Peanuts
Peanuts is the name of a syndicated comic strip written and drawn by American cartoonist Charles Schulz, from 1950 to 2001.
Schulz originally called the strip Good Ol' Charlie Brown, after the strip's feature character. The syndicate insisted on the name Peanuts, a name Schulz disliked. The title panel for the Sunday strips usually read Peanuts, featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown, as a result.
Peanuts features a group of children, ranging from eight years old to infancy, whose perspectives on the world around them are at once childlike and adult. Initially, the strip revolved around Charlie Brown, a boy who generally fails at anything he attempts, but nevertheless continues trying. He can never win a ballgame, but continues playing baseball. He can never fly a kite successfully, but continues trying to fly his kite. Charlie Brown's playmates in the early years included Lucy Van Pelt and her little brother Linus, Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy, and piano-playing Schroeder.
The Peanuts characters generally do not age, except in the case of infant characters who catch up to the rest of the cast, then stop. Linus, for example, is born in the first couple of years of the strip's run. He ages from infancy to Charlie Brown's age over the course of the first fifteen years of the strip's run, during which we see him learn to walk and talk with the help of Lucy and Charlie Brown. Linus then stops aging, and becomes Charlie Brown's classmate in third grade.
In the 1960s, the strip shifts in two ways. For one, Snoopy becomes a more prominent character. Many of the strips revolve around Snoopy's active fantasy life, in which he might be a World War I fighter pilot or a hockey star, to the amusement and consternation of the children who wonder what he is doing. Also, Schulz introduced greater diversity in his cast of characters by replacing some of the largely anonymous neighborhood children (Shermy, Violet et al. ) with a character by the name of Peppermint Patty, an assertive, athletic girl who shakes up Charlie Brown's world by calling him "Chuck," flirting with him and giving him compliments which he's not so sure he deserves. Peppermint Patty (not to be confused with an earlier character named Patty) also brought a new group of friends, including the strip's first black character, Franklin, and Peppermint Patty's bookish sidekick Marcie, who calls Charlie Brown "Charles" (all other characters call him "Charlie Brown" at all times).
Peanuts is remarkable for its deft social commentary, especially compared with other strips appearing in the 1950s and early 1960s. Schulz did not explicitly address racial and gender equality issues so much as he assumed them to be self-evident in the first place. Peppermint Patty's athletic skill and self-confidence is simply taken for granted, for example. However, Schulz could throw some barbs when he chose. One memorable sequence featured a little boy named "5", whose sisters were named "3" and "4", whose father had changed the family surname to their zip code number as a protest. Another sequence lampooned Little Leagues and "organized" play, when all the neighborhood kids join "snowman-building" leagues and criticize Charlie Brown when he insists on building his own snowmen without leagues or coaches.
Television and films
The first excursion into other media for the strip was A Charlie Brown Christmas, a 30-minute television special which featured the music of Vince Guaraldi. Schulz and Bill Melendez waged and won some serious battles with network executives and sponsors over the content of the specials. One notable example was the retention of Linus reciting the story of the birth of Christ from the gospel of Luke. Another was the absence of a laugh track; Schulz wanted the audience to be able to enjoy the show at their own pace, without being cued. A third was the use of children's voices, instead of employing adult actors. The choice produced some production difficulties (notably with the child who did Lucy's voice, who was too young to read and needed to be cued line by line during the soundtrack recording), but was later hailed as contributing to the authentic, sincere feel of the special. (It is worth noting that the show is not titled "A Peanuts Christmas".)
Schulz and team later colaborated on other television specials and full-length feature films, the first of which was You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown (1971). (Again, note the absence of the word "Peanuts" in the title.) Most of these made use of material from Schulz's strips, which were then adapted.