Peanuts: Search and Destroy

I'll definitely see this, even at 38 I still love Peanuts fare.

did anyone see this movie?

wish i had a scanner, but this peanuts I actually had to cut out and save:

Panel 1:
Charlie Brown, awake in bed, staring at ceiling, snoopy sleeping draped over CB's feet: "Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, can my generation look to the future with hope?"

Panel 2:
Charlie Brown, lying on side with very worried expression, and snoopy is now awake with identical furrowed brow:
"Then, out of the dark, a voice comes to me that says, 'Why, sure... well, I mean... that is... it sort of depends... I mean... if... when... who... we... and..."

October 23, 1995

most of them were bad, but every once in a while... pow.

― (Jon L), Friday, September 26, 2003 11:05 PM (12 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is actually a LOT of gold in the later peanuts.

i saw it:

this was actually quite lovely and sweet, i was pleasantly surprised.

none of the fears expressed here and elsewhere came to pass, the voices sound right and the dialogue is authentically peanuts-ish and they didn't tack on any grand quest story. (and no, no crude jokes.) i was basically the target audience to be disappointed or infuriated by this movie and i wasn't, at all. unless you really hate the way the cgi looks, there's nothing here that any peanuts fan is going to hate.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, November 9, 2015 6:44 PM (3 days ago)

it seems worth remembering that expectations were not high for the first major peanuts adaptation either:

A Charlie Brown Christmas was completed just ten days shy of its national broadcast premiere. All involved believed the special would be an unmitigated disaster. (Bill) Melendez first saw the completed animation at a showing in a theater in the days before its premiere, turning to his crew of animators and remarking, "My golly, we've killed it." Melendez was embarrassed, but one of the animators, Ed Levitt, was more positive regarding the special, telling him it was "the best special (he'll) ever make (...) This show is going to run for a hundred years." (Lee) Mendelson was similar in his assumptions of the show's quality, and when he showed the film to network executives in New York, their opinions were also negative. Their complaints included the show's slow pace, the music not fitting, and the animation too simple. "I really believed, if it hadn't been scheduled for the following week, there's no way they were gonna broadcast that show," Mendelson later said.

http://i.imgur.com/vkp8ZC8.png

The movie completely embodied the peanuts strips: the characters we love, the exact same situations and quotes, jokes that make us smile but not laugh, and a comforting aura of fluff that is completely foreign to any child that likes to move it move It. Likewise, my excitement subsided by the end of the movie.

B-

Esp loved the part where Charlie and Linus get iinto a heated debate over whether fuel can melt steel

11/16/52

https://twitter.com/Hoganmag/status/666256171444150272

saw this w/ my six year old over the weekend. i didn't find it offensive or anything... too much slapstick-y kinda stuff ultimately, but it was mostly a pleasure to look at, and found an OK middle ground between the TV specials and the strip itself. six year old loved it.

reading 97-98 now and noticed the rifle strip posted upthread being reused nine years later, along with the short sequence leading up to it. the dates on the strips have been changed but otherwise they are reprints. this is the first time in the fantagraphics books that i've noticed schulz doing this.

did he do this at any other time? it's interesting given the unusually pointed nature of the strip.

Huh. I haven't really looked through my copy much yet so I hadn't noticed that. I think they were running some reprints occasionally towards the end of his run when his health was failing but I don't know why Fanta would choose to reprint those strips. They usually run some sort of explanatory text when they make decisions like that.

ah, according to the peanuts faq in 1997 schulz took his one and only vacation and 35 strips that year were reprints.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/03/07/barack_obama_wrote_the_foreword_for_the_newest_complete_peanuts_installment.html

oh whoa they're almost done!

!!!

awesome

Yeah, this is the final collection of strips, and then I guess there's a book of supplementary material coming out later this year (something to justify the existence of a final slipcase, if nothing else).

Note that volume 25 will also include THE ENTIRE RUN of Li'l Folks, and Volume 26 looks far more interesting than just a slipcase-filler: http://aaugh.com/wordpress/2016/02/you-can-and-should-order-complete-peanuts-26/

Thanks! I hadn't seen much in the way of details for 25 and hadn't seen anything about 26. The Chip Kidd book that came out last year is lovely so I'm definitely down for another volume of ephemera.

I'd love to see a complete set of images from the View-Master slides but it would probably be weird to put non-Schulz work in a Schulz-centric book.

r.i.p. donna wold, the real little red-haired girl:

http://www.startribune.com/obituary-donna-wold-inspired-charles-schulz-s-little-red-haired-girl-for-peanuts/390807911/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/21/business/media/metlife-grounds-snoopy-curse-you-red-baron.html?_r=0

that piece reads weirdly like an obituary, what w/ the odd use of past tense: "snoopy was the loyal pup..."

I found it really sad and poignant, the end of an era

i liked this bit:

Consumers thought the “Peanuts” characters were friendly and approachable, Ms. Lee said, but did not associate them with traits like leadership and responsibility. Nor did the characters affect interest in buying insurance.

i was never even remotely attached to the idea of the peanuts gang hawking metlife, though i do think it made them seem like somehow the most cuddly and least corporate insurance company, without them having to do anything else. which was the intention. the bigger story of course is the fading popular visibility of these characters. i mean clearly the movie was trying to intervene in that process and maybe it succeeded? my sense is that their time of ubiquitous familiarity could be beginning to fade. but i don't browse the kids' and cartoons' sections of bookstores much - - - maybe they are still widely sold and read. the christmas special i'm sure is still in rotation but i have a feeling the rest of that lot have been supplanted, if TV even shows holiday specials anymore. it's weird, peanuts wasn't THAT huge a part of my childhood but imagining childhood without it is real weird.

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it. I can now read the 60s ones and they're pretty good. I do a scan though, and if I see Snoopy with a thought balloon, or doing anything besides standing, walking, or laying on his doghouse, or a new character like Woodstock, etc, I skip it.

http://i.imgur.com/TQi2CWr.gif

http://i.imgur.com/4qCLWud.gif

all i really remember from jonathan franzen's essay on peanuts is that he uses the phrase "the unhilarious bird woodstock."

great, now i'll never be able to think of him any other way

lol i should add that i think woodstock is a much better character than anyone in anything i've ever read by franzen

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/71/44/05/71440504a330329c37c7cab836d822ef.gif

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it.

so many kids reading the LA Times every day

They may well grab the funnies page like we did in my day. I mean, who the hell else is reading some of those?

The Los Angeles Times continues to run the series, so I imagine young kids are still getting exposed to it.

At least a dozen seeders on The Pirate Bay.

Contemporaneous Peanuts always seemed a little stodgy when I was a kid but I was lucky enough at the time to find a stack of my uncle's paperback collections of the timeless and classic '50s and '60s material. That's the stuff the newspapers should be running if they want to build a new fanbase.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids read newspaper comics at all anymore? Abbott?

Lol, exactly the person to ask.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids anyone reads newspaper comics at all anymore?

I do, but not every day

I was the biggest comics page reader as a kid, but that section is shit now.

Worst thing to happen to the comics in the past 20 years? Introducing set fonts into the text balloons.

Hell yeah it makes things easier, but it looks like shit.

That's the stuff the newspapers should be running if they want to build a new fanbase.

That was Bill Watterson's argument: do editors think that fewer and smaller and shittier strips will somehow attract more readers? Wouldn't making a huge Sunday comics section, with one big comic per page, be a relatively cheap and easy way to increase circulation?

I honestly don't even get what the point of the comics section is anymore. With very few exceptions, it's been a cesspool for decades. Which seems increasingly shameful with each amazing old-school strip I discover. At least we're in the golden age of collections of classic strips!

(i read the paper every day but haven't read strip sections in years as they don't exist in the non-tabloid dailies; somebody tell carlos slim to step up his game)

i know my niece was reading and cutting out strips from the sunday paper a few years ago.

can anyone speak to whether or not kids read newspaper comics at all anymore?

i had a daytime server job at a diner and it was so slow we spent most of the time playing cards or reading newspapers, comics was the favorite section next to sudoku.

that was 10 years ago tho. no idea if now people just play games on their phones.

seems likely

I still read the LAT comics (on paper!) but I'm old. I read Bizzaro, Candorville, the Latino one I can't remember the name of now (by Lalo Alcaraz), Doonesbury (they're also rerunning this one, think they're in the late 70s now), even Dilbert, and even after I found out what a tool Adams is, and two single-panel ones that I also can't remember.

What's the name of the fucking sub dilbert pirate one

Overboard! I really liked both Overboard and Dilbert when I was a kid, I think partly because they were poorly drawn enough that I could draw reasonable approximations of the characters from both