“I should take this bottle cap over to that Little Red-Headed Girl,” Charlie said once. “Well, that’s not exactly true … I hate myself for a lot of other reasons too.”īetter yet, he only knew hopeless ways to try to attract her. He always wanted to, but never quite could, make the first move: “I hate myself for not having enough nerve to talk to her,” he said in one strip. I also loved Charlie Brown because he never got the Little Red-Headed Girl. Even now, if I look at Munch’s The Scream I can imagine what Charlie Brown would have looked like had he ever grown up – bald, wizened and existentially demented through worry. Certainly, Ibsen and Strindberg made a lot of sense to me as an adult because I was raised on Peanuts. Perhaps the Scandinavians, who settled in the part of the US in which Schulz grew up, brought their northern European angst with them. To my childhood ears, it sounded as though all the voiceover artists had colds, which made the characters seem sadder and made Peanuts seem not so much cartoon as lugubrious dramatic exploration of seasonal affective disorder.
#That what i think love is charlie brown tv#
For me, that setting added to the melancholy mood, particularly when – as always seemed to be the case when I watched the TV versions – the action unfolded in winter. I think Sparky intensely held on to the feelings he had, whereas many of us discuss them with our parents or others and then let them go.”Īlthough Schulz spent much of his life in sunny California, he set Peanuts in the Minnesotan landscape of his youth. “Sparky said many times that he observed that there was a whole world going on in the playground that adults had no clue about. Her husband died 15 years ago and, for reasons we needn’t get into, she calls him Sparky. “I don’t think it was a calculated strategy to shatter the idyllic perceptions of childhood,” Schulz’s widow, Jean, told me recently. One reason Peanuts endured from 1950 to 2000, and was published in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and 21 languages, reaching a global audience of 355 million, was that all 17,897 of the four-framed comic strips that bore the name were drawn by that rare thing – an adult who didn’t want to systematically airbrush what childhood was really like. Those are the only possibilities that make sense. But how could I have been in that team when I kicked like Charlie Brown? Perhaps the trophy – or me – were pasted in using an early version of Photoshop. It shows me in the Alder Coppice junior school football team which has just won the Dudley under-11s six-a-side trophy. I have a photo from the early 1970s that has mystified me for decades. Meet the crew … Peanuts characters (from left) Pigpen, Peppermint Patty, Schroeder (back) Linus, Franklin (back) Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Sally (back) Lucy, Marcie and Woodstock Illustration: HO/Reuters It took him to show me what I knew already, that childhood involves not only failure but an inability to overcome failure, and for that I shall be eternally grateful.
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Charlie Brown was, like me, too full of self-doubt and torment to be part of the Blyton gang. The Five were forever exposing adult crime rings, taking ludicrous, healthy dips in early springtime ponds and eating seven square meals a day. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, for instance, were always overcoming adversity Charlie Brown was endlessly defeated by it. Here, at last, was a kindred spirit, one who served as a rebuke to pretty much every other character in books or TV shows I came across as a kid. I loved Charlie Brown for his insecurity, for admitting that he was unfit for the game of life, for providing consolation in a literary world of supposed role models. “Sometimes you lie in bed and you don’t have a single thing to worry about,” Charlie Brown reflected once. For kids like me and Charlie Brown there was a third one – our constant companion is, and will always be, worry. In four frames he told truths that every child knows but too often go unrecognised when adults write for kids: namely, that life is difficult, one’s shortcomings feel insuperable and that, when fate has laid you low, it comes along to kick you again in the proverbials.įor adults, the only certainties in life were death and taxes. The moral is in the fourth frame, as Charlie continues his lugubrious shuffle: “Then you discover you can’t even kick good.”Īs a child, I loved Charles M Schulz for comic strips such as this. “ When you lose the first game of the season,” he says, “it’s a long walk home.” Frame two, he sees a rock: “If anything gets in your way, you just want to kick it!” Frame three, he swipes hopelessly with his foot at the rock, misses and falls over. I n frame one, Charlie Brown is shuffling along, baseball cap peak drooping to the ground.
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