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You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Make The World A Better Place / Afternoon Open Thread: We Need Charles Schulz More Than Ever

Afternoon Open Thread: We Need Charles Schulz More Than Ever

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I wasn’t going to post today, but then CBS Sunday Morning and Steve Hartman (seriously dude, do you have stock in the Kleenex company?) made me cry, so fine, here you go:

https://youtu.be/RyaHhF4UY_M

I read Pearls Before Swine (Stephan Pastis) every morning and I had forgotten this story about meeting Sparky.

Having witnessed duck grief first hand, this story…oh. my.

I’m off to walk the dogs before getting into some serious cleaning today. Cleaning is always serious here, LOL, but company is coming to stay this week, so it’s real serious.

Open thread

Reader Interactions

36Comments

  1. 1.

    MagdaInBlack

    I loved my pair o geese like you love your ducks. Thank you for the love story ❤️

  3. 3.

    PaulB

    Thanks for the Sunday boost, TaMara. Good luck with the cleaning and the guests. I think we all occasionally need that little bit of pressure of company coming over to help give us the strength and determination to tackle stuff we’ve put off.

    With this and with the knowledge that the jackals here have raised $13,566 to help Larime and Sylv (gofundme.com/f/friend-of-the-blog-larime-needs-a-helping-hand), it’s turning out to be a good Sunday.

  4. 4.

    Alison Rose

    I live in Santa Rosa CA, where Schulz’ family moved sometime in the 1960s and he lived here the rest of his life. We have Peanuts character statues all around town, a museum, etc. It’s charming :)

  6. 6.

    Kathleen

    Thank you for the Peanuts story link. I’ve loved Peanuts for 63 of my 73 years on the planet. I spent hours has a kid with absolutely no drawing talent trying to draw the characters (to no avail).

  7. 7.

    japa21

    CBS Sunday Morning is one of the few, if not the only, Sunday morning news type shows Mrs. Japa and I can tolerate. When its over we usually jump over to Animal Planet and the zoo shows.

    I thought of you immediately while watching the goose segment.

    And Pearls before Swine is our go to comic strip everyday.

  8. 8.

    oatler

    Peanuts taught to reach for the Prophesies of Saint Jerome before our cold cereal gets soggy.

  9. 9.

    Matt McIrvin

    While I have always loved Peanuts, I do think the cultural currency of it has faded without Schulz faster than I expected.

    Part of that is that they never handed the newspaper strip over to someone else to carry on an unsettling zombie existence, like so many old legacy strips (even though it would have been an easy thing to do– other artists had approximated his style in comic books and elsewhere). They re-ran the originals instead, but that means it’s frozen in amber.

  12. 12.

    MelissaM

    That goose story is super sweet!

    I used to be a CBS Sunday Morning junkie, but quit for some reason or another. It seemed like I couldn’t get moving on Sundays until too late. Roger Welsch was a favorite for his midwest down home style, RIP.

  13. 13.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Baud:  Here is a Linus and Lucy cover worth hearing.

    Until his death in July of 2021, Jerry Granelli was the last surviving member of the original group led by Vince Guaraldi that played the the soundtrack for the iconic television broadcast A Charlie Brown Christmas back in 1965. In this 2014 recording we see the Jerry Granelli trio perform Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy”.

  14. 14.

    RaflW

    Ahh, here’s a really nice remastered instrumental version of Christmastime is Here, from Vince Guaraldi’s page. Without the words, it just works well as a fine non-seasonal jazz tune. But for whatever reason, the song (w/ or w/o words) makes me tear up a little bit.

  16. 16.

    Ruckus

    @RaflW:

    My computer says it can not load your link because the address is incomplete.

    It could be my computer. It’s a bit fussy about this stuff.

  17. 17.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    @Jackie: Nice.  I met a kid at winter camp when I was about 10.  He played that on the piano and I thought he was a musical genius.  I asked him daily to play it.  He didn’t think it was a big deal.

  18. 18.

    Layer8Problem

    @Ruckus:  Nope, it’s my computer too.  When I right-click and do “copy link”, the link I get says “http://Vince Guaraldi’s”, and no further.

  19. 19.

    Splitting Image

    @Matt McIrvin:

    While I have always loved Peanuts, I do think the cultural currency of it has faded without Schulz faster than I expected.

    Part of that is that they never handed the newspaper strip over to someone else to carry on an unsettling zombie existence, like so many old legacy strips (even though it would have been an easy thing to do– other artists had approximated his style in comic books and elsewhere). They re-ran the originals instead, but that means it’s frozen in amber.

    It’s hard to say. The Fantagraphics reprints of Peanuts are still the company’s flagship product, and they’ve been in print since 2005.

    I think that Peanuts is actually holding up fairly well compared with the other old comic strips. Maybe Calvin and Hobbes does better with kids today, I’m not sure. Part of it is that the cultural relevance of all newspaper strips has collapsed along with the newspapers themselves. If nobody under 60 reads the papers anymore, what difference does it make how many papers carry a particular strip?

    On the other hand, Peanuts merchandising still does over $2 billion in business every year, so the characters aren’t disappearing entirely.

  24. 24.

    brantl

    Hard not to miss Charles Schultz. He wrote a note to a kid about fascism that was prescient, too.

  25. 25.

    PJ

    @Splitting Image: For my money, Schulz was the greatest American visual artist of the 20th century.  But newspaper strips are, by their nature, ephemeral, and with the disappearance of newspapers, even less likely to be encountered in the wild.

    As you note, the Fantagraphics collections are still selling, and the Peanuts TV specials still get re-run, along with new ones made by Apple+.  Calvin and Hobbes might have more cultural cache at the moment, but it’s hard to think of any other American comic strip that still has that kind of hold on the public.  (No disrespect meant towards Pogo, Krazy Kat, or Little Nemo, but those have more of a cult following these days.)

  26. 26.

    Splitting Image

    Here are a few links for anyone who might like to add a little more Charles Schulz to their day.

    This is an obituary of Schulz written by Mark Evanier about a month after Schulz passed away. It has a nice little anecdote about the Nancy comic strip.

    The late Scott Erik Kaufman wrote an article at LGM about ten years ago on the introduction of Franklin back in 1968. Black People Can’t Swim. I agree with Kaufman there. Schulz’s handling of this was him at his very best.

    Also, there was a co-ordinated celebration of Schulz’s 100th birthday back in November, with a whole bunch of cartoonists marking the occasion in their strips. The Schulz Museum has an archive of them on their site. Stephan Pastis did one in Pearls Before Swine. There are a whole bunch of others.

  27. 27.

    JMG

    The story of A Charlie Brown Christmas is fascinating. Like many iconic TV programs, it made the air over vehement opposition from network executives. An advertising exec who was the head of the Coca-Cola account was its fervent advocate, and Coke’s power was such he was able to override their objections. Then there was Schulz. The network’s strongest objection was to the use of the Bible in the program when Linus delivers the passage from Luke. Schulz said “if no speech, no program” and the network again relented. The first broadcast got a 50 share, which is good for a Super Bowl and aired every December until the estate sold it to one of the streaming services.

  28. 28.

    eclare

    @JMG:   Interesting.  I remember from watching in my childhood that Dolly Madison (sort of a Little Debbie) was the primary sponsor.

  31. 31.

    gene108

    My niece and nephew (currently 15 and 18, respectively) loved “Calvin and Hobbes”, and “Baby Blues”, when they were younger.

  34. 34.

    laura

    • @Alison Rose: that’s my hometown too. Charles Schulz built the lovely ice rink when we were young- and Friday nights meant going skating throughout my teenage years. Charles Schulz, Wiley Miller and Stephan Pastis were and are darn good comic strip legends and well respected amongst their peers so take that Scott Adams.
  35. 35.

    Rachel Bakes

    My dad loves Peanuts so Mom gave him a book of the strips every year as his Christmas Eve gift. I spent hours reading and rereading them as a kid. He passed away last year and the whole collection came to me. I haven’t been able to open them yet.

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