81–90 of 96 posts
Does anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute? I know, I'm being something of a Bah Humbug, but I legitimately cannot see the draw of this comic. It reminds me of Family Circus - no story, just vague…
Does anyone simply not get how this comic got so popular? I've never read a strip from this comic and once felt anything interesting. It's not a Calvin and Hobbes, it's not a Howard the Duck, it's just... I dunno, cute? I guess people like it because it's kinda cute? I know, I'm being something of a Bah Humbug, but I legitimately cannot see the draw of this comic. It reminds me of Family Circus - no story, just vague…
You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.
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Honest question here - is this getting downvoted because it’s untrue, or something else?
Maybe people wonder what the point/relevance is? Is it that Gawker had lots of ads, so Kotaku would also have ads? What's relevant (to this thread) about Thiel killing it?
I'm a musician, and something I've noticed is that children no longer recognize the "peanuts" theme song.
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The only comic worse is Garfield. I have no idea how anyone enjoys either of them.
I see you've never met 'Andy Capp' popularly serialised in UK papers, together with Peanuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Capp
He said the Andy Capp title was a cockney accent pun for Handicap. Apparently Andy was a cockney horse race fanatic. That tidbit did make the strip any funnier to me.
Interestingly, Peanuts started with a focus on Shermy and Violet as the 'straight men' and young(er) Charlie Brown as the comic upstart. Snoopy shows up fairly soon, but he doesn't even seem to be CB's pet for the first while. It's fascinating to see Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Sally grow from tots or babies to the developed characters we know today.
There was a long read article that came out a few years ago called "How Snoopy Killed Peanuts:" https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 about how Peanuts lost it's edge once the "cute" popular dog was introduced, whereas prior it used to be more subversive, philosophical/theoretical with darker material.
1. Snoopy becoming Flanderized, as in the "Happiness is a warm puppy" stuff from the 1960s.
2. Introduction of Woodstock the bird. That meant Snoopy and Woodstock went off and had their own adventures which didn't involve the human gang at all.
I also wonder whether Schulz participated in any recreational drugs in the 1960s. I don't meant to be disrespectful at all, but some of the stuff he drew was pretty wild.
There's a set of strips where Charlie Brown sees the moon as a baseball (and later, Alfred E. Neuman's head), another where Snoopy dreams of Charlie Brown flying him like a kite and him crashing to the ground in pieces, and a horror-movie-like series where Linus's blanket attacks Lucy. All very strange.
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The Thanksgiving and Christmas specials aired every year, and might still. But who has an antenna any more? I do.
Apple bought the rights years ago, PBS cannot show them anymore, they are now behind a paywall.
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Aha. I'm showing my age. I didn't know there was a "Peanuts" movie. I was talking about the tune "Linus and Lucy" which was the theme for the original animated TV show "A Charlie Brown Christmas." (And I shouldn't have called it a song, as there are no words).
Perhaps-fun stuff: Linus and Lucy was recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Trio back in 1964. They're all dead now, which is a shame. But there's a brilliant modern recording, from 2016, that features the original drummer, Jerry Granelli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OODA_K5hxyc And it's definitely worth spending some time to give it a watch/listen. There's a lot more to that little tune than most people probably realiz…
The genesis of Guaraldi's involvement was a 1963 documentary "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" which has nothing to do with the 1969 animated feature.
This was produced for TV but never aired, and recently surfaced on Youtube: https://youtu.be/UGAs5fZUvBM&t=425s
To complicate things further, Guaraldi released "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" (once again, based on the 1963 documentary) but these recordings are not the same as the cues used in the documentary.
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I wish Vince Guaraldi had lived longer, I really like his style of Jazz, its both the kind of thing you can leave on in the background, and its music that takes you places. Cast your fate to the Wind and Alma-Ville are still some favorites. I also consider his arrangement of the peanuts music into a cohesive whole to be pretty masterful - its out of print now, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charlie_Brown_Suite…
My wife, as a teen, had the job of being Vince Guaraldi's chaperone / guide for a series of concerts during the 70's. She's got great stories of hanging out and partying with his people.