Peanut Gang Keepsakes (I loved to have)

Jim Shore, Hallmark and other collections of Peanut Gang. Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz that ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. The comic strip is the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all,[1] making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being".[2] At its peak in the mid- to late 1960s, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of around 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages.[3] It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States,[4] and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion.[1] Peanuts The Peanuts gang Top row left to right: Woodstock, Snoopy, Charlie Brown Bottom row left to right: Franklin, Lucy van Pelt, Linus van Pelt, Peppermint Patty, Sally Brown Author(s) Charles M. Schulz Website www.peanuts.com Current status / schedule Concluded, in reruns Launch date October 2, 1950 (dailies), January 6, 1952 (Sundays) End date January 3, 2000 (dailies), February 13, 2000 (Sundays) Syndicate(s) English: United Feature Syndicate (October 2, 1950 – February 26, 2011) Universal Uclick (February 27, 2011 – present) Genre(s) Humor, gag-a-day, satire, children, adults The strip focuses entirely on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are rarely seen or heard. The main character, Charlie Brown, is meek, nervous, and lacks self-confidence. He is unable to fly a kite, win a baseball game, or kick a football held by his irascible friend Lucy, who always pulls it away at the last instant.[5] Peanuts is one of the literate strips with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones that flourished in the 1950s.[6] The strip's humor (at least during its '60s peak) is psychologically complex, and the characters' interactions formed a tangle of relationships that drove the strip. Peanuts achieved considerable success with its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas[7] and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,[8] won or were nominated for Emmy Awards. The Peanuts holiday specials remain popular and are broadcast on ABC in the U.S. during the appropriate seasons. The Peanuts franchise also had success in theatre, with the stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown an oft-performed production. In 2013, TV Guide ranked the Peanuts television specials the fourth Greatest TV Cartoon of All Time.[9] A computer-animated feature film based on the strip, The Peanuts Movie, was released in 2015. Contents History Edit 1940s Edit Peanuts had its origin in Li'l Folks, a weekly panel comic that appeared in Schulz's hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. He first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like the early 1950s version of Snoopy.[10] In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post, which published 17 of his single-panel cartoons. The first of these was of a boy sitting with his feet on an ottoman. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a firm run by the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through.[citation needed] Li'l Folks was dropped in early 1950. Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate—also operated by Scripps-Howard—with his best work from Li'l Folks. When his work was picked up by United Feature Syndicate, they decided to run the new comic strip he had been working on. This strip was similar in spirit to the panel comic, but had a set cast of characters rather than different nameless little folk for each page. The name Li'l Folks was very close to the names of two other comics of the time: Al Capp's Li'l Abner and a strip titled Little Folks, so to avoid confusion, the syndicate settled on the name Peanuts, after the peanut gallery featured in the Howdy Doody TV show.[11] Peanuts was a name Schulz always disliked. In a 1987 interview, Schulz said of it: "It's totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity—and I think my humor has dignity."[12] The periodic collections of the strips in paperback book form typically had either "Charlie Brown" or "Snoopy" in the title, not "Peanuts", because of Schulz's distaste for it. From November 20, 1966, to January 4, 1987, the opening Sunday panels typically read Peanuts, featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown. 1950s Edit The first strip from October 2, 1950. From left to right: Charlie Brown, Shermy, and Patty. Peanuts premiered on October 2, 1950, in nine newspapers: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Tribune, The Allentown Morning Call, The Bethlehem Globe-Times, The Denver Post, The Seattle Times, The New York World-Telegram & Sun, and The Boston Globe.[citation needed] It began as a daily strip. The first strip was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other young children, Shermy and Patty. Shermy lauds Charlie Brown as he walks by, but then tells Patty how he hates him in the final panel. This was groundbreaking. Until then, rarely had children expressed hatred for others in comic strips. Snoopy was also an early character in the strip, first appearing in the third strip, which ran on October 4.[13] Its first Sunday strip appeared January 6, 1952, in the half-page format, which was the only complete format for the entire life of the Sunday strip. Most of the other characters that eventually became the main characters of Peanuts did not appear until later: Violet (February 1951), Schroeder (May 1951), Lucy (March 1952), Linus (September 1952), Pig-Pen (July 1954), Sally (August 1959), Frieda (March 1961), "Peppermint" Patty (August 1966), Woodstock (introduced April 1967; given a name in June 1970), Franklin (July 1968), Marcie (July 1971), and Rerun (March 1973). Schulz decided to produce all aspects of the strip himself from the script to the finished art and lettering. Schulz did, however, hire help to produce the comic book adaptations of Peanuts.[14] Thus, the strip was able to be presented with a unified tone, and Schulz was able to employ a minimalistic style. Backgrounds were generally not used, and when they were, Schulz's frazzled lines imbued them with a fraught, psychological appearance. This style has been described by art critic John Carlin as forcing "its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions."[15] Schulz held this belief all his life, reaffirming in 1994 the importance of crafting the strip himself: "This is not a crazy business about slinging ink. This is a deadly serious business."[16] While the strip in its early years resembles its later form, there are significant differences. The art was cleaner, sleeker, and simpler, with thicker lines and short, squat characters. For example, in these early strips, Charlie Brown's famous round head is closer to the shape of an American football or rugby football. Most of the kids were initially fairly round-headed. As another example, all the characters (except Charlie Brown) had their mouths longer and had smaller eyes when they looked sideways. 1960s Edit The 1960s is known as the "golden age" for Peanuts.[17] During this period some of the best-known themes and characters appeared, including Peppermint Patty,[18] Snoopy as the "World War One Flying Ace",[19] Frieda and her "naturally curly hair",[20] and Franklin.[21] Peanuts is remarkable for its deft social commentary, especially compared with other strips appearing in the 1950s and early 1960s. Schulz did not explicitly address racial and gender equality issues so much as assume them to be self-evident. Peppermint Patty's athletic skill and self-confidence is simply taken for granted, for example, as is Franklin's presence in a racially integrated school and neighborhood. (Franklin came about at least in part as a result of Schulz's correspondence in 1968 with a socially progressive fan.[22][23]) The fact that Charlie Brown's baseball team had three girls was also at least ten years ahead of its time (and in fact, the 1966 TV special Charlie Brown's All-Stars dealt with Charlie Brown refusing sponsorship of the team because the sponsor said the league does not allow girls or dogs to play). Schulz threw satirical barbs at any number of topics when he chose. Over the years he tackled everything from the Vietnam War to school dress codes to "New math." One strip on May 20, 1962, even had an icon that stated "Defend Freedom, Buy US Savings Bonds."[24] In 1963 he added a little boy named "5" to the cast,[25] whose sisters were named "3" and "4,"[26] and whose father had changed their family name to their ZIP Code, giving in to the way numbers were taking over people's identities. In 1958, a strip in which Snoopy tossed Linus into the air and boasted that he was the first dog ever to launch a human parodied the hype associated with Sputnik 2's launch of Laika the dog into space earlier that year. Another sequence lampooned Little Leagues and "organized" play when all the neighborhood kids join snowman-building leagues and criticize Charlie Brown when he insists on building his own snowmen without leagues or coaches. Peanuts touched on religious themes on many occasions, most notably the classic television special A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible (Luke 2:8–14) to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about (in personal interviews, Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side). Because of the explicit religious material in A Charlie Brown Christmas, many have interpreted Schulz' work as having a distinct Christian theme, though the popular perspective has been to view the franchise through a secular lens.[27] During the week of July 29, 1968, Schulz debuted the African-American character Franklin to the strip, at the urging of white Los Angeles schoolteacher Harriet Glickman. Though Schulz feared that adding a black character would be seen as patronizing to the African-American community, Glickman convinced him that the addition of black characters could help normalize the idea of friendships between children of different ethnicities. Franklin appeared in a trio of strips set at a beach, in which he first greets Charlie Brown's beach ball from the water and subsequently helps him build a sand castle, during which he mentions that his father is in Vietnam. He never occupies the same panel, however, with Sally.[22][23] 1970s–1990s Edit In 1975, the panel format was shortened slightly horizontally, and shortly thereafter the lettering became larger to compensate. Previously, the daily Peanuts strips were formatted in a four-panel "space saving" format beginning in the 1950s, with a few very rare eight-panel strips, that still fit into the four-panel mold. Beginning on Leap Day in 1988, Schulz abandoned the four-panel format in favor of three-panel dailies and occasionally used the entire length of the strip as one panel, partly for experimentation, but also to combat the dwindling size of the comics page.[citation needed] Later in the '90s, Schulz abandoned the characters Patty, Violet, Pigpen and Franklin. Schulz drew the strip for nearly 50 years, with no assistants, even in the lettering and coloring process.[28] In the late 1970s, during Schulz's negotiations with United Feature Syndicate over a new contract, syndicate president William C. Payette hired superhero comic artist Al Plastino to draw a backlog of Peanuts strips to hold in reserve in case Schulz left the strip. When Schulz and the syndicate reached a successful agreement, United Media stored these unpublished strips, the existence of which eventually became public.[29] Plastino himself also claimed to have ghostwritten for Schulz, apparently uncredited, while Schulz underwent heart surgery in 1983.[30] In the 1980s and the 1990s, the strip remained the most popular comic in history,[31] even though other comics, such as Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, rivaled Peanuts in popularity. Schulz continued to write the strip until announcing his retirement on December 14, 1999, due to his failing health. 2000: The End of Peanuts Edit Final Sunday strip, which came out February 13, 2000: a day after the death of Charles M. Schulz The final daily original Peanuts comic strip was published on Monday, January 3, 2000. The strip contained a note to the readers of the strip from Schulz and a drawing of Snoopy, with his trusty typewriter, sitting atop his doghouse deep in thought. Beginning the next day, a rerun package premiered in papers that had elected to pick it up (see below). Although Schulz did not draw any daily strips that ran past January 3, he had drawn five Sunday strips that had yet to run. The first of these appeared six days after the last daily, on January 9. On February 13, 2000, the day after Schulz's death, the last-ever new Peanuts strip ran in papers. Three panels long, it began with Charlie Brown answering the phone with someone on the other end presumably asking for Snoopy. Charlie Brown responded with "No, I think he's writing." The next panel shows Snoopy sitting at his typewriter with the opening to a letter addressed to "Dear Friends". The final panel features a large blue sky background over which several drawings from past strips are placed. Underneath those drawings is a colorized version of Schulz's January 3 strip, with almost the same note he wrote to fans, which reads as follows: