by Kevin Burton
“At the time of Charles Schulz’s death he had produced 17,897 strips, and Peanuts had run in more than 2,600 newspapers worldwide and been translated into 21 languages,” reports www.interestingfacts.com.
Today we continue yesterday’s post, presenting more facts from that website.
I know for a fact that the Peanuts gang speaks fluent French, because I watched their antics one day from a Montreal hotel room.
I also know that Schultz died in Feb. 2000, just a few days before my father passed away.
But Charlie Brown and his friends will never die. They live on in syndication and in our hearts, with one exception. Read on for info from Interesting Facts, about a character who quietly disappeared from the strip:
6-A trombone was used for the voice of Charlie Brown’s teachers
In the original comic strips, Charlie Brown and his friends are the focal point, while teachers and other adults are relegated to the backdrop. But when the popular comic was made into an animated series, producers knew they’d need to find some way to create a “voice” for adults in a way that still paid homage to Schulz’s wishes to leave adults out of the main picture.
Composer Vince Guaraldi, who scored all of the early classics including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, came up with the solution: Use a trombone with a mute in the bell to stand in for any adult dialogue. The result was what’s now widely referred to as the “wah-wah” voice.
7-“Peanuts” was first major strip to introduce a minority character
Schulz was intentional about a lot of things when it came to how he framed his famous comic strip, but most especially when it came to race. The majority of the Peanuts gang had always been white, mostly because the cartoonist felt unsure as to whether it was his place to include minority characters in his story lines.
But things changed in 1968 following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Schulz received a letter from a woman asking him to add an African American character to the comic, and three months later, in July 1968, Franklin made his comic strip debut, picking up and returning a beach ball that Charlie Brown had lost.
Critics have noted that Franklin is more nondescript than his white counterparts, but Schulz’s longtime friend and fellow cartoonist Robb Armstrong once said that he thought Schulz “played it smartly” with Franklin.
“He was always very thoughtful in how he treated his characters,” Armstrong told NPR in 2018. And in fact, Schulz actually dedicated Franklin’s last name to Armstrong after the pair developed a friendship that lasted until Schulz’s death in 2000. Armstrong is the creator of Jumpstart, one of the most widely syndicated Black comic strips ever.
8-Schultz killed off an unpopular character
In November 1954, Schulz introduced a new female character to the Peanuts strip: Charlotte Braun, a loud, brash character who was meant to be the counterpart to bumbling, soft-spoken Charlie Brown (note the similarity between their names).
It turned out, though, that readers weren’t ready for an opinionated female character and largely disliked Charlotte’s presence on the page. She made a total of 10 appearances in subsequent comic strips and then quietly disappeared without any explanation.
Some 45 years later, however, following Schulz’s death, a letter he had written to a disgruntled fan about Charlotte Braun was unearthed. In it, he wrote — perhaps jokingly, possibly not — that the reader and her friends “will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?” He ended the letter with a drawing of Charlotte with an axe in her head. The Library of Congress currently has the original letter.
9-The final “Peanuts” strip ran the day after Schultz died
Schulz was a notoriously hard worker and was rumored to have taken only one real vacation in his career. (Reportedly, the only time Peanuts strips were ever republished during his lifetime were when United Features ordered him to take five weeks off around his 75th birthday.)
It was perhaps fitting, then, that when he died of colon cancer two years later, it was just one day before his last original strip ran.
Schulz never missed a deadline.
10-“Peanuts” is no longer drawn
Unlike many other comic strips (such as Gasoline Alley, Blondie, and Beetle Bailey) which have brought on new artists to write or draw the cartoons after the original creator’s death or retirement, Peanuts ended with Schultz’s death in 2000.
In December of the previous year, Schulz had announced that he would be ending Peanuts’ nearly 50-year run; his final daily strip ran in January 2000 and the final Sunday comic ran on Feb. 13, 2000. Schulz used that strip as a farewell letter: “Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip. My family does not wish Peanuts to be continued by anyone else, therefore I am announcing my retirement. … Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy … how can I ever forget them …”
To this day, there have been no new strips released posthumously, and new animated specials must be based on story lines, themes, and dialogue that already exist within the strip’s 50-year history.
11-There is a “Peanuts” documentary that never aired
The very first Peanuts animation was made by Bill Melendez in 1959 for The Ford Show, a variety show sponsored by Ford Motors. Melendez would later form his own company, Bill Melendez Productions, and he was largely responsible for animating and directing all subsequent Peanuts television specials and movies — with one exception.
In 1963, Lee Mendelson (who later produced nearly all of Melendez’s work) produced a documentary about the popular comic strip in collaboration with Schulz himself. The finished product, A Boy Named Charlie Brown (not to be confused with the above-mentioned Oscar nominee of the same name), never aired on TV. It is, however, available on DVD exclusively in the Schulz Museum Store.
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