The Family Van Pelt Episode 1 - Schulz Tackles a Baby!

It’s a new season on Unpacking Peanuts, as the gang begins a long look at everyone’s favorite venerable grade schoolers: Linus, Lucy, and Rerun Van Pelt. In this first episode, we review the earliest episodes featuring two of Charles Schulz' beloved characters, and the seeds of greatness have already been sown.

Harold interviewed by Ted Koppel: https://youtu.be/DwsY4agO2qs?si=4Gf05kzociyR2cuI Transcript available at UnpackingPeanuts.com

Jimmy’s, Michael’s, and Harold’s books are available at UnpackingPeanuts.com/store.

Unpacking Peanuts is copyright Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz, and Liz Sumner. Produced and edited by Liz Sumner. Music by Michael Cohen. Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark. 

For more from the show follow @unpackpeanuts on Instagram and Threads, and @unpackingpeanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky, and YouTube. For more about Jimmy, Michael, and Harold, visit unpackingpeanuts.com.  

Thanks for listening.

Episode Transcript

VO (00:02):
Welcome to Unpacking Peanuts, the podcast where three cartoonists take an in-depth look at the greatest comic strip of all time, Peanuts by Charles M.
Schulz.

Jimmy (00:18):
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back to the show.
It's a new year here on Unpacking Peanuts, and we are absolutely happy to have you back.
And I'll be your host for the proceedings.
My name is Jimmy Gownley.
And joining me as always are my pals, co-hosts and fellow cartoonist, Michael Cohen.

Michael (00:34):
Say hey.

Jimmy (00:35):
Harold Buchholz.

Harold (00:37):
Hello.

Jimmy (00:38):
And our producer and editor, keeping us out of trouble, Liz Sumner.

Liz (00:41):
Howdy.

Jimmy (00:43):
Today, we are going to discuss the Van Pelts.
This is our new season.
We wrapped up our Understanding Snoopy.
So this is the Family Van Pelt.
I'm excited to talk to you guys about it because I know you guys are very excited about this character.
And by you guys, I mean Michael and Harold.

(01:04):
So tell me, so Harold, starting with you, what are your thoughts on this trio of characters from the Schulz universe?

Harold (01:12):
I guess, I mean, the Family Van Pelt is the family I relate to the most in this strip.
And certainly as a little kid, I've said before Linus was more real to me than my next door neighbor.
When I was growing up, I mean that as a person.
And given that he was a bunch of little dots and lines with Indian ink, that blows me away.

(01:37):
And I think that's been an inspiration to me my whole life as a cartoonist is how did Charles Schulz make this world of this little family so real?
And so it just helped me understand my own life better.
Does that make any sense?
I was, yeah, you know, there are things you go through as a kid, and you don't feel like you have reference points for it because it's just happening to you, but you don't see it necessarily in a neighbor.

(02:06):
You don't see it in your classmates or anything outside of your family.
And so it's just just the actual experience of it.
And there's nothing to give it context or comment on it.
Except to Peanuts.
I mean, Peanuts was the place where I would see things in my life and like, oh, that's kind of where I am.

(02:26):
And I had an older sister by just under two years, Sarah, and she was not a Lucy.
But I said before, I kind of married a Lucy.
So there are all of these amazing dynamics that I find in Peanuts that I totally relate to in the Van Pelt family.

(02:47):
I mean, then you throw in Rerun, and he's an artist.
So it's just crazy how all of these different angles on these characters in this family, I relate to them.
It's helped me understand myself.
I think it's helped me figure out who I should be in my family, who I should be in society, who I should be as an artist.

(03:13):
I mean, it's crazy, but that, I don't think I'm overstating that.
It was super profound.

Jimmy (03:19):
No, I absolutely hear you.
I understand that.
Michael, how about you?

Michael (03:24):
Well, I don't think my thoughts are as profound as Harold's, but that's too big.

Jimmy (03:29):
That goes without saying.

Michael (03:30):
Yeah, it goes without saying.

Jimmy (03:31):
That's why we have Harold, because we have semi-prefound thoughts, and he has actual profound thoughts.

Harold (03:36):
We need somebody pedantic.

Michael (03:38):
Yeah, well, you got me.

Jimmy (03:40):
What do you say profound?

Michael (03:43):
Yeah, going back over these early strips, which we're going to be doing in this episode, I decided to cut it off with the first time Linus actually speaks.
What's interesting for me is when people talk about peanuts, especially in the 50s, they talk about how it's children using sophisticated adult language, which is true, which is no one ever did before.

(04:13):
But here we have a sequence of strips where there is almost no language.
Linus is a baby and this is the first time we've seen Schulz tackle a baby.
You'll see that Lucy comes in already.

Harold (04:28):
Different term.

Michael (04:32):
Yeah, he's attacking the babies.
What can I say about this guy?

Harold (04:36):
I think he's got the title of this episode.

Jimmy (04:40):
Schulz tackles the babes.

Michael (04:43):
Anyway, we'll see Lucy.
She's still a baby, but she's probably like two, I'm guessing, when we first see her.
But we're seeing Linus, he's completely non-verbal and he's able to create what seems like a fairly well-rounded character without using words at all.

(05:06):
I think most strips coming along when they're starting out this strong would stick with Linus' baby because time has no meaning in these strips because he's getting a lot out of it.
But no, this period lasts like a year.
So you'll see all of that, or not all of it tonight, but mostly picking strips that we haven't discussed.

(05:33):
So this is new for us.
We haven't talked about most of these strips before.
Yeah, you'll see Lucy assuming a sister role, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
But she's not just a bystander to this.

(05:54):
She's actively playing a role in helping this little kid get along in the world.

Harold (06:01):
Yeah.
Jimmy, can you think of a comic strip where, I mean, it has to be comic strips because I mean, you could also think of TV shows and things that have families, but those people grow, right?
I guess it could be animated, but can you think of a comic where the relative ages of child characters move the way they do in peanuts?

(06:25):
No.

Jimmy (06:26):
I remember someone describing it in some other cartoonist, I think in Comics Journal, like just saying how strange it is they're born as babies and then age to roughly Charlie Brown's age and then just stop.
It's such an idiosyncratic thing.
It could only happen in a con.
Well, you know what actually it makes me think of?

(06:47):
Like family ties.
I remember the mom had a baby at the season finale of family ties, and the next season they come back and he's like six.

Harold (06:57):
Okay.
There's an example.
Yeah, or the kids are just aging out of a family show and they had Cousin Oliver.

Jimmy (07:05):
By the way, huge fan of Cousin Oliver.
I was the Cousin Oliver of my family, the younger kid, only child.

Harold (07:15):
Cousin Oliver spoke to you.
He was more real to you than your ex-daughter.

Jimmy (07:18):
He was more real to me than my actual cousins.

Liz (07:22):
And then Ernie and my three sons, he was the fourth son.

Michael (07:27):
I liked Ernie.
The TV can handle perpetually aged kids.
I mean, it's a real problem with having kid characters in the series.

Liz (07:36):
Yeah.

Jimmy (07:37):
It's even a problem really for animated shows because they have to keep getting new voices and stuff.
When I was doing the, if you're a Patreon of ours, if you join our Patreon, every once in a while, I hop on the microphone and just watch a Peanuts cartoon and chat about it.
There is no insight into the process, so you will not be a better person, but you'll have hung out with me for a half hour.

(08:01):
But I was watching, You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown.
And for whatever reason, you know, our pal Duncan, who we've had in the show, he's Charlie Brown in that show and he's doing a great job.
And then they just splice in the aug from the original Charlie Brown.

SPEAKER_2 (08:16):
Oh.

Jimmy (08:18):
And it's so obviously the wrong, it's a different voice, but I guess no one noticed, cared or whatever.
But I think it was just so iconic, they couldn't get a new kid to do the sound again.

SPEAKER_2 (08:31):
Hmm.

Michael (08:33):
Interesting.
Well, there were a few baby characters in comic books anyway.
Franklin.
Sugar and Spike and Baby Huey.
Yeah.
In that case, they just totally ignored the fact that kids grow up pretty quick.
But I really think, looking back on these, especially these early Lucy strips that I think he was seeing what his kids were doing and saying.

(09:03):
I think a lot of these are more like journals about the kids growing up rather than him creating.

Harold (09:11):
Yeah, it's interesting.
Yeah, they're growing up with whatever he's experiencing and then he locks it in.

Michael (09:18):
Yeah.
So he really nails, especially with the early Lucy's, which I don't particularly like because she doesn't quite have the personality yet.
But it's just very, very kid-like.
The humor really comes from, yep, that's what these little kids are like.
Rather than any brilliance, brilliant writing.

Jimmy (09:41):
Well, observation can be its own type of brilliance, I would imagine.
Now, we talked about a lot, and I think, I don't know if we talked about a lot.
We talked about it somewhat though, and other places have mentioned that Lucy, in particular, could have been inspired by his oldest daughter, Meredith.
I wonder if then you could extrapolate and say, do you think his oldest son, Monty, would possibly be an inspiration for Linus?

Michael (10:11):
Well, does it work age-wise?

Jimmy (10:14):
Yeah, roughly, yeah.

Harold (10:15):
Well, she was born in February of 1950, Meredith.
So that's about eight months before the strip debuts, and then he's working four weeks in advance.
So that's nine months when he starts the strip.
And, of course, Lucy doesn't show up until when, Michael?

Liz (10:37):
It looks like 52, early 52.

Michael (10:39):
Yeah, so that works out pretty good.

Harold (10:41):
Okay, yeah, you got a toddler, a two-year-old, around the time he chooses to add Lucy, which is, yeah, that's interesting.

Liz (10:50):
Do we know from interviews the personality of Monty?

Jimmy (10:55):
Well, he's an artist.
He's published several novels.
I've only seen him from interviews.
He seems like a thoughtful, nice guy.
I could definitely see that.
Doesn't look like he was dropped on his head like Linus.
That's good.
This is all high-minded and wonderful, the psychology and Schulz bringing in characters and aging them in certain ways.

(11:15):
What I want to know is who dropped Linus on his head to give him that dent.
That is what I want to know.
Of all the weird character design things, the shape of Linus' head has baffled me since I was a child.

Harold (11:29):
Well, that would mean that Rerun had to have been dropped on his head, too, right?

Jimmy (11:33):
Well, again, this will be what we get into in this family.
What's going on with the dad there?
Because of my dad, the first time he took me to the park when I was a kid, let me go up on the sliding board and I fell off and landed on my head.

Michael (11:45):
Oh, no.

Jimmy (11:47):
So I assume it's a similar situation.
I guess everybody could have guessed there was some sort of head injury for me.

Harold (11:55):
Well, okay.
So Monty is born almost exactly two years after Lucy.
So I think she's born on like the 5th of February, 1950.
He's the 1st of February, 1952.

Jimmy (12:08):
Wow.

Harold (12:09):
So yeah, it kind of kind of lines up, right?

Jimmy (12:12):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And it plays into what Michael's saying is that he is doing this as a form of almost diary writing or observation at least.

Harold (12:21):
Yeah.
I mean, how could you not?
You're doing a strip on kids and you've got kids and they're right in that sweet spot.
Or you make them in that sweet spot by introducing them because they weren't there before.
This makes sense, yeah.

Jimmy (12:33):
One of the questions I sort of have about this is, you're asking about the, have you ever seen anybody else do ages like this in a comic?
Can you think of antecedents for these two particular characters at all?
There are plenty of sad sacks in comics.

(12:54):
So making a sad sack a little boy, that's an innovation.
Obviously, Charlie Brown becomes a brilliant character in the soul of the strip, but you can see there have been characters like that before.
There's been wild dogs in kid strips before, going back to Skippy and whatever.

(13:16):
But Linus and Lucy together, they're way more modern and they don't to me, seem like they have such an obvious antecedent.
What do you guys think?

Michael (13:28):
I can't think of sister, brother, little kid combos.
I don't know.

Jimmy (13:34):
Or even just as individual characters, forget them as a duo.
I don't think there's a character like Lucy in comics before Lucy, and I don't think there's a character like Linus before Linus.

Michael (13:46):
Yeah, probably.

Harold (13:46):
Yeah.
They feel suburban.
By that, I mean that, given where the world was going at this time, that you would have a middle class that is doing as well as it was, say, in the United States in the early 50s.
You've got, they're not, you know, typically characters like this that had the things they had access to in the past would have been the upper crust.

(14:14):
And usually be making fun of them or having to put all these layers of aristocracy and stuff on top of that.

Michael (14:21):
Kids are not working in the mill when they hit age three.

Harold (14:25):
Right, right.
They're just like right in the middle of this American experience in the 50s.
And they're living it out where they don't, yeah, they're not, exactly, they're not working in the mills.
They're not working on the farm.
They are kids who are, you know, jumping rope and going to school.

(14:46):
And they are, there's not danger around, there's not a lot of death around them.
It just is a different vibe that is kind of unique for this era.

Michael (14:57):
Well, we're talking about a fairly prosperous era.
Now we're talking, I don't know what the Van Pelt parents do.
We can speculate.
But for a barber to have his own suburban house was possible.

Jimmy (15:09):
Right.

Harold (15:10):
Yeah.

Jimmy (15:10):
Right.

Harold (15:12):
Yeah.
And so you got, you got, and you said, you know, Charlie Brown, the sad sack takes a while to become the sad sack in some ways.
And sometimes you say it was there from his first strip.
Yeah.
But Lucy, yeah, Lucy is, yeah, there's so many words we could use.
I'm sure we'll come up with some for Lucy, but she is, she is unique.

(15:33):
And I think one of the cool things about Lucy is you can't just put one or two words on her.
She is complex and things I think that would have been judged and made fun of or squashed in a strip, the things that she had as a female character, Schulz doesn't do that.

(15:54):
And I think that's incredibly unique.
It doesn't draw attention to itself that she's a strong female character.
Usually if you saw a strong female character, which there were certainly plenty of them.
But the whole point was, look, this is a strong female character.
This is the typist who can get everything done.
This is the flapper who can run a household.

(16:16):
And in a certain way, it's like, this is a type and I'm selling you a type so that you can experience vicariously this type of character.

Jimmy (16:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Harold (16:26):
And she's not that.

Michael (16:27):
I'm wondering, I don't know it from the newspaper, but I know it from comics, so Little Lulu seems the closest.

Harold (16:33):
Yeah, that's a great call.

Michael (16:36):
Kids, you know, it seems suburban.
It seems like there's a little gang of kids who, you know, have adventures together.
But I don't remember any sibling interactions.

Harold (16:50):
Yeah, she had her cousin was an Alvin.
And then, of course, Nancy, you know, Nancy feels slightly more urban, but also it really is a suburban feel to it.

Michael (17:02):
I don't want to talk about Nancy.
Little Lulu, yes.
Now, there's a little girl, Little Lulu has a little girl companion, Andy, Annie or something.
But I don't think it's a relative.

Harold (17:17):
No, I think she babysits sometimes.

Michael (17:19):
Okay.
Anyway.

Harold (17:20):
I don't know.
I'm not an expert on Little Lulu.
But yeah, I do agree.
Those are two examples, I think, that absolutely are coming before what we're seeing here in Peanuts that you could make a connection to.

Jimmy (17:34):
You know, I think it's interesting that Peanuts is having such a cultural moment with Gen Z.
But the thing that Gen Z gravitates to the most is Snoopy.
And I don't think it's just because Snoopy's, you know, an icon, a cute icon.
I think Snoopy sits at a keyboard at his house and fantasizes.

(17:56):
You know?
And like the world of Peanuts.
I mean, I know this from Amelia, talking to, you know, kids who are now in their 20s or whatever, who had Amelia.
Even Amelia felt like a fantasy to them.
Just kids running around in the neighborhood, wildly free to do whatever they want.
That, this, none of this exists anymore.

(18:19):
So even if you had, like, there's an element, I think of it, that in real world childhood of this period, you could go out and become a Linus on your own or become a Lucy, as opposed to being shuttled from event to event where you're becoming just occupied.
You know, your time is being occupied, you're doing your thing, but you're not exploring freely the world, your peers and yourself.

Harold (18:47):
Yeah, it was interesting you say that about Snoopy, that, you know, Snoopy is the one who, it's mostly in his head, or you could argue it's mostly in his head.
And, you know, if you, your free moments that you have are, you know, online or, you know, just you in your room drawing or whatever you might be doing, reading, you know, that's the life I relate to.

(19:10):
But I think, yeah, it's true that there seems to be less agency for kids to just do their own thing, especially if it means, I mean, you could do your own thing inside the house, right?

Jimmy (19:22):
Yeah.

Harold (19:22):
You know, you probably have the freedom a lot of kids do.
But in terms of pulling together a whole gang of kids from the neighborhood to do something, that seems to be a little less common, a lot less common, I guess.

Jimmy (19:37):
Yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, like I talked about in the show, where we would just have, you know, two week long or a week long rather doubles tennis tournaments in Gerardville just organized by the kids and be like 20 kids playing.
That's never, it's unimaginable.

Harold (19:54):
I think something that's super indicative of that, you know, you look at how kids have engaged with music over the last 80, 100 years, you know, back in the 30s or 40s, you try to join a big band, right?
And who started that?
How did that happen?
You try, you want to be part of something, then rock and roll comes along and everyone wants to form a band.

(20:17):
Now you look at, it's like if you have a band, it's been organized by somebody and some company owns a K-pop group or whatever, it's like, who's creating a band from the band members?
And they're sticking together and moving around.
It happens, but it's all these solo people, because people don't have the opportunities to work together.

Liz (20:38):
But solo people can create all the instruments on their devices.
They don't need a band, they are the band, they can create the band.

Harold (20:46):
Right.
Which also means the personality that comes out of having a five-member group.
And each of them putting something in, so that it feels rounded in a way that it's just a different experience.
It's all these personalities finding a way to work together.
You don't get that in the single person, figuring out how to do the drums and figuring out how to do the backing tracks for themselves.

Michael (21:11):
Now we're sounding like a bunch of old farts.

Liz (21:13):
Yeah, we really are.

Jimmy (21:13):
We are, though, but let me just end with one thing.
I know that feeling, though, just the difference between this podcast and the podcast I do on my substack, gvillcomics.substack.com.
But because there's just a limit to one person.
There just has to be.

(21:35):
I know what I know and I can do the things I can do.
But when I'm doing my podcast alone and I stop talking, there's nobody to pick it up and take it to the next thing, to the next place or the next insight.

Michael (21:47):
Yeah.

Jimmy (21:49):
Okay.
Well, with that prelude said, let's get into looking at some of these strips.
Starting, like Michael said, with good old Lucy.
This is March 3rd, 1952.
Charlie Brown is sitting on the curb playing with a little toy truck.
And from off panel, we hear someone saying, one, one, one.

(22:11):
And this captures Charlie Brown's curiosity.
And we cut to the second panel, where we see it's Lucy, who's skipping rope, saying, one, one, one.
And she's a toddler at this point.
Charlie Brown yells out to her, two Lucy, two.
And then we see Lucy continuing to skip rope saying, two, two, two.

(22:35):
Yeah, this is the earliest version of Lucy.
We got the big saucer eyes.
She's just trying to figure out her way.

Michael (22:43):
She really looks totally baffled.

Jimmy (22:48):
That last panel?

Michael (22:49):
Well, all at this early, this was the first Lucy, but yeah, for six months, she was just this really baffled kid.
She didn't have any clue what was going on.

Liz (23:03):
But Charlie Brown knows who she is.

Michael (23:06):
Yeah.
I think Schulz might have tried a few other introductions that didn't make it to the page.

Harold (23:14):
Yeah, the saucer-eyed Lucy is.

Jimmy (23:17):
Yes, the saucer-eyes.
He has not gotten to the point where he knows his iconic poses, well, because it's two years into the strip.
I think there's a real awkwardness to the drawing of Lucy's body in the lounge panel that works great because it's a little kid who doesn't know what's going on.
He's just trying to learn how to skip rope or whatever.

(23:40):
But later when you think of some of those stunning rope skipping panels with the rope spinning around them and the feet not even visible, they're just strokes of the pen like from Snoopy when he's dancing.
He's a long way from that at this point.

Harold (23:58):
Yeah.
It feels much more grounded in a reality.
There is a look of awkwardness.
Although I will say she looks like she got at least nine skips in this four-panel strip from what we can tell.

Michael (24:14):
At this point, I don't think there's a character there.
There's just maybe the daughter, the two-year-old daughter just had these glazed eyes or something.
It was just like a visual joke.

Harold (24:30):
Yeah, it's almost like she is this kind of, not a blank slate, but she's, you know, she's...
She's a baby.
She's a baby, yeah.
We don't know what's going to come out yet.

Jimmy (24:43):
Well, 21 days later, we're getting an inkling because on March 24th, 1952, Lucy is in her crib.
She's just about ready.
She's in her feety jammies.
She's getting ready to go to sleep, and she calls off panel, night, night, daddy.
She's sitting there with her little teddy bear.
She then quite happily picks up the teddy bear, and then throws him out of the crib and yells, daddy, and then leaning over the rails of her crib, yells, I want my teddy bear.

Liz (25:16):
That feels real.

Jimmy (25:17):
Oh, my daughter, Anna, had a stuffed toy, has a stuffed toy named Callie, an octopus, and this was her go-to move when she didn't want to go to sleep.
Eventually, we have to tie Callie's tentacles to the railings.

Harold (25:37):
I love the big smile that she has at the first panel.
She knows exactly what she's going to do, because she's going to get to see daddy the second time.
That's really sweet.
She's singing to herself, humming to herself as she goes pick up the big stuff, the bear.

Jimmy (25:56):
Well, in the first three panels in a way, especially one and two.
What do you think of the saucer eyes just as a character design, just purely visually?

Michael (26:06):
I don't like it.

Liz (26:07):
The eyes are disturbing.

Michael (26:09):
Yeah, it is disturbing.
Yeah, I don't think it's good look.
I'm glad it went away.
It makes me nervous.

Jimmy (26:14):
Well, I think it really doesn't look peanuts-y.

Michael (26:20):
No.

Harold (26:22):
I mean, I guess if it had gone on for 50 years, we would have said it was.
But I would think most people would say, I prefer when they turn into the little parentheses rather than the full circles and that they're just floating right in the middle of the eyes.
It really does suggest this kind of wide-eyed, I don't know if it's innocence or what it is, but it's, yeah.

Jimmy (26:49):
Now, I wonder, now that you mentioned that, we've talked before that the Van Pelt, Linus and Lucy and Rerun, all have those parentheses on the sides of their eyes that gives them that sort of perpetually worried look.
Other characters in the strip get that when it's an emotion, it either reflects anxiety or something like that.

(27:12):
Do you think it comes from the evolution of him losing the eyes, the circle around the eyes rather, and just tweaking it to be on the side?

Harold (27:25):
Well, take a look at the second panel of this.
That looks, he does not complete the line of the eye because he wants the pupil to be floating and you draw your eye into it where it's not touching anything.
And that is so close to the later Lucy.
There's a little more arc over the eye to suggest the angle of the eye.

(27:48):
I don't even know what the parenthesis is supposed to represent to them in terms of anything physical in an actual person versus somebody else in some other family in the strip.
I don't know why they look like that except maybe it just evolved out of cutting down the circle too.

Jimmy (28:11):
I never thought of it before but I think it today.

Harold (28:14):
Yeah and it's weird, I mean look at the teddy bear.
It's got the same look on the second panel.
It's got those wide eyes with the circles around them.
Yeah, it's almost like, yeah, there's a, I can't find the right word for it but yeah, there's a simplicity and a purity to this little baby and that's going to go away but Lucy had a look.

(28:41):
And I guess we could go back and we could, you know, when does it change?
That's when you probably can find the panel when you have a head on version of it and all of a sudden the circles are gone.

Jimmy (28:52):
Yeah, well, shocking new one was just by May which is when our next trip is going to be, they're gone.

Michael (28:57):
Yeah, no, they're gone.
It was a very short period but by the way, before we leave this trip, look at the signature.

Liz (29:03):
Yeah, yeah, daddy.

Jimmy (29:06):
Oh, that is neat.
I did not notice that.
So wow, that is definitely just for Meredith really.

Harold (29:17):
So sweet.

Jimmy (29:18):
That's amazing.
Boy, babies are hard to draw.
If you really start looking at Lucy in that first panel, just like really stare at it for a while.

Liz (29:33):
I don't want to.

Jimmy (29:35):
Yeah, it looks more like a doll than a child.

Harold (29:39):
Yes, definitely.
Wow, you think that's the one strip that Schultz didn't sign Schultz in the History of Peanuts?
It might be.
That's cool.

Michael (29:50):
Good thing we're looking real close.

Jimmy (29:52):
Real close.
Good catch.
May 14th, here is a really rare eight panel daily strip.
He has taken the four traditional panels that he's given as his space saver strip size and he's divided each of them in half vertically.

(30:12):
So what it is, is Lucy building a tower out of some building blocks.
And in the first four panels, she builds them up to a quite high tower, almost up to her forehead in height.
And she stands up there and then by panel five, she just kicks it over into a million pieces.
Looks absolutely delighted and then starts over again.

(30:35):
And I believe we're meant to believe that the cycle just continues.

Michael (30:40):
Well, the bit, the sigh is really unusual.
What is she happy about?
Is she happy that she built it or she's happy that she was able to destroy it?

Liz (30:51):
It's complete.
It is now ready to be kicked.

Jimmy (30:55):
Yes, exactly.
That's what I think.
Yeah, she's satisfied that she has done the work part, so now she can have fun.
By knocking it over.

Liz (31:05):
Yeah.

Michael (31:06):
Okay.
This is a hint of her personality.

Liz (31:09):
Yeah, definitely.

Harold (31:10):
For sure.

Michael (31:11):
Torn between the urge to destroy and the urge to create.

Jimmy (31:15):
Yeah, that's a very famous Lucy Stryff, right?

Harold (31:21):
Yeah.
This also rings very true to me.
One of the things that's a little bit odd about this is that as she's stacking her blocks, she has two different sizes of blocks.
And so she looks like she's alternating them as she's...
So, I mean, that's not what I would typically see if someone was just thinking of the idea, all of the blocks would be the same size.

Jimmy (31:44):
Right.

Harold (31:45):
It's like, Meredith maybe had two sets, I'm just guessing here.
And one was bigger than the other, and you play with both of them, and you just combine them into your toolkit of things you could do.
So that's why this one kind of also feels like, oh, this might have come from observation.

Jimmy (32:05):
So, yeah, I can see that.

Liz (32:07):
Is she coming?
She had a little note in the last strip, too.
Is she just sort of making music to herself with her?

Jimmy (32:17):
Yeah.
So I think just, that kind of thing.

Michael (32:21):
There's no one to talk to.

SPEAKER_2 (32:22):
Yeah.

Harold (32:24):
I'm so happy.
Now, this is a very, very cute Lucy.
That first panel and the second panel, in particular, in the last panel are just...
And when she's happy standing over the pile of blocks, she's just knocked over.
It's a very appealing character at this point.
And you go back and you look at Lucy just from a little bit earlier.

(32:48):
He's come a long way in making a really appealing design.

Jimmy (32:53):
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And she has a classic early peanuts look right now.

Harold (32:59):
Now, this is all from the side.
And so we just see the parentheses around.
He's taken the arch that's kind of over the eye, the way we saw earlier when we saw the side of Lucy that was not a complete circle.
And now it's just the parentheses instead of almost a complete cartoony, you know, Bugs Bunny style oval.

(33:25):
And it looks really good.

Jimmy (33:27):
Yeah, it does look really good.
Any inklings at this point?
What do you think the parents are doing?
We have no clues yet.
Nothing, no clues that can point us to what's going on with these kids.

Michael (33:41):
Do we ever get clues?

Jimmy (33:43):
I don't think we ever hear a mention in 50 years of what either of the parents do for a living.
Although, what did we decide?
Like psychiatrist and college professor?
Is that what we decided?

Liz (33:56):
Yes, or two psychologists and two professors maybe.

Jimmy (33:59):
That makes sense.

Harold (34:00):
They're both working parents.
Yeah, that's the vibe.
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, and it does seem in really early on, there's not a whole lot of these references, but when you do, it seems like, yeah, she's a daddy's girl.

Liz (34:18):
We're all daddy's girls.

Harold (34:21):
When she's relating to the mom or the dad, I'm trying to think of, are there strips that we can think of where she's somehow responding to her mom or reacting to her mom, you know, what that dynamic is like?
Yeah.

Jimmy (34:37):
Yeah, I mean, we definitely hear, you know, mom giving orders now and again through Lucy.
So we'll have to be aware of that.

Harold (34:46):
So maybe a, you know, strong, strong mom.

Jimmy (34:51):
Yeah.

Harold (34:52):
Maybe daddy's the pushover who will come in.
She knows that she calls her mom to get the teddy bear.

Jimmy (34:57):
Yeah.
Not going to happen.
Yeah.
Oh, well, dad's obviously always going to be the pushover, especially then because the mom has been dealing with Lucy all day.

Harold (35:10):
Right.
Right.

Jimmy (35:12):
She's not interested in picking up this stuffed animal.

Harold (35:15):
She knows the game.

Jimmy (35:16):
Yes.
September 19th, 1952.
Charlie Brown is sitting there reading.
Is this the first appearance of the book that Charlie Brown never finishes?
He's sitting there reading this book and Lucy comes over and says, my baby brother can sit up.
Charlie Brown follows Lucy off and he says, really?

(35:38):
All by himself?
Then they run through the gate to Lucy's house as Lucy says, almost.
I only had to prop him up a little bit.
Then Linus is sitting there.
Charlie Brown sees him and Linus is in fact sitting up in his diapers, but he is propped up by a series of boards nailed into the ground that is keeping him sitting upright.

Harold (36:00):
That's disturbing.
Those nails.

Jimmy (36:02):
It really always bothered me as a kid.

Harold (36:05):
Yeah.

Liz (36:06):
But he's happy.

Jimmy (36:07):
I could feel the raw wood up against Linus.

Harold (36:10):
Yeah.

Jimmy (36:12):
Now we notice he hasn't been dropped yet.

Liz (36:16):
But it's the back of his head, right?

Jimmy (36:19):
No, it's the top.
It dents in on that.

Harold (36:23):
That is the fullest head of hair I've ever seen on Linus too.
That's a lot of hair.
It's okay.
The new baby in the house, around the time this was drawn, would have been six months old.

Liz (36:35):
We have the right eyeballs now.

Harold (36:37):
Yeah.
Linus never has the round eyeballs, does he?
He immediately got the little parentheses.

Michael (36:47):
Yeah.
It looks like Schulz didn't want to bother with a little baby on his own again.
He did it.
There's probably not a whole lot of material there until the kid becomes active.

Jimmy (37:02):
Unless you're focusing on the pan.

Michael (37:04):
He's skipped the tiny baby phase.

Jimmy (37:08):
Yeah.
Because in strips like Baby Blues or whatever, so much of it is the parents dealing with the little baby.
Because the little baby, unless you're going to do like Trixie in High and Lowess or something where you can listen to the baby's thoughts somehow.
Right.

Liz (37:26):
How about Sally?
How old is she when she appears?

Jimmy (37:31):
Oh, a baby.
Her birth happens in the strip.

Liz (37:35):
But do we see her any younger than Linus is here?

Jimmy (37:42):
At least this age.
She's in a stroller, Charlie Brown's pushing her around, and he's not able to play in the baseball game.
I'm only six months old and already I have guilt feeling.

Harold (37:57):
Yeah.
It is interesting that with Linus and Lucy, you don't get some of the accoutrements that you get with Sally.
Like you said, the pacifier and bonnet and a stroller.
It's almost like the Van Pelt adults don't believe in those things for children.

Jimmy (38:16):
Yeah.
The kid is sitting here in his diaper held up by two by fours.

Michael (38:20):
Yeah.
Well, he's sitting on the ground outside.

Jimmy (38:22):
Outside.

Michael (38:23):
Which is weird.
You wouldn't let a baby do that.

Jimmy (38:27):
No.
Not traditionally, no.

Michael (38:29):
Yeah.
But here we have Lucy trying to help.
I mean, it's bizarre.

Jimmy (38:35):
Yeah.

Michael (38:35):
But she is trying to help him.

Harold (38:37):
Those nails to me, I don't know if Lucy put them in there or these are just rejected or the nails are just loose and dangerous.
And I love that Schulz adds that to the look because it does feel a little dangerous for Linus to have Lucy as his big sister.

Jimmy (38:59):
Well, it's funny too because Linus is just happy sitting there, but he could have looked concerned.

Liz (39:05):
Charlie Brown looks a little concerned.

Jimmy (39:07):
Yeah, he does.
Yeah, he could be looking at Charlie Brown like, get me out of here.

Harold (39:11):
But he's not, he's happy.
Which suggests at this early point that the Van Pelt kids are a little clueless and a little, you know, you're on the edge here with them because they will do things that maybe wouldn't happen.

Jimmy (39:30):
Lucy remains clueless.
All that changes is her, well, it doesn't even change.
She just becomes more and more confident.
I don't know if you've noticed in the world, but you can be quite clueless.
As long as you're a confident loudmouth, you can go pretty far.

SPEAKER_2 (39:51):
Yep.

Liz (39:54):
We could take a break now, by the way.

Harold (39:57):
Perfect.

Jimmy (39:57):
All right.

Harold (39:58):
Let's see if we can do that.

Liz (40:01):
Hi, everyone.
Thank you for listening and engaging with us.
Your appreciation makes this effort a real pleasure.
Now, we're asking that you support our work.
If you enjoy the show, we hope you'll join us on Patreon as a contributor.
Those of you who count, for whatever reason, that's okay.
We've been there.
We're glad you're here.

(40:22):
Thank you for being an essential part of Unpacking Peanuts.

Jimmy (40:30):
We are back.
All right, Liz.
We're hanging out in the mailbox.
Do we have anything?

Liz (40:34):
We do.
We heard from a couple of people.
Regular contributor Aaron Foringer sends us a link from Laughing Squid that says it's ranking the Peanuts characters by impact.
His comment in the e-mail is that it's more Peanuts characters defined because it doesn't really do any ranking, but I can post it so others can weigh in.

Jimmy (40:58):
All right, cool.
Thank you very much for that.

Liz (41:02):
Patrick McMullen writes, hello to the Unpacking Peanuts gang.
First, I just wanted to thank you all for the thoughtful and fun exploration of Peanuts.
It's definitely made me appreciate the masterpiece that Schulz created even more so than I already did.
I've been particularly loving the Spotlight series on Snoopy.

(41:24):
I'm definitely of the belief that he is the greatest comic character of all time.
My wife and I particularly love a Snoopy scene outside of the comic strip.
It's from the Great Pumpkin cartoon when Schroeder is kind of piano playing with Snoopy's emotions to the point that Snoopy lets loose a sorrowful howl and then is immediately embarrassed by his instinctual reaction.

(41:49):
We howl with laughter every time we watch it.

Jimmy (41:53):
Awesome.

Liz (41:54):
Just curious if you all have any favorite non-comic strip Snoopy moments or maybe this will be explored in a future episode.
Thanks again for such a great podcast.

Jimmy (42:07):
Oh, thank you for writing and you're welcome for the podcast.

Harold (42:11):
Yeah, thank you.
For me, the Christmas special always comes to mind.
We were watching a lot of it.
You know how you watch the reaction video of someone watching something for the first time?
That's always, it's absolutely irresistible.

(42:31):
There's something you love and you know someone's going to watch it and fall in love with it and you get to watch them fall in love with it.
I can't help but watch those things.
So we watched some people watching the Charlie Brown Christmas.
So you see little clips of it, often without the sound or like it's just a little, so they don't get shut down by YouTube.
It is really, there's so many adorable Snoopy moments.

(42:54):
The one where he's listening to the piano and getting into the music, and he just turns super joyful and starts dancing and dancing and dancing, and then Schroder stops and Snoopy realizes that all eyes are now focused on him disapprovingly and then he shrinks down, slinks away.

(43:16):
It's so great animation that there's so many beautiful animated versions of Snoopy in that Charlie Brown Christmas when he's skating on the ice.
That's the stuff that I remember of Snoopy that's not from the strip itself.

Jimmy (43:33):
I like it when he's in the hospital bed reading Play Dog.
You're a good sport, Charlie Brown.
Made me laugh at five, made me laugh at 53.

Liz (43:48):
That's pretty funny.
Deb Perry, super listener Deb Perry writes, listening to your latest understanding Snoopy episode and flipping through various Peanuts collections, Snoopy does seem to have had more design changes than the rest of the Peanuts cast.
Yet in a way, each of them is suited to the role Snoopy is playing in the strip in a given time period.

(44:11):
Cute little puppy Snoopy from the earliest strips wouldn't have worked as the vulture, the World War I flying ace or the world famous grocery clerk.
If you sat puppy Snoopy down in front of a typewriter, you wouldn't get a cliche filled novel, you'd get a paw print.
As much as I liked Snoopy as we know him now, I still have a soft spot for Snoopy's early years.

(44:34):
The early Snoopy would have made a cute little golden book character.
I've enjoyed reading the Snoopy little puppy.
You probably could work up some sort of kids picture book from those early Snoopy strips, although it would probably feel a bit dated.
Maybe I could send the idea along to Peanuts worldwide.

Jimmy (44:54):
Do it, Debbie.

SPEAKER_2 (44:55):
That's the thing, man.

Jimmy (44:57):
You got to keep pitching.
That's what it's all about these days.

Liz (45:02):
Jason Bullitt writes, I'm writing this email on the 60th anniversary of the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
This is my favorite Christmas slash holiday special of all time.
I watched it so much as a child, I was able to commit Linus' speech at the end to memory.
I later found out it was also the first Bible passage I memorized, Luke 2, 8-14.

(45:27):
Happy holidays to all, and be of good cheer, Jason.

Harold (45:30):
Oh, be of good cheer, Jason.
Isn't it funny, you know, that and then that's and it's Linus who has, I can't memorize these lines and here Linus helps you memorize them.

Jimmy (45:41):
There you go.

Liz (45:43):
That's it for the mail.

Jimmy (45:44):
We heard some stuff on the hotline.
We heard from super listener Jim Meyer who wrote and requested an all Woodstock season.
This came in before our Snoopy and Woodstock episode.
So I'm not sure, maybe a little went a long way.
But yeah, we're all Woodstock fans here.
Do you think you could do a whole season though on Woodstock guys?

Liz (46:05):
We could try.
I would enjoy trying.

Harold (46:09):
Yeah.
Well, if we threw in the Beagle Scouts and Harry's seven-minute frosting, maybe we could.

Jimmy (46:16):
We heard from super listener Captain Billy, who also says Ray Snoopy part 5 that he hopes the next phase of the show will be the 10-part Unpacking Shermie.

Harold (46:28):
That might be a little more challenging.
Yeah.
He never had seven-minute frosting.

Liz (46:34):
Fun-sized Shermie.

Jimmy (46:37):
So if you guys want to reach out to us, we would love to hear from you.
You can e-mail us.
We're unpackingpeanuts at gmail.com.
Sign up for the great Peanuts reread over there on unpackingpeanuts.com.
And if you want to leave a voicemail or text us, you can do that at 717-219-4162.

(46:58):
But like Captain Billy did here, you got to remember to identify yourself.
Otherwise, I won't know who you are.

Harold (47:05):
Well, there's some big news in the peanuts world in recent weeks.

Jimmy (47:10):
Oh, right?

Harold (47:11):
Yeah.
So Sony bought a bigger steak in peanuts.
What does that mean?
That's not the easiest thing to answer.
But they bought a 41% steak.
So the family, the Schulz family, owns 20%.

(47:34):
And that's been set aside.
And kind of the understanding was they would contain 20% of peanuts as a business, I guess you could say, right?
And they also have certain approvals that I think the family has to be involved in, even though they own a minority share.
Previously, Sony had owned 39% of peanuts.

(47:58):
And they bought that in 2018 for $185 million.
So, this gives you an idea of what's happened to the value of peanuts in the last, what, seven years, right?
So, peanuts, as we know, stopped as a strip in the year 2000.
And a lot of things, they kind of slowly lose value over time.

(48:22):
And other things seem to just build it as an iconic part of culture and it just seems to grow.
And that's what's happened with peanuts.
So, for $185 million, they bought 39% of peanuts.
This time, in 2018, they bought, what was this, the $457 million dollars.

(48:42):
So, what is that?
That's like two and a half times, more or less, what they paid the first time around to be owners.
And it's interesting, you know, you think about Wildbrain was the company that owned it before.
Now, Wildbrain owns, like, outright strawberry shortcake and teletubbies.
And what they were saying on the Wildbrain side is, we sold this off because as licensing companies, it's a lot easier for us not to have to deal with partners.

(49:11):
Well, that might, of course, the 20% Schulz thing.
It kind of is referred to obliquely here.
The idea that it's not that they can do whatever they want with, you know, strawberry shortcake and they don't need somebody to approve it.
And so, they were saying, we can make a whole lot more money off of something we own completely than it's something that we have to share with others.

(49:32):
So, they were, they got a nice profit, sold it off.
Sony was originally an electronics company and it's a Japanese company.
So, now a Japanese company owns 80% of peanuts.
And, you know, they've been really heavily investing.
And, you know, if you think of what everyone's trying to do, they're trying to grab on to the biggest IP that you can since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of new IP being created now because everyone's so fractured.

(50:00):
So, it's like Marvel was, you know, was bought by Disney, Star Wars, you know.
It just seemed like everyone was trying to kind of grab as much of the remaining culture that everybody has in common from a common time when there were as many versions of media out there.
Now, Sony has doubled essentially their ownership in Peanuts.

(50:23):
And it's going to be, I don't expect much of anything to change.
Apparently, there's a Peanuts movie that's in the works that Wildbrain, the previous owners, had helped make happen.
Maybe it's going to be straight to streaming.

Michael (50:35):
I don't know.

Harold (50:36):
But I think that stuff's going to continue to happen.
I don't know that we're going to see much else that changes with Sony kind of just being the majority owner now because 20% owners for the Schulz family, that doesn't change whatever input they probably had with two companies.
Now, they just have it with one.
I'm hoping that won't affect anything as far as them being happy with the brand that they're shepherding.

Jimmy (51:02):
Hey, look, I'm a simple small town cartoonist.
But the one thing I know, anytime a gigantic multinational corporation takes over a beloved artistic statement, it goes great.
Think about it, guys.
Think about how much you love Rings of Power.
Now, we'll be able to get that version of Peanuts, the Rings of Power version.

Michael (51:25):
Yeah, it's horrifying.
I mean, we had a guy with a pencil.

Jimmy (51:29):
Oh, no, it's one of those, what do they call them?
Oh, Dystopian Nightmares.

Michael (51:34):
Yeah, pretty much.

Liz (51:35):
I think the family is going to be-

Jimmy (51:38):
Oh, yeah, 20% with five kids versus Sony.

SPEAKER_2 (51:42):
That'll go great.

Liz (51:43):
They will have stipulations.
I think that everything will be fine.

Harold (51:49):
To me, what it looks like is the fact that you had a 41% and a 39% and a 20% share of ownership, they still owned more than what the family owned.
I don't know what was in that 20% deal that gives the freedom of the family to veto or directs.

Jimmy (52:11):
I'll tell you, I know nothing about it.
Nothing.
Nothing.

Harold (52:14):
We all see.

Liz (52:16):
We will see.

Harold (52:18):
Well, all I can say is the integrity of Peanuts relative to other brands, I'm pretty impressed given that he's been gone 25 years.

Jimmy (52:33):
Absolutely.
It'll be interesting to see what happens going forward.

Liz (52:37):
All right.

Jimmy (52:38):
Is that the news in the mail?

Liz (52:40):
That's it.

Jimmy (52:41):
All righty.
Well, let's go back and check out those strips.
September 30th, 1952.
Baby Linus is sitting there in-
Excuse me.
I got the hiccups.
Unbelievable.
That's funny.

Harold (52:57):
It's what an influential strip.

Jimmy (53:02):
Baby Linus is sitting there in his diapers and he's has the hiccups.
Hic, hic, hic, he says, or maybe he's just insulting Charlie Brown and he's a rube.
But it appears as if he has the old hiccups.
Then Charlie Brown runs to Lucy and says, Hey Lucy, your baby brother has got the hiccups.
He shouldn't be hiccuping, should he?

(53:24):
And Lucy says, Why not?
And Linus continues, Hicc, hicc, hicc.
To which Lucy replies, He hasn't got anything else to do.
Well, if it bounced you off the ground, it might be fun.

SPEAKER_2 (53:36):
That's amazing.

Harold (53:39):
Yeah, my memory of the Linus strips more than the Lucy strips was that he's just on his own.
He's falling over because his head's so big.
I mean, there's so many jokes about that.
That was the go-to repeatable joke for Linus in his early years, is his head's too big so he falls over and hits his head, which may be where your theory of what's happened to the indentation of Linus is.

Jimmy (54:07):
That could be it.

Harold (54:08):
Right there in the strip.

Jimmy (54:09):
Yeah.

Harold (54:09):
You know what?

Jimmy (54:10):
That could be it.
Because if you look here, if you look super close on that first panel, you can see the rounded line that describes Linus' head.
He's not dented.

Harold (54:23):
He does have a fuller head of hair than he does in later strips.
He's-

Jimmy (54:29):
No eyebrows in the first panel.

Harold (54:31):
Yeah.
The eyebrows definitely come and go in-

Jimmy (54:34):
Yeah, because there's none on Lucy either in the second or third or fourth panel.

Harold (54:38):
It's like the eyebrows are for motion and not by necessity.

Liz (54:45):
She's playing with her blocks again.

Jimmy (54:47):
And they're small ones and tall ones and big ones again.

Harold (54:51):
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
Linus is-
he's talking about a blank slate baby.
Since we're getting into Linus earlier than Lucy, I think in the strip really as a character, and again, maybe because of the ages of his kids.

(55:11):
Again, we're still in that place where we're only six months into the second Schulz child, so.

Jimmy (55:18):
I like the 50s stuff a lot.
I like specifically, I think, having gone through our best dubs and stuff from 1954, though, to like the end of the 50s.
But what I'm not crazy about-
there's a couple of things I'm not crazy about in this really early stuff.
One of the things is the way he draws their hands and arms.

(55:39):
They look like, in some instances, they almost look like penguin-like flippers.
Like Lucy looks very strange in panel too.
So does Charlie Brown.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.

Harold (55:53):
Fingers just come out of the forearm.
Yeah, I think design-wise, later peanuts look so cool and here it's got, I don't know.
He makes better and better and better choices as he goes on as an artist.

Michael (56:07):
Yeah.

Jimmy (56:09):
Not seeing any of Linus' personality, of course, at this point.

Michael (56:14):
Well, he seems to be happy.

Harold (56:16):
Yes, seems to be easygoing.

Michael (56:19):
So he doesn't seem to have anxieties at this point.

Harold (56:22):
Yeah.

Liz (56:23):
No need for a blanket.

Harold (56:25):
No, not yet.
No need for clothes.

Jimmy (56:31):
Put a shirt on, kid.

Michael (56:33):
He's going to get a striped shirt before too long.

Jimmy (56:37):
October 18th, 1952.
Linus is just sobbing.
He's sitting on what looks like a big sheet of newsprint or some sort of paper and he's just crying.
Charlie Brown tries to comfort him, says, Linus, please.
Then Charlie Brown goes over to Lucy and says, Your baby brother is crying, Lucy, and I can't make him stop.

(56:57):
Lucy says, give him a comic magazine.
Then Charlie Brown runs over with the comic book and says, I don't see what good this is going to do.
In the last panel, we see baby Linus eating the comic book.
He looks absolutely delighted to be doing so.
There's some teething going on in the household perhaps at this point.

Harold (57:20):
Yeah.
Maybe, yeah.
And you got Lucy playing with the odd-sized blocks again.
And at this point, she's a little checked out.
She's been hearing a lot of crying, I guess.

Liz (57:34):
And that's a baby blanket, not a newspaper.

Harold (57:37):
A blanket?

Liz (57:39):
Yeah.
A baby blanket.
I mean, he just put something down on the floor so that the baby can sit.

Harold (57:44):
Origin and first appearance, Linus' blanket.
There it is.

Jimmy (57:48):
Not necessary.
That could be it.

Harold (57:51):
Amazing.
Yeah.
It just looks like the stuff we laid out for our dogs.
That's what makes it feel a little weird.
Yeah.

Jimmy (57:58):
Well, yeah, that's exactly what it looks like.
We've had, yeah.
All right.
So halfway through the first episode here, almost halfway through the first episode.
Are we picking up anything that we can possibly say about the Van Pelt family that we haven't any new insights?

Michael (58:14):
Well, I think you're right.
Lucy's getting a little bored with this baby.

Jimmy (58:21):
She's had enough.

Michael (58:22):
Yeah.
Then soon it turns.
She becomes violently evil.

Harold (58:29):
Yeah.
The parents are not opposed to these very young children having access to comic magazines and reading material.

Michael (58:36):
Especially in 1952, Gownley knows what that book is.

Harold (58:40):
Yeah.
What would that have been worth if he hadn't been sucking on it?

Michael (58:45):
No, I mean, in terms of web of horror and.

Jimmy (58:49):
Oh, yeah.

Harold (58:50):
Yeah.
It's like CGC graded.
It's like buckling in the upper left corner.
Moisture.

Jimmy (59:01):
Well, my daughter Anna took a comics class in college and she said, she said, did you know that in comics?
And I said, yes.
And then she was annoyed by that.
And she goes, no, did you know that there was a doctor that in the 50s that hated comics and wrote it?
I'm like, yes, I knew.
Dr.
Frederick Wertham.
I know all about him.

Harold (59:22):
My pal, Dr.
Frederick Wertham.

Jimmy (59:25):
Who knows?
He might have had a point.

Harold (59:29):
I remember, yeah, I think I talked about this before, but that book was mythical, you know.

Jimmy (59:36):
Yeah.

Harold (59:36):
This 1954 book that caused the comics code stamp to be on comics for 50 years or whatever, 40 years.
And I'd read about it and I'm like, okay, this is a rare book.
So when we would visit family in the ocean, Missouri, went down to the public library, this little town of 8,000 people or whatever.

(59:58):
And they had a copy sitting on the shelves of Seduction of the Innocent.
So I would go down and I would read it every time I got a chance.
Because I had no access to this as a kid.

Michael (01:00:09):
You got corrupted by all the pins going into eyeballs.

Harold (01:00:14):
Oh my gosh.

Michael (01:00:15):
That's why you like old horror movies.

Harold (01:00:19):
Oh man.
But yeah, the fact that that book was still circulating in the library in the late 80s is pretty wild.

Jimmy (01:00:28):
November 26, 1952.
Here we have Linus and he's actually wearing a shirt.
And not only is he wearing a shirt, he's wearing a striped shirt just like his iconic one.
But no shoes.
And he reaches, he sees a little ball and he's kind of reaching, he's reaching for it, he's barely tipping over to get it.

(01:00:49):
And then Lucy comes in and says, here's the ball, Charlie Brown, I found it.
And then Linus is just frustrated alone.

Michael (01:00:56):
I don't think she's being mean.
I think she's just oblivious to him.

Jimmy (01:01:00):
Totally oblivious, yeah.
Just like you would think of your baby brother, probably.
Linus does not look anything like Linus in panel three.

Liz (01:01:10):
In any of the panels, really.

Jimmy (01:01:12):
Yeah, for three, it looks really off.
And it takes him a while to get that hair in.
Because he definitely has a middle-aged cubicle worker haircut.
Or maybe a right-wing podcaster in panel four.
That is a very specific middle-aged man's haircut.

(01:01:35):
Instead of the comb over, it's the comb forward.

Harold (01:01:38):
Yeah.
It is a very unusual look for a little kid.

Jimmy (01:01:42):
Yes.

Michael (01:01:43):
Also that strange little halo.
It reads well.
It's like anger and frustration, but I don't remember seeing that anywhere.
It's like a chainsaw.

Jimmy (01:01:58):
He does it really strongly here.
Lots of peaks and valleys, but he will do that radiant line.
Remember the kids chasing after Lucy when she was frustrated and inhibited.
They all have the anger line radiating around them.

Michael (01:02:12):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:02:13):
I'm not sure if that is a Schultz.
Obviously, things in the air indicating emotions have existed for pre-peanuts, but I'm not sure about that one in particular.

Harold (01:02:25):
Yeah.
I'm assuming he saw it somewhere, some form.

Michael (01:02:30):
Yeah.
If I used it, people would go like, what is there some kind of weird star appearing behind her or something?

Jimmy (01:02:40):
It is strange.
I think we said this before, but because you're doing a science fiction comic, even though it's really a science fantasy comic, it has to be more grounded than just a bunch of kids in a neighborhood.
Because like you say, yeah, if there's a glowing something around the person's head, you might think that the person's actually glowing.

Michael (01:03:04):
Well, we're going to get way off topic here.
But okay, I've been rereading Scott Pilgrim, which is my favorite comic of all time.
No offense.

Jimmy (01:03:16):
But wait, okay, so just Michael's favorite comics of all time so far have been Scott Pilgrim, Love and Rockets, Peanuts and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

Michael (01:03:29):
This might be the most enjoyable, but anyway, that's not important.
He's sitting with his girlfriend and he says, what's that with your head?
What's going on with your head?
And I'm looking at the panel and I'm going, well, your head looks normal.
Nothing seems weird about her head.

(01:03:50):
And then like 20 pages later, again he's with her and he goes like, it's happening again, that's up with your head.
And I'm looking at it and I went back to the first one.
I realized it was this halo.
It wasn't halos, it was these white spikes coming out of her head, which I didn't even notice.

(01:04:12):
It was like an emotional thing.
I figured, okay, she's maybe a little upset.
But he was seeing it.
And I didn't see it.
Even though I was studying those panels, looking what the problem was with her head.
You get so used to these things in comics that you're not even aware that they're really bizarre.

Harold (01:04:33):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:04:35):
December 4th, 1952, Linus again sees a ball just out of reach, which he stretches for for three panels.
But by panel four, he gives up and just falls asleep.
This could be like a YouTube video.
Like baby loses motivation or whatever.

Michael (01:04:56):
Yeah.
Linus just had a real difficulty with the world.

Liz (01:05:00):
He's a baby.

Michael (01:05:01):
Yeah, he's a baby.
But then he becomes, he but soon becomes like a master of everything.

Jimmy (01:05:08):
Well, maybe what happens next is his origin story here.
On December 11th, 1952, Linus is sitting way far away from a very early 50s looking television.
It really gives you the idea of how old this strip is, looking at that TV.
And is that a gramophone next to it?

Liz (01:05:30):
It was a stereo console or something.

Jimmy (01:05:34):
And Lucy comes in and says to him, you can't watch television from way back here, Linus.
Move up where you can see.
And then she puts him about three inches away from the TV, to which Linus looks out at us, and he has been completely discombobulated by the TV.

Michael (01:05:51):
Yeah, but he's got Lucy's eyes.
This is like an alien strip.
He's turned into one of them now.

Liz (01:05:58):
Charles Adams.

Harold (01:06:00):
Yeah.
That's a very, very creepy, creepy.
How do you describe those eyes to those listening here?

Michael (01:06:06):
Google eyes.
Well, but they're squirreling.

Jimmy (01:06:08):
They're just scribbling spirals that indicate that his vision at the very least has been-

Liz (01:06:16):
Damaged....

Jimmy (01:06:17):
trampled by the TV.

Michael (01:06:18):
Yeah, but he didn't get worked in the head.

Liz (01:06:19):
We really were told never to sit closer than six feet away from a television.

Jimmy (01:06:26):
You're going to ruin your eyes.

Liz (01:06:27):
Yeah.

Harold (01:06:28):
Now, they said there was radiation.
I don't know what the purpose of, I guess there was radiation of some sort.
Yeah.
Never did fully understand that.
Then I guess the rules changed when they made TVs differently.
So I don't know.

Jimmy (01:06:43):
As we can see in panel four, clearly Linus has not yet been dropped on his head.

Liz (01:06:50):
But he has been damaged in other ways.

Jimmy (01:06:52):
He has been damaged in other ways.
And we know where Rerun got the hand-me-down overalls.
There were Linus's right here.

Harold (01:07:01):
Yeah.
That's a very weird first drawing of Linus too.
It's like three quarters from the back or whatever.

Jimmy (01:07:08):
The ear doesn't work.

SPEAKER_2 (01:07:10):
No.

Harold (01:07:11):
Yeah.
He's struggling with this one.
I don't think he's drawn from this angle much at all before.

Jimmy (01:07:18):
But great-looking TV, great-looking little stereo system that-

Harold (01:07:22):
Is that a stereo system or those are Buchholz?

Michael (01:07:25):
Oh, maybe.

Jimmy (01:07:26):
Oh, that's probably the 12 volumes of The Interpreter's Bible down there.

Harold (01:07:31):
Well, again, all of those books makes you wonder about the Van Pelt parents.

Jimmy (01:07:38):
Yeah, they're definitely more widely-
Charlie Brown only has that one book that he's trying to get through for 50 years, but they have a whole library, not just in this panel, but we've seen in other things with Linus where they have lots of books in the Van Pelt.

Michael (01:07:54):
I don't think those are books.
We had something like that and it slides open, it's a sliding door and your albums are in there.

Jimmy (01:08:02):
Oh, it's for record albums.
Yeah.
Well, that's an interest.
Okay.
Well, see, here's a thing.
If you think about it, Linus, the character was named after one of Schulz's friends in Minneapolis.
This is the period of time where he's at probably first encountering modern sophistication.

(01:08:23):
It's when he's getting into classical music.
It's when he's hanging out with all the art friends.
It's where he's first discussing his theological, you know, ideas with the people from his church.
So, like, it does make sense that he'd be like, yeah, let's put this thing where all my classical albums are in.

(01:08:44):
You know, that's kind of almost like a signal.

Michael (01:08:46):
Yeah, and they're all like box sets of 78.

Jimmy (01:08:49):
Yes, right.
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Because, yeah, if you got a symphony on record, it would have to come on at least four albums.
February 15th, 1953, a beautiful looking Sunday, as we see Lucy playing with some blocks again, and Linus, a happy little Linus, who looks like he's had a haircut, crawling towards her.

(01:09:13):
And Lucy says, Linus, you go away and leave my book alone.
This is my book.
So this is two separate scenes.
The first is Lucy playing with her blocks.
This is now Lucy playing or reading a book.
Now Linus is reaching out for one of her dolls.
And Lucy says, Linus, you leave my doll alone.
And the next panel, this is my ball.

(01:09:34):
You can't play with it.
And then again, you leave my blocks alone.
These are my blocks.
You leave them alone.
Then Lucy is going around the living room and Linus is crawling after her.
And the mother calls from off panel, Lucy, what are you doing?
Rare appearance of the adult voice.
And Lucy says, I'm playing with Linus' mother.

(01:09:55):
And then the mother, all right, but you be nice to your little brother.
Lucy, yes, mother.
And share your toys with them too.
Yes, mother.
And then we see Lucy surrounded by all her toys with Linus, way off in the distance.
And the mother from off panel again, you are sharing your toys with them, aren't you?
Oh, yes, mother.
And we're having a swell time playing together too.

(01:10:17):
To which Linus responds, ha!

Michael (01:10:21):
Yeah, this is really an important strip.
I mean, this defines Lucy as we know her.
She's not just oblivious, she's like purposely cruel.

Liz (01:10:32):
And selfish.

Michael (01:10:33):
And he knows, he understands what's going on.
He understands what they're saying.

Jimmy (01:10:38):
Because he has had the mystical experience of the TV set.
He's bombarded by culture.
It's a real twin X-rays.

Harold (01:10:48):
Got his superpowers.
The X-rays of the TV set.
Yeah, it's not the first time we hear Linus say something, I guess.

Michael (01:10:56):
Oh, yeah.
This doesn't count as first time he talks, though.
Wikipedia does that.

Liz (01:11:02):
He makes noise.

Michael (01:11:03):
Makes a noise.

Jimmy (01:11:04):
Why does that not count?

Michael (01:11:06):
Well, Wikipedia does not recognize this as his first word.

Jimmy (01:11:09):
Oh, well, I do, because he's not laughing.
He is sarcastically making the sound ah, which is speaking.

Harold (01:11:20):
Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy (01:11:22):
Yeah, yes, exactly.

Harold (01:11:25):
Yeah.
And the Van Pelt's, I think, they seem to be somewhat stylish, too.
They have some mid-century modern stuff in the previous things.
So yeah, they seem to be a fairly relatively well-to-do middle class family, right?

Michael (01:11:42):
Not a whole lot of furniture in that.

Liz (01:11:44):
Yeah, this is a different room from the one with the TV, because the drain is different.

Harold (01:11:49):
But look at the little weird sculpture in the first panel and the second tier that's on the table.
Well, that doesn't seem like something that would be part of the children's things.
That's something that the Van Pelt parents have purchased.

Jimmy (01:12:06):
And it feels like a bigger house, because the mom's obviously in a different room yelling in.
You know, it doesn't seem like it would be one of these little GI houses where the parents would be two feet away from them.

Harold (01:12:20):
Yeah, it's a big, big room that they're in.
And, you know, we don't, we still don't know if mom's a working mom, because this is Sunday, right?
Right.

Jimmy (01:12:28):
That's right.

Harold (01:12:29):
So she could be off work and...

Jimmy (01:12:32):
I'm just on Dent Watch.
I still don't see when it happens.
So we have to be real careful, because I think we can probably, this is like a cold case, and I think we could figure out who dropped Linus and bring some charges.

Liz (01:12:48):
When we were talking before about children aging so that you couldn't do, use the same children for voiceovers, I was thinking about Aziza getting, I think she just turned 12.
Oh, wow.
And so we can't have Aziza do, it's Dent Watch for us.

Harold (01:13:11):
Favorite panel on this is the second panel.
That little look on Linus' face as the book is being snatched away and his arms are outreached.
He's, how do you describe that?
It's a somewhat complex little reaction he has to have that book taken away.

(01:13:32):
And classic cartoony Lucy.

Jimmy (01:13:36):
Yes.

Harold (01:13:36):
With a brush line unibrow being upset.
That looks much more cartoony to me than what I normally see in Peanuts.
I mean, if I just looked at Lucy's head by itself, it just almost feels like a different artist who is more of an animator style.

Jimmy (01:13:56):
The whole movement of her body, like the contrapasto of the one leg forward as she swings the other arm.

Harold (01:14:03):
It's nice.

SPEAKER_2 (01:14:04):
But we can see her underwear.

Harold (01:14:09):
There's your little Lulu influence right there.

Jimmy (01:14:13):
Yeah.
The weird things about old pop culture.
Well, we haven't solved the mystery of the dance and we haven't figured out exactly who the Van Pelt's are, which is exactly what we need to be because we have several episodes left.
Of course, we would love for you to follow along with this.
If you want to know what we're covering before we do, you go over to that unpackingpeanuts.com and you sign up for the great Peanuts reread, which is over, but that doesn't mean we're over.

(01:14:44):
You could click on that and find out exactly what we're going to be talking about next.
You can email us at unpackingpeanuts.gmail.com.
If you want to follow us on social media, we're at Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and Threads, and at Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky and YouTube.

(01:15:05):
If you want to help me out, the new 25th Anniversary Editions of Amelia Rules, Volume 1 and 2 are out.
This is the 25th Anniversary of Amelia Rules, 2026.

Michael (01:15:14):
I have a question.
I have the box set.
And after I finish my third reading of Scott Pilgrim, I'm going to do a massive, complete Amelia reading.
All eight books from the box set.
Is there anything in the new editions that is not in the box set?

Jimmy (01:15:33):
Yes, there are new 10-page stories in Volume 1 and Volume 2, set during the time of those books.
Since you know the cartoonist, I could get you those stories ahead of time.

Michael (01:15:45):
Yeah.
Well, if it's the continuity, I need it.

Jimmy (01:15:50):
Well, I'll tell you what it is.
You know how Billy Joel would release the greatest hits and then they'd put two new songs on?

Michael (01:15:58):
Yeah.

Jimmy (01:15:58):
That's what it is.

Michael (01:15:59):
All right.
That's cool.

Harold (01:16:02):
New Amelia.
That's historic.

Jimmy (01:16:04):
I'm very excited.
Well, first of, thank you, Michael.
I feel like I also feel like I have to apologize.
I'm not sure you're going to read eight volumes of it.

Michael (01:16:12):
I'm going to read it in one night.
No, you're not.
My eyes are going to look like Linus.

Jimmy (01:16:20):
Well, everybody out there, pray for Michael.
Keep a million thoughts.
Read eight volumes of a million rules.
Harold, where are you going to be coming up?
We don't know yet.

Harold (01:16:29):
Well, we don't know, but I did want to say hello to all of our new listeners.
Thank you, everybody, for getting the word out about Unpacking Peanuts.
We are currently number two visual arts podcast in America, United States.
Thanks to you guys, and we're so happy to say hello to our new listeners, and we hope you're enjoying the show.

(01:16:51):
There's a lot more to discover, going back into the vault of Unpacking Peanuts, 50 years of strip reading.
But we're really enjoying this new path where we're focusing on the characters, and maybe a lot of you discovered us around the time we were doing Understanding Snoopy, which is obviously a hot topic in the Peanuts world.

Jimmy (01:17:12):
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you so much, everybody, for listening.
It's my favorite day of the week, not just because I get to hang out with my pals and talk about comics, but because we all get to hang out together.
And just to waste some time.

Harold (01:17:25):
And there's one other thing I would like to mention, for those of you who love the movie It's a Wonderful Life, I had the honor of being interviewed by Ted Koppel on CBS Sunday morning, the Sunday before Christmas, because I was up giving a presentation on It's a Wonderful Life in Seneca Falls, New York, which claims to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls.

(01:17:49):
So we will, in the obscurity section, is that right, Liz, of the...

Liz (01:17:53):
I'll put it in the show notes.

Harold (01:17:55):
In the show notes?

Jimmy (01:17:56):
Yeah.

Harold (01:17:57):
Oh, that's cool.
All right, we'll give you a link to that very odd piece on It's a Wonderful Life from CBS Sunday morning.

Jimmy (01:18:08):
That is so cool.
It's so great that you got to do that.
And by the way, to bring it back to Amelia, that's Rhonda's celebrity crush, Ted Koppel.

Harold (01:18:17):
Oh, that's right.
Wow, Rhonda would have been just beside her someone.

Jimmy (01:18:24):
Over the moon.

Liz (01:18:25):
Well, and since we are talking about our individual work, Michael's Stranger Tractors, the new-

Jimmy (01:18:33):
New work.

Liz (01:18:34):
New work is now on Substack.

Jimmy (01:18:37):
Absolutely.
How does that feel, Michael?
They finally get new Stranger Tractors out after lo those many years.

Michael (01:18:43):
It's pretty weird, but I'm rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
So keep finding weird continuity problems.
Actually, tomorrow, I'm going to be finished and I'll send you a PDF.

Harold (01:18:54):
Yeah, that's exciting.

Michael (01:18:56):
64 page first issue, but man.

Harold (01:18:59):
Sixty-four pages.

Michael (01:19:00):
Yeah, I have to go back and check stuff from 1992 and they go like, oh no, I'm contradicting this completely.

Jimmy (01:19:09):
I watched the Stranger Things finale with the kids.
I don't think you need to worry about that.

Michael (01:19:14):
Well, unfortunately, that's my personality.
It's got to make sense.

Jimmy (01:19:19):
I understand.
Hey, that helps me a lot.
I have to make, in the real dark night, my book, I'm Serialized on a Substack, is so strange and surreal, but it has to pass, in my mind, the Michael Cohen test.
Does it make sense?
I'm absolutely 100 percent serious.
I think about it all the time.
Does it actually though make sense?
If it passes the Michael test, then you hit publish.

Michael (01:19:41):
Well, it's totally passed the Michael test.

Jimmy (01:19:45):
All right.

Harold (01:19:46):
Cool.
Well, one more thing.
Implugging books.
I got involved in a Kickstarter, low these many years ago, where we were doing a 3D comic book version of the classic 1953 3D monster movie, the robot monster of the iconic monster that's made of a guy in a gorilla suit, wearing a deep sea diving helmet with the antenna attached.

(01:20:12):
I got to do a 10-page riff, mystery science theater style of the whole movie, and they took stills from the 3D print of the movie, which 3D Film Archive, who published this new book, also did the restoration of robot monster.
They had some beautiful 35-millimeter prints to work off of.

(01:20:32):
And it's a 64-page book with 15 different artists, with some eye-popping, 6-level, 3D, old school, blue and red glasses, analog.
If you're interested in picking up a copy, go to heraldbuchholz.com, and you can find it, and I will sign it for you if you're interested.
There you go.

Liz (01:20:49):
And I know that some of our listeners were part of the Kickstarter for that.

Harold (01:20:55):
Oh, yes, that's true.
And thank you guys so much for making it happen.
It's been quite a journey getting it out, and to see it in its final form, it is one of the coolest 3D comics I've ever seen.
I don't think I've ever seen one that had so many different art styles.
So it's like flipping every page is a different 3D experience because every artist is different in how they approach what they do.

(01:21:19):
And it was incredibly cool to see that book come out.
And really grateful to have been a part of that project.
And I will also say, I had somebody come to the Philadelphia Punk Rock Flea Market in December, who specifically said they did, I think, because of the newsletter.

(01:21:41):
Yay!
Oh, good.
Liz, they saw that I was going to be there, and they made a point of coming down to say hello.
I think his name is Jeff.
I apologize if I'm misremembering that, but it was so cool to meet a Unpacking Peanuts listener and get to meet you in person.
So thank you.

Liz (01:21:58):
And I don't have anything to report.
So I just sit here editing Unpacking Peanuts.

Jimmy (01:22:07):
Well, I think the fact that you're the producer of that number two digital arts podcast, that's a pretty dark goal.

Harold (01:22:13):
That's pretty cool, yeah.

Jimmy (01:22:14):
We would be the number nothing podcast.

Harold (01:22:16):
It wouldn't be number two if we didn't have you, Liz.
We wouldn't have any podcast.

Jimmy (01:22:20):
We would have four unused episodes on a hard drive somewhere.

Harold (01:22:25):
The lost episodes.

Jimmy (01:22:27):
All right.
Listen, thank you all for listening.
More from Linus and Lucy next time.
Until then, for Michael, Harold and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, be of good cheer.

Liz (01:22:38):
Yes.
Yes.
Be of good cheer.
Unpacking Peanuts is copyrighted by Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz and Liz Sumner.
Produced and edited by Liz Sumner.
Music by Michael Cohen.
Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark.
For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and threads.

(01:23:00):
Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky and YouTube.
For more about Jimmy, Michael and Harold, visit unpackingpeanuts.com.
Have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.

Jimmy (01:23:11):
It's Dent Watch.