‘Good Grief,’ Charles Schultz: Peanuts Still Endure

 

Almost a decade has passed since Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz left us at age 77, although it doesn’t seem like that long at all. However, every year during the holiday season, his memory is evoked when his half-hour television specials begin their annual run.

The fall season is ushered in at Halloween, when “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” airs. Originally broadcast October 27, 1966, the cartoon special has endured over four decades. The precursor to the winter holiday season happens, of course, when Schulz’s “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” airs. Its debut occurred November 20, 1973.

The winter holiday season begins in earnest when we get “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which aired December 9, 1965, actually the first of the three shows mentioned to appear on television. When it first aired, I wouldn’t be born for another eight years—in November 1973—so I am one of those youngsters who grew up watching it ever year.

What is it about Charles Schulz that has made him so enduring?

His work was simple and good-hearted. His main character, known as Charlie Brown to all the gang—except Peppermint Patty, who calls him “Chuck,” and Marcie, who calls him the more formal “Charles”—was supposedly based on his own personal experience of feeling inadequate.

The Peanuts gang includes a diverse range of characters that often harbor their own personal weaknesses and faults. Consider Linus, who never quite outgrows his “trusty blanket.” Consider Lucy, who is an overwhelming narcissist. Consider Pigpen, a walking dust storm.

Charles Schulz was certainly progressive. I never thought about it when I was a child, but his inclusion of Franklin, a black character introduced to the strip in 1968, was quite radical in a society just on the brink of racial desegregation.

Schulz’s publisher told him he didn’t “mind [him] having a black character, but please don’t show them in school together.” Charles Schulz’s response was straightforward: “I finally sighed and said, 'Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?'”

He didn’t quit, though, thankfully, for posterity’s sake. Although not everyone may be familiar with his work in comic strip format now, we still have those enduring holiday television classics.

The standout, of course, is “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Interestingly, the annual cartoon almost didn’t make it. It was sponsored by the Coca-Cola Corporation after an ad agent saw the Peanuts gang featured on the cover of Time magazine and asked producer Lee Mendelson if a Peanuts Christmas special had been proposed.

Television executives criticized it almost immediately for several reasons, primarily because it didn’t contain the usual laugh track, employed actual children for the voices, featured contemporary jazz, and delivered a religious message. From the time it aired in 1965, however, the special was a hit with viewers and critics. Schulz said of it: “There will always be an audience for innocence in this country.”

It is ironic that a show focusing on such an anti-commercial message originally included overt advertising at the end. Watch closely at the end to see the children’s singing fade, a segment later edited to cut the sponsor’s message: “Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola.” Some earlier versions of the ending still survive on YouTube.

No matter. I still get a little misty every year just watching it, and I’m not sure if it’s the simplicity of the message, the sentimentality, or the sheer childhood nostalgia—or perhaps a combination of all three. Although TV execs scoffed at first, what Linus says of the shabby little tree Charlie Brown chooses in the story might be said of the entire show: “I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” It’s a show that has received, over the years, plenty of love and will continue to do so by generations to come.