Peanuts: Search and Destroy

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would buy a t shirt of 'win with charlie brown'

posters are from '68 election, btw

One day, I'll tell my children how one of my fondest childhood icons was a bullet-ridden doghouse.

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I used to love leafing through Peanuts Treasury back in high school. Wish I could remember specific strips well enough to post some.

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the Treasury was great, so many classic storylines... the doghouse burning down, the masked marvel, good stuff.

I wish Baseball-Reference.com would set up a fake Joe Shlabotnik page.

I never pass up an opportunity to post this late-period gem:

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i always appreciated Peanuts, and definitely had one of those Charlie Brown t-shirts when i was a teenager and wore it all the time b/c i strongly identified with him.

If you haven't already put http://peanutsroasted.blogspot.com/ in your blog reader of choice yet...

that strip Deric posted is so awesome, Schulz stayed gangsta til the end

I'm about 14 years behind on the Completes at the moment, but if I don't catch up I'm definitely jumping in again for the 90s, love that weird dgaf tone he developed there

I can think of no rational reason for this nightmare to occur. I'd wager that the population-at-large has the lowest interest in Peanuts that they've had in 60 years (unless people are really charmed by those Met Life commercials), and no one who's a legitimate fan is gonna want to see this CGI abortion. But I'm sure it will unaccountably be a box office smash.

""We finally felt the time was right and the technology is where we need it to be to create this film,"

Was this actually said? By a Schulz family member?

This is the worst idea ever.

think of myself as a 'legitimate fan' - but then i think anybody who has ever read peanuts is a 'legitimate fan' - and would go to see this in the same way I went to the Tintin movie, ie more in hope than expectation. not sure why computer animation is any more or less 'legitimate' than hand-drawn cel animation, tho' i can see how the peculiar dimensions of the characters cld look v weird rendered in three dimensions.

Was this actually said? By a Schulz family member?

Reading the Schulz biography gave me a rather low opinion of most of his family members.

My guess is that Stephen Spielberg won't be directing this, so I expect it to be more in the vein of The Smurfs or The Lorax. At any rate, given the general state of computer animated children's movies these days, I thoroughly expect it to be an amped-up and unfaithful and awful adaptation. Like, with a big musical sequence featuring Lucy singing "Lady Marmalade" and Linus doing a little rap interlude.

xp I was about to say the same thing, not so much because of the content of the biography as their reaction to it.

I don't know what a CGI Peanuts would look like - I think it would be a bad idea to make a Peanuts movie regardless of style. But I have a hard time imagining Charlie Brown being hit by a baseball and spinning around in 3D and not groaning.

What'll be 'great' is showing how Snoopy stays on top of the doghouse.

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I thoroughly expect it to be an amped-up and unfaithful and awful adaptation. Like, with a big musical sequence featuring Lucy singing "Lady Marmalade" and Linus doing a little rap interlude.

― Old Lunch, Wednesday, 10 October 2012 14:16 (20 minutes ago)

I'm gathering that you have not seen the spectacularly awful late-period TV specials? Definitely a rap interlude in one of those.

Seeing the late period tv specials is what makes me very pessimistic about this 3D project.

I hate the way oldschool cartoon greats look w/ even shadows and "depth" in 2D -- I couldn't make it thru that last looney Tunes feature -- but I did have the Peanuts Viewmasters as a kid.

not sure why computer animation is any more or less 'legitimate' than hand-drawn cel animation, tho' i can see how the peculiar dimensions of the characters cld look v weird rendered in three dimensions.

bill melendez told a great story about how schulz once came to his animation studio and flipped through a stack of cels with drawings of snoopy dancing and went 'that's good...that's not so good...ugh, that's awful!' so melendez handed him a pen and asked him to redraw it. schulz's answer was 'i can't, you never see snoopy from that perspective.' then schulz looked embarrassed and never made any comments about the quality of the animation again.

perhaps when the technologically improved Linus says, "Lights, please,"

what strip or storyline is this from?


What'll be 'great' is showing how Snoopy stays on top of the doghouse.

as an ice skater, he has excellent balance. or, if you really need it,

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"Lights, please" is Linus's short request before the reading of the Bible passage in A Charlie Brown Christmas.

And I just KNEW someone would post that image.

john hughes tried to make a live-action 'peanuts' movie back in 1992: http://www.variety.com/article/VR100425?refCatId=13

i can't imagine how they'll write the screenplay for this, schulz wrote all the animated specials himself and the ones that aired after his death were all taken verbatim from actual strips. i can't imagine anyone but schulz writing convincing dialogue for the characters.

oh I can totally imagine how they'll write the screenplay

i wish schulz's actual heirs had taken a cue from schulz's (arguably) greatest artistic heir:

It is 1988. The strip has been going for three years. The phone rings at Universal Press Syndicate. It is Steven Spielberg's assistant. Mr. Spielberg would very much like to speak to Mr. Watterson.

Lee Salem, the syndicate's president, is ecstatic. Two creative minds like that getting together! The Wizard of Oz! Winnie the Pooh! Peter Pan! Excited, he calls Watterson at home in Chagrin Falls, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. Would he talk to Spielberg?

No, Watterson says.

"Bill simply was not interested," Salem remembers now, the sound of lost millions in licensing revenue like so much static down the phone line.

Wow, that's classic

Watterson is a hero imho

and yeah he is easily Schulz' greatest heir

(Mutts dude a close second)

Augh (re Mutts dude, who drives me up the wall)

Mutts is pretty to look at but also pretty terrible.

Mutts started out promisingly because the art is so good, but pretty quickly got stuck in mush and will never get out.

Cul de Sac was closest in recent years, but just reached its own sad end.

This film will give us a new medium in which to engage consumers globally and showcase the power of the Peanuts brand.

i was going to say go fuck yrselves but it just seemed totally inadequate

(to be clear tho this is entirely schulz' fault, as he made it quite clear snoopy would do anything for money)

He's a dog, different work standards. Also those Sopwith Camels don't fund themselves.

certainly not at the rate he went through them

Precisely. It's like Berke Breathed and speedboats.

While I agree that Schulz is totally responsible for Peanuts becoming a "brand" in the first place, the branded stuff still maintained the general tenor of the strips (while he was alive, anyway). I have very little confidence that the movie is going to be very faithful to the source material. Thoroughly expecting a frenzied pace, double entendres, farts, and lots of Poochie-style attitude.

yeah, probably true.

plus tremendous poshlost sentimentality, in excess even of post-67ish peanuts' already significant quotient of same

what if wes anderson directs and michael cera gets weird botox to make his head completely spherical?

Thoroughly expecting a frenzied pace, double entendres, farts, and lots of Poochie-style attitude.

Poll: Who Will Fart in the Peanuts Movie?