in the Mud.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
No, Jeffy wasn't even in the panel, so you would
have loved it. You know, jeff does the Family Circus Now?
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Oh, is he the real sign?
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:55):
I feel terrible.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, this is gonna because he's list to him. He's
a huge stuff. You should know, faim So Little PJ.
The baby, Yeah, is coming up. He's got a blanket
with him. He's in his maybe Little Pj's or whatever,
huge smile on his face and he's just gotten up
from a nap. And it says the caption is here
comes Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I love it. See I take it all back, Family Circus.
I loved it. It was wonderful, it was wholesome, but
as a kid who's into comedy, it didn't deliver the
laughs that I needed.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Sure, I'm trying to think of for me. The Far
Side was the first comic that I ever like, genuinely
laughed at.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Oh see, that didn't come along until I was older.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
So yeah, same here. I mean like it was the
mid eighties, so I was easily ten at least, and
I'd just been sitting there dourly reading comics up to
that point.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Oh see, I was. I was laughing at all that stuff, Bay, And.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, I loved all of them, like you said, Hi
and Lois Hagar, the Horrible, all those. I don't think
any of them ever made me laugh until Farside came along.
All right, So wait, no, I want to talk more
about that than that phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
It didn't take long for Peanuts to become a really
big deal. Just five years in, when he was thirty
three years old, Peanuts, I'm sorry, Chultz was named Cartoonists
of the Year.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah that's huge.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
So that's only five years in. And then ten years
after that, Peanuts was on the cover of Time magazine.
Pretty big, two huge, huge deal. I already mentioned sort
of like you know, you're sort of like casting a
player or a TV show, But Charles Schultz actually talked
about that that writing a comic is like casting a
(28:40):
drama company, and that these characters do grow and change
over time, and before he knew it, humor started coming
out of their little mouths, and he was almost like
a conduit.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
It feels like, Yeah, he definitely was. And what's remarkable, though,
is over fifty years he never seemed to have gotten
all of it out. Because I think you said earlier,
people widely consider the Peanuts characters to all be parts
of Charles Schultz's Psyche. Essentially. Art Spiegelman, the guy who
created Mouse, said that Peanuts was Shultz breaking himself up
(29:12):
into child sized pieces and letting them go at each
other for half a century. Yeah, and his widow Jeanie,
said that specific characters were meaningful to Schultz himself as
far as Psyche was concerned. He said that Charlie Brown's
is wishy, washy and insecure side, Lucy's a smart Alex side,
which he enjoyed having because apparently he wasn't particularly good
(29:34):
at getting that out in person. Linus curious and thoughtful side,
and then Snoopy, this is important to me. Snoopy is
the way I would like to be, fearless, the life
of the party, and brushing off Lucy's bad temper with
a glance and kiss. And don't you think it's telling
that he made the character that he aspires to be
the most the dog.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Telling in what sense.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I think it just says a lot about him that, like,
at the very least he thought of dogs.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Oh, he loved his dogs, right, And I think.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
That's pretty difficult to dislike anybody who loves dogs like that.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
You know that Garfield guy hates cats?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Uh yeah, he loathes them.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I collected those books too. Actually, well, now they think
about the first one. That really not the first one
that made me laugh, but the first one that hit
me on a second level was bloom County.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I was huge into Garfield and bloom County.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
I loved Garfield. I had those books too. They were
world class. The colors too in Garfield comics are really great.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I still get a cat that he's Lasagna. I still
got all those Bloom County books too. Those hold up?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Oh yeah, you are you bequeathing them to Ruby?
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Boy? I mean she won't get him now, that was
for no.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
No.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
I mean, oh sure she'll get everything. Yeah, good, But
I want to like show her at some point when
she's like twelve, You're like, hey, you should check out
bloom County. There's a penguin who's friends with a a
crazy street cat.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
She's gonna be like, So, let's talk about some of
these everybody, that's the last time I'll do that.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Oh no, we'll get emails that people like more slaveless.
Let's talk about some of these main characters. Obviously, we
can't hit them all, because there were more than seventy
characters throughout Peanuts, but we're gonna hit the big EIA's
of course, starting with Charlie Brown and that iconic shirt.
That was another sort of thing with Peanuts is that
(31:33):
they would change clothes some times. Oh yeah, but like
Charlie Brown had that shirt on almost all the time.
Lucy wore that blue dress for decades until they phased
out the dress in the eighties and then completely stopped
putting her in dresses in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Oh really, what does she wear?
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I haven't noticed, Just pants and a shirt, Like I
think they changed with the time a little bit like
why I put in nineties, two thousands Lucy in a
little like eineteen fifties curly dress. Gotcha at least you
know full time. But Schultz said that Charlie Brown, of
Charlie Brown, we all know what it's like. To lose,
(32:11):
but Charlie Brown kept losing outrageously. It's not that he's
a loser. He's really a decent little sort. So I
think that's a big point. Like Charlie Brown is constantly losing,
but that's different than being a loser. Those are two
different things.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, And in that sense, you can consider him like
the everyday person, especially if you're coming at Peanuts and
life from the viewpoint that the general common thread in
the human condition is not like winning and feeling happy,
but feeling dissatisfied and losing pretty frequently. That that's the
(32:47):
thing that all of us are equally accustomed to, and
Charlie Brown exemplifies that more than anybody. Although if you
really look at Peanuts, pretty much every character, with the
exception of maybe what Stock and Snoopy, more often than
not did not get what they wanted. They didn't win,
they didn't get a good grade. They had trouble understanding
(33:08):
things like if you look at Peppermint Patty, she was
good at sports, terrible at school, and there were plenty
of panels that had her not understanding what the teacher
was saying or what she was even saying. Marcy, her
friend really good at school, terrible socially, she was very awkward.
I think Charles Schultz described her as a very strange
little girl. So none of them were just like we're
(33:33):
just like one dimensionally happy or winning in any way,
shape or form. That's just not how Peanuts was or
just one dimensional. No, And that's the other thing. First,
there were plenty of like background stock characters for sure
that weren't fully fleshed out, But the main characters that
were talking about they were multi dimensional for sure.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Yeah, for sure. So back to Charlie Brown. He was bald,
which I always thought was very very strange. He had
that big moon head and that little squiggle of hair
up front that as a kid, I even remember thinking like,
what is going on with this kid? I'll never understand it.
Apparently he patterned that after his own quote bland face
(34:17):
that he had when he was a baby. So that's
Charlie Brown. Lucy van Pelt is probably, I mean I
would call her the second lead probably, Okay, wouldn't you.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
I don't know this snoopy somehow in the mix there,
and but I don't know if he'd be second lead lead. First,
he's just like almost on his own trip off.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
Yeah, I think Snoopy is almost his own thing. It
was almost like a spin off within a cartoon. Weird,
but Lucy had black hair again. She had that blue
dress for many, many years. She was born, or at
least born in the comic on March third, nineteen fifty two,
and she was a toddler at first, but she quickly
grew up. He didn't. I think he realized that there
(34:58):
wouldn't many dimensions with a toddler character. She's kind of
annoying and just crying and stuff. So by fifty three,
like just a year later, she was the wonderful fuss
budget we all know as Lucy. And this is a
good example of a character being different, like through adult eyes.
When I was a kid, I was like, Lucy is
(35:21):
really mean.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
She's a pos she is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
She's a real jerk. She's super vain. She's always asking
people how she looks, and if they don't say she's
pretty enough, she gets really upset. But now that I'm
an adult, I look at Lucy and I realize that
Lucy is a young girl who is deeply insecure and
who has no idea how to express her emotions in
(35:44):
a productive way. And these are like adult things that
you realize once you get to be an adult. But
Lucy was mean. She was really really mean to line us.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
He's just maybe insecure, Chuck, because I was thinking, how
compassionate of you that does. But apparently that's just the
grown up view of Lucy, which I haven't attained yet. Still,
I think she's awful.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Yeah, well, maybe having an eight year old daughter too
and seeing insecurities and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, but everything you just said are all the reasons
why Lucy is the last character in the Peanuts universe
who should put out a shingle for psychiatric help, right,
and instead of a lemonade stand offer psychiatric help to
anybody for five cents. And that's what, Yeah, it is.
(36:32):
It is a wonderful bit in and of itself. And
then also it's a great bit in that, even though
she's terrible at it and she has her own insecurities
and is just an awful person in a lot of ways,
at least on the surface herself, she's also maybe the
one that's in the best position to give out psychological advice,
(36:53):
not with any kind of spoonful of sugar, but telling, yeah,
telling things as it is and like not not even
you a sugarcoat of version of reality, but saying like
you need to just do this.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, for sure. One of my favorite panels that I
was or strips that I was kind of looking through
over the last few days, was because Schultz has talked
about every character has their own weakness, and he said
hers is Schroeder. Yeah, she could be sentimental with him.
And there was one panel where she asked him why
he never gave her flowers and he said, because I
(37:25):
don't like you. She said, well, the flowers wouldn't care.
So she had her moments like she was super mean
to linas she would. One of the running bits was
trying to get rid of his little Woody, his security blanket,
like she buried it, she burned it, she cut it
up into little pieces. In one storyline, she made it
(37:48):
into a kite and let go of it and it
flew all over the world and the Air Force rescued
it over the ocean nice and brought it back. So
she was really mean to Linus. But there was one
comic where she said she demanded to know from Linus
what she has to be grateful for, and he said,
you have a brother, who loves you, and she busts
out crying and hugs him.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, that's very sweet.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
So again it's a little girl who's just insecure and
doesn't know how to deal with emotion.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Okay, all right, fine, fine, he's great love Lucy about
Shorter though, So Shorder's the kid with the piano who
plays Beethoven.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Worship's Beethoven virtuoso.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
If you look at the ones where he's playing the
piano and those panels, there is like musical scales and
notes like instead of dialogue bubbles at the top of
the panel.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, those were all hand drawn in hand lettered by
Charles Schultz. He found it very tedious but important because
they were accurate. They were accurate transcriptions of snatches of
Beethoven's music. So if you know how to play the piano,
and you looked at that Peanuts comic, you could play, Hey,
(39:00):
what Schroeder was playing at that time?
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Amazing?
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Isn't that amazing? That's serious accuracy.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
All right, Hey, listen, I got something to pitch. What
this thing is going to be way long? Yeah, So
I say we make this a two parter. Let's take
a break and then maybe come back and talk about
Linus and Snoopy.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
I say, we save Snoopy for part two.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
All Right, we'll take a break, we'll come back, we'll
talk a little bit about Linus, and then I'm sorry everyone,
this is just too robust. We're gonna make this a
two parter, so we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Softy jaw.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Soft, Okay, Chuck, we're back. We were talking about Lucy.
You said she was super mean to Linus, and I
would say that's in part because Linus was Lucy's little brother.
Is Lucy's little brother. I don't know why I'm talking
about them in past tense. They're still very much alive.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean it nails like so
many sibling dynamics. I think while there are older sisters
who are very caring and loving for their youngers, there
are some who are in older siblings period who did
not want that baby around. And from the beginning, Lucy
didn't want a little brother. And in fact, when Sally
(40:34):
Brown came along, Charlie's little sister, Lucy was very jealous
because she said that she wanted a little sister. Oh yeah,
and I'm just like poor Linus, poor guy.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, well, poor rerun too. They both had a younger brother,
even younger than Linus, named Rerun.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I wouldn't round for Rerun. When did he come around?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
I don't know. I wish you hadn't asked me that,
But he was around for a while, Okay.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
I think that was maybe after I stopped reading the comic.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
So let's talk about Linus for a second, because a
lot of people consider him some sort of genius or
at least precociously intelligent.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
For sure.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
One of the reasons why is because he frequently cites philosophers.
He's just clearly well read. He loves school. His teacher,
Miss Othmar. He's quoted as saying that she's a gem
among gems, and he can't imagine that she would ever
accept money for teaching because she's just such a purist
and is so talented at being a teacher.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Like what kids says?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
That right? So yeah. And at the same time, though,
one of the contradictions in terms of Linus is that
he also is far and away the firmest believer in
the Great Pumpkin. And there's a really great strip with
him writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin asking him
to bring him some toys and then at the end
of the letter he says, and by the way, if
(41:59):
you not real, don't tell me because I don't want
to know.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah. Yeah, it is very sweet that this kid who
talks about philosophy and like the high arts is a
believer in the Great Pumpkin and also very sensitive. He's
he's easily the most sensitive, like kind of purest character
in the Peanuts catalog. I think. Yeah, he's got that
security blanket. And apparently Charles Schultz, if he didn't coin
(42:28):
that term security blanket, he he made it what it
was and popularized it as such as a as something
a child will have, yeah, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah. So the original security blanket was an actual blanket
that you pinned to the crib or the bed so
that your kid couldn't move.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah. It's called super dangerous.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, and also like torture I think is another word
for it. And then the military and defense sector picked
it up and used it as a metaphor for the
measure and lengths you went to to keep state secret secret.
But it was Charles Schultz who's like, no, this has
has to do with angst and anxiety, and yeah, that's
(43:08):
that's it. Was Lionis who spread the gospel to the
world about security blankets.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Yeah, I called it a woobye earlier, and that is
stolen directly from mister mom Oh, yeah, who I think
originated that term.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Yeah, wooby's a great, great word for it too.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, or binkie. I'm not sure who who made that
one up, but binkie's a big one.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I don't either. I can't even hazard a guess, but
I've heard that one too before. Did you have a blanky?
I had a blanky?
Speaker 3 (43:33):
You had a blanky?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yes? Man, that thing was scattered by the time I
gave that up.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yeah, I had a pillow. I don't remember if I
had a name for it. But it was this little
kind of like a hand pillow if that's the thing.
It wasn't like a full sized pillow. And I would uh, man,
this is just coming back to me. I would rub
it between my fingers, like over the finger and then
down the little valley between the fingers, over and over
and over. And I will also stick it in my ear.
(44:00):
And I remember this was a white pillow. And this
thing was so disgusting by the time I got rid
of it from like earwax and finger gook that. I
don't mean. My mom certainly would have never said like
it's time for that to leave, but it may have just,
you know, disappeared.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I don't remember I went to go live on a farm.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah exactly. No, Yeah, with my goat, that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
What else you got?
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Well? Nothing, I mean, that's all I got online? Is
I think that's a good robust part one.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
I think so too, So let's start part two in
a minute.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Okay, sure, reminder to everyone to go out and get
tickets for our live show this year. Yeah, there won't
be any listener mail, so we'll just go in a
live show tour plug. How about that?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, so go to stuff youshould know dot com or
link tree, slash sysk and you can get info and tickets.
Yeah that's a great idea, chuck.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah, so don't wrap up an email and spank it
on the bottom. Yet you got to wait, right.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Not yet? Here's the awkward non clapping transition for a
very special two parter.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. Ben's
here sitting in for Jerry. It's Ben h Week in
the producer's chair, and this is stuff you should Know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
I got a slide whistle in my Christmas stocking.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Do you realize you got me this slide whistle?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
I know, but I got my own. Now.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Oh okay, I thought we were talking about me.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
No, no, no, I guess you're still enjoying it. You
brought it out, yes, yeah, I love it. Would you
use it for with peanuts?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
I just thought it kind of fit the motif a
little bit comics, you know, so sure, I've been looking
for an opportunity to bust it out, and here we go.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I thought you because not everyone knows this, and this
almost never happens. We started to record. Josh said, hold
on a second and left, and I was pretty convinced
you were going to come back with a trombone and
a plunger.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
It was close. That was close, man, that would have
been something. Now I suddenly am ashamed of my slide whistle.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Wah wah, wah, wah wah.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Exactly that was a pretty good one.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
NICs.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Hey, while we're on that, Chuck, what you're talking about
is the adults in the Peanuts universe. You never see him.
You saw him once and it was just strange. You
can hear them off camera and they're discussed and talked about.
You just don't see them. But in the specials when
they talk, they talk like that, and it's a muted trombone,
(01:35):
like you said, a plunger and a trombone. And that
was the idea of Vince Giraldi, who was the guy
who created the soundtrack for the Peanuts Christmas.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
Special, Dang Straight one of the I think that's a
number two best selling jazz record of all time, right.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, after Miles Davis is kind of blue, of course. Yeah?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
Is it Giraldi? I thought it was Giraldi? Is it Giraldi?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I think it's kind of like that whole Gift Jiff argument.
The only person who can say is Vince Giraldi.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
That's about to say his families like, it's not like
that at all.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
So we're talking today about Peanuts. In case you didn't know,
it's funny. I was researching Peanuts and I came across
at least a couple results that were actually about peanuts
the food. It was a little confusing for a second,
but for the most part, there's a lot of really
interesting stuff out there that people have written about peanuts.
And I think the reason why is because it's really cerebral,
(02:32):
like surprisingly disarmingly cerebral, and people have gotten so much
out of it over the five decades that it was around,
or more than that by now almost seventy five years
since it started, that everyone just kind of loves it
and has some sort of emotional connection to it. So
(02:53):
there's been a lot of like good written analysis about it,
essays and odes and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
Totally, and you know, one thing that I'm sure you
can verify, speaking for both of us, researching peanuts is
a hard thing to stop doing.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
It really is.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
You can just it's just one of these topics you
can just keep going and going and going, because it's
all interesting beyond the nostalgic love. It's interesting as an
adult to look back on some of this stuff, Yeah,
because it's really has you know, the way it's framed
in my mind at least, is a lot different now
than it was when I was a kid. Yeah, just
(03:31):
a landmark comic strip in every single way, one of,
if not the biggest and best ever.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
Yeah, it's it's a very deceptive comic in that all
of the characters are kids, grade school kids. But it's
not a kid's comic. It's a comic for adults. And
I remember being a kid and like the extent that
I appreciated it was, you know, Charlie Brown flying through
the air, Lucy calling somebody a blockhead, or Snoopy doing
his thing. That was it. I didn't get any of
(04:01):
the existentialism associated with it. Nothing like that was totally
lost to me, and I think that's the way it
was meant to be. You know, sometimes people can create
works like The Simpsons are a good idea or a
good example where it can be enjoyed on multiple levels.
And that's true of Peanuts too. But the proportions are off.
(04:22):
It's not even like the adult enjoyment of Peanuts is
far greater and deeper than the kids appreciation of Peanuts.
You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah, I mean I think it's definitely four kids. Yeah,
I agree. I think it's just the proportions off.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Yeah, that's what I said.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
I know, but at the beginning you said it's not
a comic for kids, it's for adults, and I disagree.
I think it's for kids too, but I think adults
can definitely gain more insight.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
You know what, I have to say that what Peanuts?
Speaker 3 (04:53):
All right, So you mentioned that Peanuts ran for almost
fifty years. She said five decades, and I know math
from October second, nineteen fifty to February thirteen, two thousand. Yeah,
and for almost all of that that five decades, one
Charles Schultz drew seven Peanuts comics a week. I think
(05:15):
the Sunday started in nineteen fifty two for seventeen eight
hundred ninety seven comic strips. And he didn't farm these out, No,
he did them himself. And he found that one thing
that was like he also generally did them in pen
as well, because he was just so sort of decisive
in his work.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah. I saw somebody say, like, the average comic artists couldn't.
We would have trouble keeping up that level of dedication
for a decade, let alone five. Yeah, Like, just the
amount of dedication it takes to do that. Like, apparently
Charles Schultz was completely cut out for that kind of thing.
(05:57):
He wasn't a big fan of holidays because they got
in the way of his work. Like that's what he
was dedicated to. I saw one of his family members,
either a widow, ex wife, or a child, I can't
remember who said like, oh, I think it was one
of his daughters who said, like, his family was not
his everything, that the Peanuts comic strip was his everything.
That was his life, and he built a life for
(06:19):
himself and for his family outside of that. But I mean, like,
that's what that guy's purpose on earth was, and he
fulfilled it to the nines.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah. I mean, one thing I can relate to, I
think both of us a little bit, is doing something
with consistency over a great deal of time. We're in
year sixteen, right, Can you imagine fifty years? No?
Speaker 2 (06:42):
I really can't. But we've said stuff like this before,
so it's entirely possible we'll end up in year fifty.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
I won't be around my friend.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That's not true. There's going to be all sorts of
great breakthroughs in medicine in the next decade or two.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I'm a ninety something year old podcaster. Than something went horribly.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
Wrong, So there's a glitch in the matrix.
Speaker 3 (07:07):
Huh, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
So one of the things about peanuts is that it's
universally loved because it was basically available throughout the universe. Yeah,
twenty six hundred newspapers. Is that it's peak, and it
was at a peak pretty much from the seventies onward,
twenty six hundred newspapers in seventy five countries and twenty
(07:29):
one different languages, and its readership was about three hundred
and fifty million people around the world. And I think
one of the reasons why it was so so widespread
is because the thing about peanuts, from all the research
I did and just kind of coming to understand what
the whole thing was about, is that it's about the
(07:50):
universal human condition. It's not just about Americans and what
Americans go through. It's not just about Canadians even and
what Canadians go through. That's about what every human alive
goes through. Its very basic human condition stuff. Is what
they're actually talking about and what are behind a lot
of the gags, And so that to me is pretty
(08:12):
much the explanation right there for why it's so universally loved.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
Yeah, and the human condition thing generally with Peanuts, wasn't
the thrill of victory but the agony of defeat. Yeah,
time and time again. These characters suffer setbacks and failures
over and over and over, and even when they're not
doing that, there are very few grand victories at all.
(08:36):
And it's amazing to look at it now that it was.
I mean, I guess people do connect with that, but
it's amazing to look at a comic strip in the
funny papers about these kids with such pathos and with
such failure and such, you know, sometimes clearly depression. It's
just it's really a remarkable cultural staple I think.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah, and it's much easier to think of now because
it's so widespread among comics. But at the time in
nineteen fifty, yeah, this was There was nothing like it.
I mean, there have been some stuff about little kids
and kid groups that like comics that had focused on that,
some of which inspired Charles Schultz, but it was just
(09:20):
groundbreaking in every single way.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah, totally. So should we go to the man himself? Yeah,
let's all right. So Charles M. Schultz was born in
November twenty six, nineteen twenty two, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
He got the nickname Sparky when he was a kid,
well when he was a baby in fact, because his
uncle saw him and thought that he looked like this
(09:43):
character from another cartoon called Barney Google named Sparky, so
he nicknamed him Sparkplug. That became Sparky, and apparently everyone
who knew him and was close to him in his
life called him Sparky for his whole life.
Speaker 2 (09:56):
Yeah, and apparently he always wanted to draw comics, even
from a young age. It was his aspiration that he
got to fulfill and then some. But his dad, Carl,
was a barber and he was I think a German immigrant.
His mother, Dina, was a Norwegian immigrant, so Charles was
a full first generation American kid. And he and his
(10:20):
dad loved to read the funny papers together, so that
was just kind of like his training came from just
enjoying it with his father, which is pretty neat. And
then his mother also, and this is fairly rare among
Western European or Northern European immigrant families. His mother encouraged
his drawing too. It wasn't looked at as just some dumb,
(10:41):
idle thing that was a waste of time. Like he
he was encouraged to follow his destiny.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
I guess yeah. I thought I was hanging there. I
was wondering what was going to be dream destiny is perfect,
you know, slide with. So he was drawing, like you
said he was. He wanted to be a cartoonist from
a very young age, so he was drawing from a
very young age. He got published for the first time
(11:11):
when he was fourteen, which is remarkable in a newspaper
comic and a Ripley's Believe it or not comic. And
it was an image of Spike, the family dog, not
that Spike. We're going to get to Spike later. One
of my favorite characters in the Peanuts Cannon.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Oh yeah, you like that, does Stash?
Speaker 3 (11:29):
I love Spike. He was a desert hippie, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, he totally wasn't he.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
Was the best, But Spike was their family dog. It
was signed drawn by Sparky, so that was like his
first little cartoon signature was Sparky and Spike was a Pointer,
not a beagle. This wasn't Snoopy yet, but it was
the inspiration for Snoopy. I believe Spike was black and
white but was a pointer.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Yeah, so we've got like, this is a really good
example of what Charles did. He drew from his life,
sometimes drew people's names for the characters that he introduced.
Sometimes he would base characters and like their looks or
their demeanor on people he knew. And so Spike or
Snoopy being based on Spike is like pretty much par
(12:17):
for the course for what he did. And so fourteen
he gets his first cartoon published and Ripley's Believe It
or not, Believe it or not like you said. And
then as a senior in high school, he took a
correspondence drawing class from what was originally called the Federal
School of Applied Cartooning, a division of the Bureau of Engraving,
(12:37):
which happened to be located in Minneapolis, where he lived, essentially,
and that later went on to become Art Instruction Schools, Inc.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
And for those of them, great name wise.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
No, but I know for a fact that you're familiar
with this because you were a kid growing up in
the late seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Oh, I know what's coming in those TV ads?
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Do you remember?
Speaker 3 (12:58):
Oh? I remember ads in magazines and comic books.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
You're slightly older, so my age group had the TV ads.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
We didn't have the picture box.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
This was what you're talking about, were like magazine ads
that had Tippy the turtle, Tiny the mouse, or pirate
and you could choose which one to draw, and you
send it in and maybe you want a prize. But
really what you were doing was inadvertently sending your information
to art instruction schools who would try to recruit you
(13:29):
for their art correspondence course. And this is in the eighties,
I think they were still going into like the twenty tens.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Essentially, wow, really.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
But that's where Charles Schultz received his initial training and
the cost for that was about thirty eight hundred dollars
in today's money. And don't forget like his dad's a barber.
Like barber's have never been particularly rich, so it was
like a big deal that his parents were helping him
out with this, this this correspondence course so that he
(14:00):
could go get formal training as a cartoonist.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
Totally. He graduated from there, saw it all the way through,
went to work doing some various jobs here and there.
He was, you know, drawing cartoons, drawing comics, submitting them
ever he could. As you know, many stories like this goes.
He was rejected by everybody. Basically, the night before he
ships off for World War Two, his mother, Dina passes
(14:28):
away from cervical cancer. And this was a real sort
of lifelong scar for him. And you know, some people
say that, you know, sort of the pathos and the
deep loneliness that all the Peanuts gang felt was sort
of him getting this out. And as we'll see, you know,
everybody from his wife to people that have studied him
(14:50):
have confirmed and even Charles Schultz himself that like, each
of these characters is a little piece of him in
some way.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
Right, So, yeah, he was he had to grab with
like basically a one two punch of trauma because after
his mom's death, like and he shipped out, he saw combat.
He was in combat, so he's dealing with combat. Well
he's also you know, dealing with the grief from the
loss of his mom. Yeah, so that's I mean, that's
gonna have a pretty big impact on anybody, you know.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yeah, for sure. He makes it through the war, though
obviously goes back to Minneapolis, goes back to the art
school that he graduated from and got a job there.
So he was an instructor there and for about five
years he was still drawing still, I guess, looking at
pictures of pirates and turtles and things, and he was,
(15:42):
you know, he was getting his own style together. He
was learning about comics and how it all worked and
the business side of things. Right, and you said he
often named people after people in his reel life. Three
of his colleagues. There was one Charles Brown, a Linus Marr,
and Freda Rich.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, Freda was a minor character with curly red hair,
but she wasn't the red haired girl that Charlie Brown
had an endless crush on. That was based on another person,
a woman named Donna Johnson, whom Charles Schultz dated when
they both worked at the Art Instruction school, and she
turned him down, and he forever, I guess, kind of
(16:24):
pined or kept a flame or something for her. At
the very least, she became the red haired girl that
Charlie Brown could never have.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Can you imagine being the inspiration for one of these characters.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
I know, it's pretty cool. The guy was like the
Taylor Swift of his era.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Hey, she's got heiress.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And then also a little known fact that was a
good one, by the way, Donna Johnson who turned down
Charles Schultz and inspired the red haired girl went on
to marry instead a firefighter named al Wald, and al
Wald turned out to be the basis of the character
Gargamel in Peyo's Smurf's cartoon.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Amazing. So in nineteen forty seven he got his first
big sort of career break when he had his cartoon
litl Folks l i Apostrophel, which is weekly comic. He
got it in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press, and then
when he was twenty seven, in nineteen fifty, he got
a syndication deal for Little Folks and seven newspapers, not
(17:29):
one hundred. Yeah, and they had to change the name.
There was already a Little Folks and there was also
Lil Abner, and so they said, you know, we can't
really do this. We got to change it. So they
changed the name to Peanuts, reference to Howdie Duties Peanut Gallery.
And Schultz evidently never liked that name, even though it's
(17:50):
hard to imagine anything different now.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Oh no way. Plus also he's like, Peanuts is too
schmaltzy and sachrein give me Little Folks any day, right,
But yeah, he carried that around the whole career. He
hated the name Peanuts. He never came to like it,
which is bizarre. And then I guess with that syndication deal,
one of the really big things that happened was he
(18:14):
moved from this space filler section on like the women's
page in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press to the comics
page in addition to getting like a huge bump and pay.
So now he'd made it as a comic, his comic
was now on the comics page, which was a huge
deal to him.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
Yeah, huge bump and pay. So he went to like
thirty dollars a week.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
Yeah, he had been making ten. And the editor of
the Saint Paul Pioneer Press was like, I'm not giving
you a dime more than that.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So the first Peanuts comic strip came on October second,
nineteen fifty and I think that is a pretty good
place for our first break, eh.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
I think.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
So, all right, we'll be right.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Back, softy jaw soff.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
All right, So the first Peanuts is October second, nineteen fifty.
Snoopy the Dog appeared just two days later on October fourth,
nineteen fifties, for Snoopy's first appearance. Snoopy on four legs.
I don't think if you're not, you know, a big
Peanuts officionado, you might not know that Snoopy started out
much more dog like, and Charlie Brown would teach Snoopy
(19:44):
to walk on two legs, and Snoopy's character really more
than any other character in Peanuts changed over those fifty years. Yeah,
for sure, even though a lot of them changed quite
a bit. Because you know, like with anything with any
even television sitcom, like the characters really grow, like you
(20:04):
cast your cast, whether it's TV or it's a cartoon
or a graphic novel, and then as you write, they've
become real and they change, it evolved just like real people.
And that's certainly what happened to Peanuts.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yah, that's pretty awesome. One of the other things about
that's widely recognizes about Peanuts is the style of the drawing,
of the writing, of the lettering, all that stuff. It's
just immediately recognizable as Peanuts. And Schultz's style was described
as a formal minimalism, and he had the four panel format.
(20:41):
I guess foisted it on him at first. Wow, there's
a lot of F's alliteration and he had to work
within it. And a lot of times just being constrained
by rules can actually produce the best art. You know,
sometimes when you don't have any rules, it's tough to
find your way or your direction where you're starting in
a structure can help a lot, and he really thrived
(21:02):
in that, even though he apparently didn't like having that
foisted on him. But this minimal style and the proportions
between the lettering, the like the the speech bubbles and
the kids and the panels, there is a study that
called it Schultze and symmetry, which makes a lot of sense,
(21:25):
and that what Charles Schultz did first was draw the panels,
then he wrote the dialogue, then he drew the characters.
And there's a writer named Ivan Brutelli who wrote in
the Parish Review that pointed out, like if you if
you look at a Peanuts cartoon, you're on like eye
level with them. You're not looking up, you're not looking down.
You are on their level. And in that way, it
(21:47):
draws you into the cartoon and you can imagine yourself
like in there with them. It makes it that much
more like it makes you part of that world and
vice versa.
Speaker 3 (21:57):
Yeah, that's the one thing I didn't get because that's
in that comic in the world.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Uh so before him, yes, now, before him, that was
not the style.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Did they draw like they were looking down on top
of someone's head.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
They did whatever they wanted, and each one was giant
and took up huge amounts of the newspaper, and they
were masterpieces, like they were works of art, oftentimes really surreal.
They were all over the place, all sorts of different perspectives.
This was new, and it was part of that formal
minimalism that it was this one that you looked at
(22:32):
it the one way from the side, at the in
these these specific proportions. It was it was something new
that he introduced.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Uh a little while ago, when you were saying that
those constraints can really lead to great things, I thought
you were going to say, unless it's family circus.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Oh do you not like family circus?
Speaker 3 (22:52):
When was the last time you looked at family circus?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Let's see age seven?
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Okay, it's terrible. Oh, I mean I loved that family
because I was a little kid that read the comics
like incessantly, but like humor in a family circus cone
just a single square was like, you know, Jeffy tripped
over the book.
Speaker 2 (23:17):
Poor Jeffy, Jeffy.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
The other good thing about getting Peanuts going was that
it was known and marketed as a space saving comic,
so those four panels could be arranged however you wanted.
If you wanted to draw a square, you could, If
you wanted them up and down, you could. So that was,
you know, a real benefit to a newspaper who were
when you do newspaper layout is a big part of
putting together a newspaper, making everything fit on the page.
(23:44):
So that was that was a big plus for him
as having that flexibility. I imagine Family Circus even more
flexible just the one square. But because of this minimalism,
it really the character is what shown. Because it wasn't like,
look at this outstanding art, it's art we grew to love,
but it was look at these characters and look at
(24:06):
these emotions that these characters are feeling, and how they're
insecure and they're frustrated, right, and they're sad. But that's
also coupled with the fact that they were also very smart.
At times they were it could be very funny, but
a lot of times it wasn't funny at all as
far as just like you know, an lol type of funny.
It was something meaningful, right, but there was always a
(24:26):
lot of hope, I think, and you know, Dave helped
put this together. And he points out which Gas and
other people have pointed out that no matter how many
times Lucy holds that football, Charlie's gonna try and kick it.
And it's not because he's dumb.
Speaker 2 (24:40):
No, And that's I mean, that's part of a gag, right,
that he's she's going to pull the football away at
the last moment, he's going to go flying through the air.
But the bigger part of the gag is that he's
going to keep trying, and you know that she's not
going to let him kick that football, and yet he's
going to keep trying and trying. You know, Like that's
the dual level that Peanuts exists on. It's a good
(25:02):
example of that.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
Who was the uh? When Peanuts turned one hundred, there
were some of the most major comics did tributes me
and you sent along. Some of those was that Mark
Trail who let him kick the football?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Close?
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Who was this?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
It was Gil Thorpe.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
I did know Gil.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Thorpe, so if you want to, I actually tears were
brought to my eyes. I'm not gonna I was crying
the If you want to just feel incredibly moved, wait
until the end of this episode and then go look
up the November twenty second, twenty twenty two comic strip
of gil Thorpe and you will be moved. It's amazing.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
All the tributes were amazing. Yeah, and it was so
cool to see Snoopy in a garfield and high and Lois,
even though I didn't like them, go in for marriage
counseling with Lucy, like, oh yeah, it's it was a surreal,
like amazing tribute mash up and pretty wonderful thing.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Yeah. It was part of this drive for basically every
comic artist working at the time to create a tribute
comic on November twenty six, twenty twenty two, which was,
like you said, Charles Schultz one hundredth birthday, or would
have been had he lived to one hundred.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
Family circus didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
They did.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
No, they said, Jeffy's gotta flush his pencil down the
toilet instead.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
No, they did something I don't remember, but it wasn't
like it wasn't dead on. It was a little off.
Now that you mentioned it, although so Family Circus has
one of the sweetest single panel comics I've ever seen
in my life, though I saw years ago when it
came out, and still to this day, I think it's
one of the sweetest things ever.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
It's did Jeffy's step in the Mud.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
No, Jeffy wasn't even in the panel, so you would
have loved it. You know, jeff does the Family Circus Now?
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Oh, is he the real sign?
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (26:55):
I feel terrible.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Yeah, this is gonna because he's list to him. He's
a huge stuff. You should know, faim So Little PJ.
The baby, Yeah, is coming up. He's got a blanket
with him. He's in his maybe Little Pj's or whatever,
huge smile on his face and he's just gotten up
from a nap. And it says the caption is here
comes Sunshine.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
I love it. See I take it all back, Family Circus.
I loved it. It was wonderful, it was wholesome, but
as a kid who's into comedy, it didn't deliver the
laughs that I needed.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Sure, I'm trying to think of for me. The Far
Side was the first comic that I ever like, genuinely
laughed at.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
Oh see, that didn't come along until I was older.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
So yeah, same here. I mean like it was the
mid eighties, so I was easily ten at least, and
I'd just been sitting there dourly reading comics up to
that point.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Oh see, I was. I was laughing at all that stuff, Bay, And.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Yeah, I loved all of them, like you said, Hi
and Lois Hagar, the Horrible, all those. I don't think
any of them ever made me laugh until Farside came along.
All right, So wait, no, I want to talk more
about that than that phenomenon.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
It didn't take long for Peanuts to become a really
big deal. Just five years in, when he was thirty
three years old, Peanuts, I'm sorry, Chultz was named Cartoonists
of the Year.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah that's huge.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
So that's only five years in. And then ten years
after that, Peanuts was on the cover of Time magazine.
Pretty big, two huge, huge deal. I already mentioned sort
of like you know, you're sort of like casting a
player or a TV show, But Charles Schultz actually talked
about that that writing a comic is like casting a
(28:40):
drama company, and that these characters do grow and change
over time, and before he knew it, humor started coming
out of their little mouths, and he was almost like
a conduit.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
It feels like, Yeah, he definitely was. And what's remarkable, though,
is over fifty years he never seemed to have gotten
all of it out. Because I think you said earlier,
people widely consider the Peanuts characters to all be parts
of Charles Schultz's Psyche. Essentially. Art Spiegelman, the guy who
created Mouse, said that Peanuts was Shultz breaking himself up
(29:12):
into child sized pieces and letting them go at each
other for half a century. Yeah, and his widow Jeanie,
said that specific characters were meaningful to Schultz himself as
far as Psyche was concerned. He said that Charlie Brown's
is wishy, washy and insecure side, Lucy's a smart Alex side,
which he enjoyed having because apparently he wasn't particularly good
(29:34):
at getting that out in person. Linus curious and thoughtful side,
and then Snoopy, this is important to me. Snoopy is
the way I would like to be, fearless, the life
of the party, and brushing off Lucy's bad temper with
a glance and kiss. And don't you think it's telling
that he made the character that he aspires to be
the most the dog.
Speaker 3 (29:54):
Telling in what sense.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I think it just says a lot about him that, like,
at the very least he thought of dogs.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
Oh, he loved his dogs, right, And I think.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
That's pretty difficult to dislike anybody who loves dogs like that.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
You know that Garfield guy hates cats?
Speaker 2 (30:10):
Uh yeah, he loathes them.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
I collected those books too. Actually, well, now they think
about the first one. That really not the first one
that made me laugh, but the first one that hit
me on a second level was bloom County.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
I was huge into Garfield and bloom County.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
I loved Garfield. I had those books too. They were
world class. The colors too in Garfield comics are really great.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
I still get a cat that he's Lasagna. I still
got all those Bloom County books too. Those hold up?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Oh yeah, you are you bequeathing them to Ruby?
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Boy? I mean she won't get him now, that was
for no.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
No.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
I mean, oh sure she'll get everything. Yeah, good, But
I want to like show her at some point when
she's like twelve, You're like, hey, you should check out
bloom County. There's a penguin who's friends with a a
crazy street cat.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
She's gonna be like, So, let's talk about some of
these everybody, that's the last time I'll do that.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
Oh no, we'll get emails that people like more slaveless.
Let's talk about some of these main characters. Obviously, we
can't hit them all, because there were more than seventy
characters throughout Peanuts, but we're gonna hit the big EIA's
of course, starting with Charlie Brown and that iconic shirt.
That was another sort of thing with Peanuts is that
(31:33):
they would change clothes some times. Oh yeah, but like
Charlie Brown had that shirt on almost all the time.
Lucy wore that blue dress for decades until they phased
out the dress in the eighties and then completely stopped
putting her in dresses in the nineties.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Oh really, what does she wear?
Speaker 3 (31:50):
I haven't noticed, Just pants and a shirt, Like I
think they changed with the time a little bit like
why I put in nineties, two thousands Lucy in a
little like eineteen fifties curly dress. Gotcha at least you
know full time. But Schultz said that Charlie Brown, of
Charlie Brown, we all know what it's like. To lose,
(32:11):
but Charlie Brown kept losing outrageously. It's not that he's
a loser. He's really a decent little sort. So I
think that's a big point. Like Charlie Brown is constantly losing,
but that's different than being a loser. Those are two
different things.
Speaker 2 (32:26):
Yeah, And in that sense, you can consider him like
the everyday person, especially if you're coming at Peanuts and
life from the viewpoint that the general common thread in
the human condition is not like winning and feeling happy,
but feeling dissatisfied and losing pretty frequently. That that's the
(32:47):
thing that all of us are equally accustomed to, and
Charlie Brown exemplifies that more than anybody. Although if you
really look at Peanuts, pretty much every character, with the
exception of maybe what Stock and Snoopy, more often than
not did not get what they wanted. They didn't win,
they didn't get a good grade. They had trouble understanding
(33:08):
things like if you look at Peppermint Patty, she was
good at sports, terrible at school, and there were plenty
of panels that had her not understanding what the teacher
was saying or what she was even saying. Marcy, her
friend really good at school, terrible socially, she was very awkward.
I think Charles Schultz described her as a very strange
little girl. So none of them were just like we're
(33:33):
just like one dimensionally happy or winning in any way,
shape or form. That's just not how Peanuts was or
just one dimensional. No, And that's the other thing. First,
there were plenty of like background stock characters for sure
that weren't fully fleshed out, But the main characters that
were talking about they were multi dimensional for sure.
Speaker 3 (33:54):
Yeah, for sure. So back to Charlie Brown. He was bald,
which I always thought was very very strange. He had
that big moon head and that little squiggle of hair
up front that as a kid, I even remember thinking like,
what is going on with this kid? I'll never understand it.
Apparently he patterned that after his own quote bland face
(34:17):
that he had when he was a baby. So that's
Charlie Brown. Lucy van Pelt is probably, I mean I
would call her the second lead probably, Okay, wouldn't you.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
I don't know this snoopy somehow in the mix there,
and but I don't know if he'd be second lead lead. First,
he's just like almost on his own trip off.
Speaker 3 (34:37):
Yeah, I think Snoopy is almost his own thing. It
was almost like a spin off within a cartoon. Weird,
but Lucy had black hair again. She had that blue
dress for many, many years. She was born, or at
least born in the comic on March third, nineteen fifty two,
and she was a toddler at first, but she quickly
grew up. He didn't. I think he realized that there
(34:58):
wouldn't many dimensions with a toddler character. She's kind of
annoying and just crying and stuff. So by fifty three,
like just a year later, she was the wonderful fuss
budget we all know as Lucy. And this is a
good example of a character being different, like through adult eyes.
When I was a kid, I was like, Lucy is
(35:21):
really mean.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
She's a pos she is.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
She's a real jerk. She's super vain. She's always asking
people how she looks, and if they don't say she's
pretty enough, she gets really upset. But now that I'm
an adult, I look at Lucy and I realize that
Lucy is a young girl who is deeply insecure and
who has no idea how to express her emotions in
(35:44):
a productive way. And these are like adult things that
you realize once you get to be an adult. But
Lucy was mean. She was really really mean to line us.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
He's just maybe insecure, Chuck, because I was thinking, how
compassionate of you that does. But apparently that's just the
grown up view of Lucy, which I haven't attained yet. Still,
I think she's awful.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Yeah, well, maybe having an eight year old daughter too
and seeing insecurities and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, but everything you just said are all the reasons
why Lucy is the last character in the Peanuts universe
who should put out a shingle for psychiatric help, right,
and instead of a lemonade stand offer psychiatric help to
anybody for five cents. And that's what, Yeah, it is.
(36:32):
It is a wonderful bit in and of itself. And
then also it's a great bit in that, even though
she's terrible at it and she has her own insecurities
and is just an awful person in a lot of ways,
at least on the surface herself, she's also maybe the
one that's in the best position to give out psychological advice,
(36:53):
not with any kind of spoonful of sugar, but telling, yeah,
telling things as it is and like not not even
you a sugarcoat of version of reality, but saying like
you need to just do this.
Speaker 3 (37:05):
Yeah, for sure. One of my favorite panels that I
was or strips that I was kind of looking through
over the last few days, was because Schultz has talked
about every character has their own weakness, and he said
hers is Schroeder. Yeah, she could be sentimental with him.
And there was one panel where she asked him why
he never gave her flowers and he said, because I
(37:25):
don't like you. She said, well, the flowers wouldn't care.
So she had her moments like she was super mean
to linas she would. One of the running bits was
trying to get rid of his little Woody, his security blanket,
like she buried it, she burned it, she cut it
up into little pieces. In one storyline, she made it
(37:48):
into a kite and let go of it and it
flew all over the world and the Air Force rescued
it over the ocean nice and brought it back. So
she was really mean to Linus. But there was one
comic where she said she demanded to know from Linus
what she has to be grateful for, and he said,
you have a brother, who loves you, and she busts
out crying and hugs him.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Yeah, that's very sweet.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
So again it's a little girl who's just insecure and
doesn't know how to deal with emotion.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Okay, all right, fine, fine, he's great love Lucy about
Shorter though, So Shorder's the kid with the piano who
plays Beethoven.
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Worship's Beethoven virtuoso.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
If you look at the ones where he's playing the
piano and those panels, there is like musical scales and
notes like instead of dialogue bubbles at the top of
the panel.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Yeah, those were all hand drawn in hand lettered by
Charles Schultz. He found it very tedious but important because
they were accurate. They were accurate transcriptions of snatches of
Beethoven's music. So if you know how to play the piano,
and you looked at that Peanuts comic, you could play, Hey,
(39:00):
what Schroeder was playing at that time?
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Amazing?
Speaker 2 (39:03):
Isn't that amazing? That's serious accuracy.
Speaker 3 (39:06):
All right, Hey, listen, I got something to pitch. What
this thing is going to be way long? Yeah, So
I say we make this a two parter. Let's take
a break and then maybe come back and talk about
Linus and Snoopy.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
I say, we save Snoopy for part two.
Speaker 3 (39:23):
All Right, we'll take a break, we'll come back, we'll
talk a little bit about Linus, and then I'm sorry everyone,
this is just too robust. We're gonna make this a
two parter, so we'll be right back.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Softy jaw.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Soft, Okay, Chuck, we're back. We were talking about Lucy.
You said she was super mean to Linus, and I
would say that's in part because Linus was Lucy's little brother.
Is Lucy's little brother. I don't know why I'm talking
about them in past tense. They're still very much alive.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean it nails like so
many sibling dynamics. I think while there are older sisters
who are very caring and loving for their youngers, there
are some who are in older siblings period who did
not want that baby around. And from the beginning, Lucy
didn't want a little brother. And in fact, when Sally
(40:34):
Brown came along, Charlie's little sister, Lucy was very jealous
because she said that she wanted a little sister. Oh yeah,
and I'm just like poor Linus, poor guy.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Yeah, well, poor rerun too. They both had a younger brother,
even younger than Linus, named Rerun.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
I wouldn't round for Rerun. When did he come around?
Speaker 2 (40:53):
I don't know. I wish you hadn't asked me that,
But he was around for a while, Okay.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
I think that was maybe after I stopped reading the comic.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
So let's talk about Linus for a second, because a
lot of people consider him some sort of genius or
at least precociously intelligent.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
For sure.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
One of the reasons why is because he frequently cites philosophers.
He's just clearly well read. He loves school. His teacher,
Miss Othmar. He's quoted as saying that she's a gem
among gems, and he can't imagine that she would ever
accept money for teaching because she's just such a purist
and is so talented at being a teacher.
Speaker 3 (41:36):
Like what kids says?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
That right? So yeah. And at the same time, though,
one of the contradictions in terms of Linus is that
he also is far and away the firmest believer in
the Great Pumpkin. And there's a really great strip with
him writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin asking him
to bring him some toys and then at the end
of the letter he says, and by the way, if
(41:59):
you not real, don't tell me because I don't want
to know.
Speaker 3 (42:02):
Yeah. Yeah, it is very sweet that this kid who
talks about philosophy and like the high arts is a
believer in the Great Pumpkin and also very sensitive. He's
he's easily the most sensitive, like kind of purest character
in the Peanuts catalog. I think. Yeah, he's got that
security blanket. And apparently Charles Schultz, if he didn't coin
(42:28):
that term security blanket, he he made it what it
was and popularized it as such as a as something
a child will have, yeah, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (42:36):
Yeah. So the original security blanket was an actual blanket
that you pinned to the crib or the bed so
that your kid couldn't move.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah. It's called super dangerous.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah, and also like torture I think is another word
for it. And then the military and defense sector picked
it up and used it as a metaphor for the
measure and lengths you went to to keep state secret secret.
But it was Charles Schultz who's like, no, this has
has to do with angst and anxiety, and yeah, that's
(43:08):
that's it. Was Lionis who spread the gospel to the
world about security blankets.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Yeah, I called it a woobye earlier, and that is
stolen directly from mister mom Oh, yeah, who I think
originated that term.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Yeah, wooby's a great, great word for it too.
Speaker 3 (43:22):
Yeah, or binkie. I'm not sure who who made that
one up, but binkie's a big one.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
I don't either. I can't even hazard a guess, but
I've heard that one too before. Did you have a blanky?
I had a blanky?
Speaker 3 (43:33):
You had a blanky?
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Yes? Man, that thing was scattered by the time I
gave that up.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
Yeah, I had a pillow. I don't remember if I
had a name for it. But it was this little
kind of like a hand pillow if that's the thing.
It wasn't like a full sized pillow. And I would uh, man,
this is just coming back to me. I would rub
it between my fingers, like over the finger and then
down the little valley between the fingers, over and over
and over. And I will also stick it in my ear.
(44:00):
And I remember this was a white pillow. And this
thing was so disgusting by the time I got rid
of it from like earwax and finger gook that. I
don't mean. My mom certainly would have never said like
it's time for that to leave, but it may have just,
you know, disappeared.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I don't remember I went to go live on a farm.
Speaker 3 (44:18):
Yeah exactly. No, Yeah, with my goat, that's exactly what happened.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
What else you got?
Speaker 3 (44:26):
Well? Nothing, I mean, that's all I got online? Is
I think that's a good robust part one.
Speaker 2 (44:31):
I think so too, So let's start part two in
a minute.
Speaker 3 (44:33):
Okay, sure, reminder to everyone to go out and get
tickets for our live show this year. Yeah, there won't
be any listener mail, so we'll just go in a
live show tour plug. How about that?
Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, so go to stuff youshould know dot com or
link tree, slash sysk and you can get info and tickets.
Yeah that's a great idea, chuck.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah, so don't wrap up an email and spank it
on the bottom. Yet you got to wait, right.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Not yet? Here's the awkward non clapping transition for a
very special two parter.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
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Chuck Bryant
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