I’M PRETTY SURE you’re all damn sick-N-tired of the millennial hype by now.
So we’ll take a few days off from the whole new-era talk, and instead talk about an era that’s ending today.
When other boys in the mid-’60s were into the likes of Spider-Man, I was collecting Peanuts books.
The Fawcett Crest volumes, to be precise–mass-market paperbacks that arranged four-panel daily strips into full-page layouts, often with additional, anonymous artwork that usually ruined the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s designs. (Yes, I could realize that as a kid.)
My family didn’t subscribe to a paper that carried the daily strip; so the books, which showed up in supermarket newsracks a year or two after the strips’ original newspaper publication, provided my only access to them.
Eventually, I tracked down the better Peanuts books–the Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston trade paperbacks that stacked two strips per page in proper sequence.
When the papers announced “the first in a series of animated adaptations” of the strip, I was elated. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out the “series” wasn’t going to be a weekly visit with the gang but just occasional specials. The week after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in all its depressing glory, I glommed up to the black-and-white Magnavox only to find a regular episode of that mediocre sitcom The Munsters.
A very Charlie Brown-y moment.
Like a lot of smart, unathletic, unpopular boys throughout North America, I identified a lot with Charlie Brown.
He was no dumbed down kid-lit tyke like the Family Circus brood, nor an artificially cheery “lovable loser” like Ziggy or The Born Loser. He was a realistic kid with realistic kid frustrations. He lived in a cookie-cutter suburb like the one growing around our house.
He was lousy at sports, at making friends, at one-upsmanship games–at everything except verbally articulating his troubles; a skill that often just led him into deeper troubles, thanks to “friend” Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth.
His only true friend was a dog whose hyperactive playfulness settled into an elaborate fantasy existence, part of which Charlie Brown was once invited into (the sequence in which Snoopy’s tiny dog house was revealed (verbally but not visually) to be a Doctor Who-like dimensional portal into a vast, art-filled mansion).
Such occasional flights of fancy (a boy known only as “5;” Pig-Pen’s magical ability to become instantly unclean) somehow only enhanced the “realism” of the Peanuts universe.
The strips were often funny and more often poignant, and always maintained sympathy with the characters. They taught an infinite number of lessons in comic pacing, dialogue, and the construction of complex narratives within the discipline of daily four-panel installments.
Bill Melendez’s TV specials and movies (all scripted by Schulz) expanded the visual scope of the strip’s universe without breaking its fundamental laws (except for a few of the later shows, which showed adult human characters on-screen). Vince Gauraldi’s jazz-piano music was gorgeously understated. The casting of real child actors to voice the characters’ elaborate dialogue further cemented Schulz’s central tenet that children really do think and talk this intelligently.
But the tight perfection of Schulz’s draftsmanship (at its peak from about 1965 to 1985) was one aspect of the strip that Melendez’s animators never quite mastered. This was a clue that the strip, unlike most strips from before the days of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, would not continue without Schulz.
In 1987, Schulz suddenly abandoned the format of four identically-sized panels per strip. Peanuts went to three taller panels most days; except on days when Schulz chose to divide his space differently. At the time, I wrote that, while it brought a new energy to the strip, it ruined one of its main unspoken themes. The rigid repetition of the same number of frames, all the same size, perfectly matched the ultimately hellish concept of these characters forced to repeat the same life mistakes, to remain the same presexual age for eternity.
Now, they finally get to leave their newsprint prison. Not to enter adult freedoms, but merely to disappear.
AARRGH!
IN OTHER NEWS: Thousands took my heed (or, more likely, got the idea on their own) and gathered all around the closed-off Seattle Center to enjoy a healthy, terrorist-free New Year’s despite mayor Paul Schell’s best efforts to ban them. Schell himself showed up to be interviewed on KOMO, and was very properly met outside the TV station by safe-and-sane jeers and catcalls. Good job, citizens. Next step: A recall election that would be a referendum on the city’s now more official than ever damn-the-non-upscale attitude.
IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The one company you’d expect to have changed its name by this week still hasn’t, at least as of Sunday night.
TOMORROW: A portent of the digi-future most culture mavens don’t want to talk about–the potential obsolescence of culture mavens.
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