Posted on 12/11/2022 3:02:33 PM PST by Twotone
The 100th anniversary of the late cartoonist Charles Schulz's birthday came and went last week without any notice anywhere, that I saw. And so, with thanks to Mark, I pen my own little tribute here to one of the great creative geniuses in American history.
If you were young at any time between 1950 (when Schulz first began publishing his comic strip Peanuts) and 2000, when Schulz died at the age of 77, you grew up in a world in which everyone read the latest Peanuts comic strip (particularly in the US and Canada) as part of their daily newspaper reading ritual.
In that world, Peanuts comic strip panels—carefully cut from the newspaper—adorned refrigerators, bedroom walls, lockers, office bulletin boards, everywhere you went; Peanuts characters adorned T-shirts and lunch boxes; Peanuts references peppered everyday conversations; and Peanuts television specials attracted as many adult viewers as child viewers.
Most remarkably, in that world, Peanuts story lines, themes, and characters resided so deeply in the North American psyche, they had come to serve as crucial cognitive tools for enabling people to experience, make sense of, and communicate about themselves and the world around them.
On that last point, think of how many times you've said, or heard someone say, "It's Lucy with the football". The reference instantly transmits not just an insight into the true dynamics of a situation, but an insight with powerful emotional valence. In a flash, you think back to all those strips showing Lucy fooling Charlie Brown again...and you re-experience your own past feeling of wanting to believe in something so badly, you've forgotten what history has already taught you, and you've started to fall prey to the persuasions of someone who just won't deliver in the end. Think of Lucy holding that football...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
An interesting article about ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ and how it was decided to include Linus reciting a passage from the gospel of Luke (Charles Schulz)...
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3609204/posts
On his actual 100th birthday, a number of comic strips had Peanuts-related themes (most of them can be seen at GoComics.com). Some of them were pretty clever. “Drabble” quoted a bunch of the expressions made popular by the strip—quite a number of them. “Tank McNamara” had a punter running to make a punt when he suddenly realizes it’s Lucy who will be holding the ball for him.
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