Charlie Brown

A new book delves into one of the great enigmas about Charles M. Schulz: Was he a fundamentalist, an atheist—or both?

Colby Cosh on the Yuletide lessons we can learn from Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Ayn Rand

Good Grief! Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock are the gang are set to make their big-screen debut after 20th Century Fox secured the rights to create a movie based on the Peanuts franchise.

Tonight I saw this promo — a real promo, running on real television — for ABC’s broadcast of “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” I think this promo might have appeared earlier, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. Nothing I could say about it could really do justice to the pain of it, so here it is with no further comment:

You wouldn’t want to cross either one, That’s how it’s done in Wawota, Sask. and Andy, Andy, we got us a crime wave!

I am a big Peanuts fan who’s collected all of the Complete Peanuts volumes so far (they’re up to 1970, so they’ve already collected most of the strips from Charles Schulz’s prime); I’ve never been quite as sold on the animated specials as some. This is mostly due to the fact that I came to Peanuts first through the comic strip, so the specials always kind of got to me whenever they would depart from the strip. I’m not just talking about plot points that would never happen in the strip, like showing the Little Red-Haired Girl (something Schulz reluctantly approved for the special but refused to do in the comic strip), but just re-assigning lines: “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is great, but it jarred to hear Sally saying the line “All I want is what I have coming to me; all I want is my fair share” when that was originally Linus’s line. More importantly, the more specials they did, the less they had to do with the strip; I remember seeing the first broadcast of the infamous “It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown” and wondering who these people were and what they’d done with Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

Act One, published March 27, 1969…