CSotD: The evolution of Peanuts and pizza
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"Peanuts" merchandising rights have been sold to the Canadian company that also controls "Caillou" and "Yo Gabba Gabba" and some similar kids' stuff.
Michael Cavna has the story here.
My first impression was that selling out is selling out, a contemptuous reaction tempered strongly by the good work Jeannie Schulz has done for the cartooning community with the money earned from her late husband's creation.
Then I tempered it further with the realization that I was thinking of a different "Peanuts," one that hasn't been around for half a century.
I remember, as a very young lad, reading "Peanuts" along with "Miss Peach," "Dennis the Menace" and "Family Circus," all of which featured little kids.
I also have a strong feeling of having known that Dennis and the kids in Family Circus were archetypal, while the Peanuts and Miss Peach gang were strangely real.
I didn't always get what they were talking about, but those were real kids who thought and talked the way real kids thought and talked.
Sometimes, it was hyper-realistic. The comic on the left struck home with my whole family and henceforth we frequently referred to our cocker spaniel as "the vacuum cleaner," because, yes, this was a slice of our lives.
Other times, it was considerably less so: I got the joke and I thought it was funny, but little kids don't play real golf. They golf in the back yard with plastic clubs, putting into empty soup cans.
Still, they were kids being kids, in those early days when Lucy was a baby, Linus and Schroeder were yet unborn and Patty and Violet were the older kids in the crowd more apt to tolerate Charlie Brown than to consider him a friend.
And Snoopy was a dog. A mischievous dog and a challenging dog, but, nonetheless, a dog.
Things changed, and one of the oddities of the strip is that everyone aged until they hit a certain point, at which they topped out. While Lucy would always be Linus's big sister, they both ended up the same age as Charlie Brown, while I suppose Patty and Violet were off in an assisted living center for 11-year-olds.
And Snoopy became increasing anthropomorphic, going gradually from a doggy dog to a dog with thought bubbles who could do imitations of other animals …
… to a full-blown kid-in-a-fur-coat as his forays into imaginary adventure fleshed out more and more until they essentially became a separate strip from the one about kids.
And there's nothing wrong with any of that, but I don't like pineapple on my pizza and, similarly, I prefer my Peanuts truly Old School.
I retain my right to grouse about pineapple on pizza and I will also grouse about how Snoopy ruined Peanuts. But that's more about me being an Old Codger than about any fault with them.
There is a whole cohort of people not all that much younger than I am who simply have a different orientation towards Peanuts (and pizza).
When the first Peanuts TV special came out, I was 15, which put me at a more critical stage of life but also means that I'd been reading the strip for about a decade and had the characters' voices and inflections hardwired.
I also had, I think, a sense of how a Peanuts joke is timed, which is not over the course of a half hour with action between the gag lines.
It wasn't that I disliked the specials. They just didn't resonate. It was Peanuts, sure, but it wasn't my Peanuts.
But it's not that there was some huge age gap between us Old Schoolers and those who embraced the Red Baron and the animated specials. My little sisters adored Stage Two Peanuts and they're not that much younger than I am.
They were having a different experience of Peanuts than I had. That's all. Not good, not bad: Different.
I'm not sure anybody got much out of the next stage, in which I think Schulz lost his footing for a few years and the strip too often was just Snoopy standing around announcing that he was now Joe Cool or Joe College or Joe Merchandising or whoever.
But then Rerun began to come of age and Schulz, and Peanuts, were just beginning a solid rush back into form when his stroke ended the strip.
When Schulz first had his stroke, I went to the editor of the paper and told him the strip would likely end and that we should make plans.
Turns out we were among the extremely small minority who felt the word "new" was critical to the idea of a "newspaper." And we had very few complaints over declining to run repeats.
I think we made the right decision, and not simply because I'm an Old Codger who feels newspapers have sold out on all sorts of levels.
Though that much is true.
But, besides the impact of the strip itself on young cartoonists, Schulz is warmly remembered for being supportive of newcomers and helping them find their feet in a tough business.
And given that he insisted nobody else would draw the strip when he was gone, the idea that Peanuts pioneered the concept of tying up limited space on the comics page with recycled material seems wrong. I say that as someone whose current hometown paper runs three different recycled strips among the dozen or so it features.
Still, the marketing deal is about the brand, which only started in the form of a strip.
So I have no problem with the Canadians marketing new Peanuts features.
And pizza hasn't been uniquely Italian in a long time, either, so I have no problem with Dominos offering pineapple as an option.
It's not how I think of Peanuts, and it's not how I think of pizza.
So I won't order pineapple on my pizza. I suspect Dominos will muddle through somehow.
YMMV, of course.
Now here's your moment of catchy irrelevance:
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