Welcome to Unpacking Peanuts. The podcast for three cartoonists. Take an in-depth look at The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time. Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We're here in 1991 in Unpacking Peanuts. We're gonna wrap up the year, so that's always a fun time. We'll get our MVPs and strips of the year and all that kind of good stuff, so thanks for joining us. I'll be your host for the proceedings. My name's Jimmy Gownley. I'm also a cartoonist.
I did things like Amelia Rule, Seven Good Reasons Not To Grow Up, The Dumbest Idea Ever, and you can subscribe to my new comic, Tanner Rocks, over there on gvillcomics.substack.com. It'll come right to your email. Joining me as always are my pals, co-hosts and fellow cartoonists. He's a playwright and a composer, both for the band Complicated People as well as for this very podcast.
He's the co-creator of the original Comic Book Price Guide, the original editor for Amelia Rules, and the creator of such great strips as Strange Attractors, A Gathering of Spells, and Tangled River. It's Michael Cohen.
Say hey.
He's the executive producer and writer of Mystery Science Theater 3000, a former vice president of Archie Comics and the creator of the Instagram sensation, Sweetest Beasts, it's Harold Buchholz.
Hello.
Well, guys, we did it. We got to the end of another year, another epic year in Peanuts and another great year in, just pop culture. How are you guys feeling about where we're at in our journey here?
Tired.
Can you imagine if we did this in real time? That's what we should have done, one strip a day.
Oh, yeah. That's the way to go.
That would have been how to do it.
That'll stretch it out.
Harold, how about you?
It's crazy to see this new stuff that I really kind of missed. I don't recognize any strips from 1991 as I was living my life. I was newlywed. Yeah, I just hadn't seen this stuff before, so it's all fresh to me and that's making it fun given their familiar friends and characters that had such an influence on me in the past, to see a version of them that I've never seen has been very interesting.
Even if I'm not loving it quite as much as what I really loved about Peanuts as a little kid, that doesn't mean it isn't really a joy to see more of these characters that I just missed out on the rest part of my life.
Yeah, I feel the same way. I love exploring these areas because in some ways, this is insane, but I feel a little bit like it's ours because, right? I mean, there's a zillion books that are about everything else, but we're talking about this and I love it. That's really exciting. Do you have any good old editor and publisher info for us, Harold? I know that's been a source for you recently.
Yeah. I've been looking into this. For those of you who aren't in the mix with this, there was a publication called Editor and Publisher for Editors and Publishers of Newspapers and subscribed to it when I was in college. I would have let that lapse probably right around now or a little bit earlier. They had a lot of information about syndicated cartoons for the newspapers that subscribed who were looking for keeping their comic section fresh.
Certainly, the syndicates were spending money advertising in this publication. It made sense to the publication to give it a lot of space, a reasonable amount of space in this newspaper magazine. Checking in 1991 and their archives, I was interested to see what was going on in the peanuts world because they were pretty good about finding things happening with peanuts in the news. Often, they would instigate things and ask Schulz about things here and there.
So, it's just a great source of seeing where you are in the timeline of peanuts through the lens of the newspapers. One of the things that came up, of course, is a comic survey. They would report the newspapers around the country when they would pull their readers, and they were asking, hey, what do you think of the strips that are in the paper? What about these strips?
Sometimes they would offer you sample strips and say, vote on this one, we'll put in the two of the five we're showing here, and we'll get rid of the bottom two strips from the poll. So this was high stakes for cartoonists, because you are laid bare before the people of this newspaper, and they would often not just pull and say, hey, and this is now happening. Sometimes, they would literally show the number of votes for everything.
So if you were a working cartoonist and the word got out and the list is circulating and you're at the bottom, it's like, oh, that's really hard.
Can you imagine that in any other thing? Here's our four sports writers. Let's rank them. The way you don't like, we're going to get rid of.
It's a powerful thing. I think that's why social media has such power over us, is because whether you like it or not, things are numbered and you see the number of people who bothered to come back to do this or that or watch this, or like this or not like this. We have to adjust to these sorts of things and cartoonists definitely had to live with these reader polls, which were becoming particularly popular in the late 80s and early 90s.
What I see from the February 16th edition, they said that readers had voted Calvin and Hobbes as their favorite comic once again at the Florida's Palm Beach Post. 6,170 people in the pre-internet era bothered to respond to this survey. 6,170 people. That's nuts. And number two is Peanuts. Then For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnson. Hagar the Horrible is showing up a lot in these ones. And The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sanson. The very bottom of the list was Batman.
And they said it is being dropped by the Post. So there you go. That's the sad news for Batman fans.
Does it say who drew it?
Bob Kane.
It was very kind of them not. They list everybody's names of the winners, but they didn't bother to mention who was doing Batman at the time from the one that was being dropped. So their name was not attached to that.
The only reason I ask is Jerry Ordway, who I was a big fan of, he is a great artist and it was a great Superman artist. And he also did the adaptation for the Batman 89 movie, which was astounding in how he got the accuracy of the actors and stuff like that. I mean, comic adaptations of movies are terrible. But I just wondered if he happened to get the gig due in the comic, I don't know.
Well, there was another poll, Sheboygan Press, and they were asking, what do you want to have brought back that we've dropped? What do you want to drop that we have in the paper? Only 29 readers of the Wisconsin paper wanted to keep the creators' distributed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Whoa.
And 660 people wanted the return of Greg Evans' Luann, which apparently they had dropped. So they were going to-
Boo on them.
Yeah. But the editor said that the Sunday version of the seven-day-a-week turtles would remain in the paper. And then they conjecture here that maybe the turtles and Batman showings could be partially explained by the relative newness of the strips and the fact that a large portion of their audiences are young kids who would not be answering a poll and also not buying the newspaper.
Right.
But anyway, so that's kind of the- Oh, and then a couple of things just to kind of give us the zeitgeist of where Peanuts is. In Manchester, the union leader, they invited readers to let them know what they thought about the paper's funnies after Nancy and Annie were dropped. And he reported that more people mentioned Gasoline Alley as one of their favorites than any other color strip.
Where's the yellow kid?
Right. That was 70 years into that strip, although it was really nicely done.
I think they should be running photographs of cave paintings still. I mean, come on.
Also in the news, Schulz has been a part of this exhibition called This Is Your Childhood, Charlie Brown, Children of American Culture 1945 to 1968 at the Smithsonian Institutions, National Museum of American History. So that's pretty classy.
Wow. The Louvre and the Smithsonian. That's pretty good.
He's doing pretty well. Also, the Forbes List came out where they would list the 40 highest paid entertainers every year. And Charles Schulz came in ninth of all entertainers.
All right, 1991. Can I guess how much? Did they tell how much you made annually?
They did.
All right, you're ready? I'm getting, Michael, you guessed too. How much did Charles make?
No, no, no, I have absolutely no idea.
No idea? Okay, then I'm gonna guess. $53 million.
It's a $51 million.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
And one other cartoonist made the list at 39th place. Any guesses?
Jim Davis.
No.
Oh wow.
This is a slight curve ball with $18 million, 39th place, Matt Groening, The Simpsons.
Oh, for God's sake, of course, of course. Yes. Wow.
Anyway, that's, I don't need to go any further than that, but that's kind of an interesting picture of where Schulz is in the time we're gonna be covering with these strips.
It is interesting. And I was thinking in some ways it feels so unique because it's this art form housed inside this delivery medium and the delivery medium is struggling in a way that is causing, I think, the art form to struggle. But that does kind of happen. You can see it was streaming even now, right? Because, I mean, they all seem to be searching for their audience, but there's not that sense of, oh, here is the source of all this great stuff, and it becomes this big cultural thing.
Everything is so small, and that's more a result of the fact that people have to pay for all these streaming surfaces than it is for the quality of the shows that they're streaming, if that makes any sense.
Well, one other thing I remember reading that Schulz was saying in 1991, the question asked of an editor and publisher, journalist named David Astor, who did lots and lots of these articles, he asked, do you think comics gets the respect it deserves in the United States? And Schulz, I think he said something along the lines of, I don't think it's ever going to get the respect it deserves. It's considered along the lines of burlesque.
Well, that's an interesting, I wouldn't expect that correlation, but I guess the idea is that some burlesque has done incredibly well, but because it's the milieu in which it's in, you don't really honor it. If there's an amazing comedian in burlesque, that comedian is going to have to move somewhere else to get any respect.
So there's no Pulitzer Prize for burlesque there.
That's my knowledge.
Well, and television was considered lowbrow until about this time, and the prestige, I mean, sopranos and things like that. So it morphed into something that people take very seriously.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, wouldn't you say that some TV, like I remember they used to do like the live drama stuff, which they actually dropped after about 10 years of TV, that a lot of people considered that. I don't know how seriously they took it, but it seemed like it was the prestige version of TV.
I've heard, I've read a lot of think pieces, well, not recently, but years ago when it was, are we in another golden age of TV and stuff like that. A lot of people point to 1989 as the year when TV started to get more ambitious because Seinfeld started, Twin Peaks started, and other things that I didn't watch, whose name I can't remember started. That's a long time for it to be rolling. But I still think TV in general is probably considered. Maybe not.
I guess for young people, TV is considered the same as film or anything else.
That's interesting. Yeah, because if they're not going to a theater, what makes the difference? They're watching it on a screen. It's just long form, short form.
Well, TV nowadays has budgets that are bigger than Hollywood sometimes.
Yeah. Yeah.
I listened to the Quentin Tarantino podcast called Video Archives, where they are just going over the old videos they used to have in their video store when they were kids and they watch them on VHS and talk about them. Everyone's in a while, I'll watch one that they recommend. One of the things I seem to be drawn to is when they say, boy, they had nothing to make this movie work. They had five bucks and six weeks and they made it happen. Those are so fun and interesting to watch.
Then you'll see like Rings of Power, which cost a billion dollars and you can't watch two seconds of it. I mean, the money and creativity are almost, I think, diametrically opposed sometime, which is maybe why comics work.
It's weird. In some ways, every low-budget film, whether it likes it or not, is an on tour film. Right. Because it's one guy scraping along trying to get something done. There's not enough committee-izing of it because there's not the resources. So it's usually somebody, usually the director is seeing through a vision. They have to by themselves. That's what I love about independent films and low-budget movies, even like old sci-fi movies or whatever.
Yeah. You see a little bit more of the print of the person making it because it really isn't a committee. Yeah. Well, the one other thing that Schulz said in respect to not getting respect for comics and the context in which people experience it was this poor reproduction. But the other thing is the thing that I am featured in every day is thrown away tomorrow. There's something about that that somehow he thought would change the perception of the value of comics.
Wow. Yeah, that's true. Yesterday's newspaper has no value whatsoever. Well, that's sad.
Except for the bird in the cage.
Yeah.
The fish that you're at.
Well, with that in mind, how about we take a minute and look at these long forgotten strips that are totally available for everyone to read and hard cover and on the Internet. So, all right, we're going to do that. We're going to hop in on the strips. Now, if you want to follow along with us, there's a couple of ways you could do it.
The first thing you got to do, you just got to do, got to go over to unpackingpeanuts.com, sign up for the Great Peanuts reread and that'll get you one email a month where we tell you to the best of our ability at the time what we're going to be covering in that month. Then you don't even need a penny to read them. Like I said, you can just hop on over to gocomics.com and every single one of these strips is available for you to read there.
Or if you got a little coin in your pocket or you just want to treat yourself a little retail therapy, you could buy the unpacking, or the unpacking, yeah, you can buy.
Not yet.
Hang in there, people. Hang in there. You can buy the complete Peanuts from Fana Graphics and you'll have a beautiful collection on your bookshelf. So, with all that said, how about we just get back to the strips?
Sure.
September 6th, Lydia and Linus are in class. Linus leans back to Lydia and says, Lydia, can I borrow a paper clip? To which Lydia replies, aren't you kind of old for me? Which causes Linus to freak out and scream, I didn't ask you to marry me. I just want a paper clip. And then Lydia replies, you need more than a paper clip. I think you're coming unglued and Linus sinks down in his seat.
Lydia, by the way, has by far the highest percentage of strips being picked by us.
Really? That's amazing.
I think, well, at least I think I picked every Lydia strip. Yeah.
What is it about Lydia? They're all just bangers. Every one of the strips really kind of works.
Well, she's so mysterious.
Yeah.
And she's always got like a straight face. She's like not reacting to anything.
She always reveals things about Linus that you don't get to see otherwise.
And I really do think he had some great character design at this stage. I think Peggy Jean is great. I think Lydia is great. I think Eudora, I mean, I know she's gone back 15 years now, but still post-60s, let's say. Great, great character designs.
Yeah, I love the shading of Lydia's hair in the second panel. Just the light shining off of what looks like jet black hair.
Yeah.
It's just really nicely, nicely done.
Yeah, I always found that very hard to do. And a few times, I've had lots of characters that have black hair, and I always try to, well, this time I'm going to do it like that, put a little highlight in it, and it never works for me. It always looks like jangly black hair.
It's a real science to do the little, the feathering on the hair to make it look, and then when they color it, they color it blue.
They color it blue. That's maddening. The blue hair in Superman and Lois Lane and all that.
Veronica.
It works, it works. I mean, for some reason, I've tried various colors, and blue definitely reads the best as being black hair.
And who was the first person to try it? Because it just seems so not right until he put it in there.
Yeah, totally.
It seems not right. Yeah. Lydia's hair is...
Oh, no, it's really not interesting. Go ahead.
Well, neither is mine.
I'm leaving this in.
I remember. All right, we'll leave all this in and we'll decide who's is least interesting. You guys can...
Readers right in, just like the syndicated cartoonist to humiliate us.
My entry in the not interesting comments is, I remember when John Byrne took over the Fantastic Four, he made a big stink. He had to get the colorist to make Mr. Fantastic's eyes brown again. The colorist weren't into it because they had to do the separations by hand, and it was a lot easier to just put 100 percent cyan than it was to mix brown for Mr. Fantastic's eyes. See, I told you that's not interesting at all. Beat that, Harold.
That's pretty interesting little trivia. I was just looking at Lydia's hair and the design of what he's doing with the hair, because he's got this arc, which you have the hairband, which obviously gives it a clean look. But then you have this arc from the back of the hairband around the back of the head, and then dropping all the way down. But then he has this one little stray hair that's a little bit longer than the rest of the bottom of the hair, which is like what do you call it, Bob?
I like that. Then there's a little stray hair just above her brow. In one way, it looks perfect, but in the other way, it looks like there's just enough kind of this little wispy.
Yes.
There's which, I don't know, it's just a very nice attractive design for hair, because you get the sense that ladies are very put together, right? She's got a proper, she's got good posture, the way he always draws her, and then it looks like her hair is pretty clean. But there's just a little bit that's not absolutely perfect. For some reason, the design-wise, I think, really works well.
Yeah, it does. It keeps it from being too geometric, to looking like just a shape filled in with black. It gives it that hair look. You know, seeing that, talking about the little part at the top where we just see the highlight brushed in, where he leaves the white showing. The guy who is a master of doing this, a totally different style, of course, is Michael's favorite, Al Williamson.
Because I remember as a kid looking at episodes, yeah, looking at panels in his Empire Strikes Back comic, which was a huge comic for me as a kid, where he would do up to where the highlight would come in. And then he's so good, he wouldn't even have to do the holding line around the hair. If you follow what I'm saying. And it would still completely read like realistic hair on the realistic head with the end. It's just like, that was another thing. It's like, oh, I'm going to try that.
No, Jimmy, you draw like circles and triangles for hair, that is not going to work in your style. But I try it every year once, you know, can I do it now? Nope. September 16th, Charlie Brown and Snoopy are sitting in the classroom. Snoopy is very happy to be there. And Charlie Brown says, Sorry, ma'am, there was no one to stay with my dog today, so I had to bring him with me. No, he continues, as long as he has some crayons, he won't be any trouble.
And the last panel Snoopy holds up a drawing that he's been working on at the desk, and he thinks to himself, looks a little bit like her, doesn't it? And it's a little stick figure drawing of the teacher.
This is the first time we've ever seen the teacher in Peanuts.
That's right.
That's why I picked this one. This is a historic moment Snoopy has provided us.
So now we have an idea. She's a curly haired woman with only three fingers.
I guess she forgot to take the curlers out of the hair before she came to school. Yeah, that's what it looks like. This is an interesting version of Snoopy. This is a different version of Snoopy than we've seen much, I think, in previous 40 years. Snoopy as the child, you know, the happy to be a little child.
It seems to be this aspect of him that comes out when Charlie Brown brings in to school and Snoopy's kind of on his good behavior, and is just genuinely delighted to be part of the human world.
That first panel of him smiling is just adorable. I love him sitting there. He is so happy to be sitting in that classroom.
Nice, earnest look on his face. And the little tongue that's sticking out, which is Schulz, so famous for the tongue sticking out of the top of your mouth when you're drawing or writing. I love it.
September 18th. Okay, we're still in class with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and this time Snoopy's reading a book and it's cracking him up. Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, he says in the first panel. Panel two. By the way, at this point, they've given Snoopy his own desk. He's now behind Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown's sitting there and he says, Sorry, ma'am, he loves those bunny books.
And then Snoopy says to Charlie Brown says to Snoopy, The teacher says you can look at the bunny books, but to do it quietly. Snoopy is reading it and trying to hold himself together. And he says, I can't help it. Boy, I wish they had books like this when I was young. I once had to, I think this had to be as validated as an English teacher could possibly be. Sister Anne James out there.
I had to leave the room because I was laughing so hard at Huckleberry Finn, which remains one of my top five books of all time to this day. And I, I was like, I'm so sorry. I couldn't, she's like, no, that was great. I think she just assumed everyone was just asleep. She's like, wow, you thought it was funny. Fantastic.
That's great. Well, these, these bunny books you makes, you want to bring these into the world. Got to make these bunny books, not just in the sideline of some comic strip from 33 years ago.
Now, do you think this is one of the canonical bunny books that he's already, no, it can't be.
These are new. These are new bunny books.
Okay, so is it a reboot?
No, it's in these bunny books.
September 26th, Charlie Brown's hanging out in his beanbag chair, and Sally's behind him. He says to Sally, have you done your homework yet? Sally answers, no, I have a new philosophy. She continues, I've decided to put everything off until the last minute and to learn everything in life the hard way. To which Charlie Brown replies, good luck. And Sally says, thank you. That's what my teacher said. I don't get that this is a joke. This seems like a good philosophy. What's the problem?
Yeah, actually, she's my new guru. I do whatever Sally says.
The thing that does drive me crazy, and that drives me crazy because it's only ever said with love, I guess, by people close to me. But it's always a rush to get a comic out at the end. And every once in a while people say, well, maybe you should start earlier next time. As if you don't wake up the next morning and start and spend every waking moment of your life doing the thing, and there's just no more time.
And if there was more time, you would fill it working more on that.
Exactly, exactly. September 28th, oh, a really weird looking strip. Really weird looking. Snoopy's looking, he's atop the dog house. He's huge atop the dog house, and he's looking right at us, and he's thinking to himself, he has his eyes closed, you should never let them know you're anxious about dinner. Then he has, you're going to have to look at this one yourself because this is so much about Snoopy's facial expressions.
So in panel two, he continues, never turn your head or even look at the door, be cool. Then panel three, though, he glances sideways towards the house. In the last panel, he admonishes himself, I hate myself when I do that.
Now, if you told me that in the history of Peanuts, there was one strip that Schulz did not do, I'd pick this one.
Yeah, I was thinking exactly the same thing. I was thinking, if it weren't for the lettering, if you just took the lettering away and asked, did Schulz draw this? I would, yeah.
Yeah, it is so rare. I think we've probably seen Snoopy looking directly at us four times in the last 20 years of the strip. And now it's four times in one strip. He does not fit on the dog house, right? I mean, if that, and we know we've talked about how he changes the design according to his needs. But if that dog lied down in that dog house, it wouldn't fit, right?
Yeah. And what's interesting to me, when I look at this, we know we've been talking about this for years, the tremor that Schulz has, it seems as if he has learned the stroke you need to do for the things he draws over and over again. And he can do a really fast stroke to get the peanut head of Snoopy or whatever, so that the tremor does not come through. When he's doing the back legs of Snoopy, look at the left one on the third panel and the right one for that matter. What the heck?
It looks like I don't normally draw this. I don't quite know how to do it. I'm hesitating and it is the lumpiest, craziest looking thing.
Yeah, it really is.
The weirdest thing is, I mean, to get the gag across, he could have done this in any position, Snoopy in any position. I mean, he could have been lying down. It certainly could have been a profile or a three quarter view. Yeah, and look how he handles the eyes. Totally different in every panel. Yeah.
Yeah. And I don't think the panel too reads as cool. Is that drugged or something?
Olaf.
Yeah, very Olaf. I like the last one, though. I think that's a great disgruntled looking. And the first one, the two in the middle are weird to me, but I don't know.
Yeah, it's almost like he's kind of doing a Garfield style strip here. Garfield is usually sitting on the countertop. He's usually, not usually straight on with us, but something close to it. So it's interesting to see Schulz kind of playing with that.
October 2nd, Charlie Brown's sitting in his room. He looks like he's just reading possibly a comic book on the floor. And Sally is standing in the doorway and she has her arms full of different things, including like a teddy bear. She's got some bags on the floor. And she says to Charlie Brown, Mom says I can have your room when you go away to college. To which Charlie Brown says, You're going to stand there till then? And Sally replies, I'm a very patient person. She's just funny.
This is a pretty ugly strip though.
You think?
In terms of jangled lines, jangly, uh, zip-a-tone.
Yeah. I think you start to really see fatigue starting to set in. Like the, you know, the, the comic book that Charlie Brown's reading, for example, it looks just very, like you're struggling to get it across the finish line. Having said that though, and I think maybe the reason is, this is hard to draw, to draw three identical, roughly identical, pictures of Sally with all those items in her arm, including the little teddy bear and stuff. I think that would wear me out.
I, you know, drawing a repeat thing with that much detail.
That first panel, I like.
Oh, I like the first panel.
I'm generally, I said, I'm not a huge fan of the use of really rough, what would you call it? Shading. Because it often will draw me away from what I'm looking at in terms of the overall effect and I get pulled into the individual lines. But that first panel, I really like the black behind Sally that is solid, but then it just becomes slightly rough at the bottom. You got that rumpled throw rug, I think is brilliant.
I love that and just the bundle of Sally with her little teddy bear and holding, looks like I don't know what all she's got in her hands there, and her little briefcase suitcase on either side. I think that's just really nicely done. Then the zippotone that he's cutting out, for those of you who are not reading along with us right now, we've talked about this rough zippotone that he'll cut out with white space around it, and it just works for me in this particular panel.
Now, for some reason, Schulz neglects to shade on our right of Sally, the suitcase that he shaded in the first panel, probably just an oversight. But anyway, I was pleased with how this one looked. We have one that's coming up a little bit later, which is loaded with this wild shading, and that one I have really mixed feelings about. I can't wait to hear what you guys think.
You know, I think the thing about the way, when you say, you're not crazy about it, when you can basically see the stroke as the stroke, you can see the tool that was used. That's one of the things that sometimes takes you out of it. I think really what it is is when someone can do that, it's because they somehow have the ability to make it both look like this tool they're using and the texture that they're trying to create.
Yes, and that's a hard thing to do. Yes. I will say, looking at that first panel and actually all three of them, Schulz honors the faces and the heads of these characters, which is to me is by far the most important thing in a comic strip. The expressions, how the characters are connecting, and he does not compromise that in any way with all of the stuff going on around it. They're very cleanly drawn. You can see they're looking at each other.
You've got this interesting angle of Charlie Brown's head and the cleanness of that. Yeah, I think we talked about this before, but my theory is the cleanness of where the lines are and tends to draw the eye to that. Then everything that's rougher and more jangly is like your peripheral vision. He's drawing me to the things that I really need to see in that first panel and then everything around it, you have to pull yourself out of it, and really analyze it separately.
I'm just getting the gestalt or the effect of it.
Well, this is actually a good strip.
Yeah.
But I think it would work just as well if actually there was no background at all.
Even though it's his room and that's part of the story.
Yeah. I think, I mean, as an experiment, just take everything away except Sally's stuff and Charlie Brown sitting. It still would, the gag would work. Strip would work.
Yeah.
But I think on a page, if you're scanning a newspaper page for the comics, this would not attract me.
Really? And why is that?
Because it looks too busy.
Even though you got his classic clean lettering and...
Yeah. Well, I mean...
It's still just too much to the end.
It's hard to imagine anybody who didn't know Peanuts, you know, finding this strip.
Right.
But it wouldn't be what my eye went to. I think that, anyway, he did what he did, but I think it's just like too much. It's too fussy.
October 5th, Charlie Brown and Sally are hanging out at the old dining room table, and Sally is making, practicing a bunch of mathematical signs, which, as we see in panel two, she explains to Charlie Brown, these are called radical signs. She then continues practicing them by saying, I'm as radical as they come.
This ain't nothing you're going to learn in grammar school, junior high or high school.
That's why Peppermint Patty gets D minuses, because she's forced to be competing in classes that are designed for college freshmen.
They're in some weird AP elementary school.
Yeah.
But radical was a cool word seven years before this.
Yeah. I think when did radical? Because you still hear people say it now. Mid-80s. Yeah. Yeah, 85.
Rad became part of it.
Rad, yeah.
Valley speak.
Yeah. Radsters, I think I used that term in my very first comic I ever drew. Wow. I'm sorry. Which what we called the skateboard kids. Oh, he's a radster. I came from quite a place.
Yeah. That's one word that sure changed its meaning from 1970s to 1980s, radical. Yeah.
Isn't that true? October 14th. This is one of those panoramic, single panel strips and we see Snoopy in what appears to be a very well-stocked antique shop. He is looking at just a stack of three vintage supper dishes. He thinks to himself, I love looking at antique dog dishes.
I think he might have sketched an actual antique shop here.
That's what I was thinking, right? This feels like he went out with Jeannie for a Sunday of antique shopping, and this is like a real place.
It feels like it. Because just coming out of my head, I don't think I would draw it like this, but this looks really authentic.
Yeah, like the canes in the umbrella stand or whatever in the foreground.
Yeah, kerosene lamps.
Yep.
Yeah, I mean, and this is the one I was referring to. This one is tremendously fussy, but it's an antique shop. So how can you hold that against? It really does feel, it does have that feel. Because that's the thing about antique shops, right? They usually are in older buildings. Depending on the one you go to, it might be super pristine, but often you're in this musty thing that's, this mixture of high class, higher, more expensive things with a bunch of crazy junk.
Yeah, like a porky pig last.
Yes, and you're in this weird space where it seems slightly dangerous to be in there because 20 bucks is gone if you turn the wrong way, you know?
You know, one thing I think that could make it possibly read cleaner, because what I love about the drawing in it, aside from the observed detail, which is great, I love the way he used the Zip-a-Tone to make a spotlight around Snoopy. I think though, maybe, if I may be so bold, I would not put those squiggly white lines, like where he cuts out pieces of the Zip-a-Tone, because I think that adds to the fussiness that takes away from the detail in the drawing.
And one of the things Zip-a-Tone can do is like flatten out an area for you. So if he just had the Zip-a-Tone all the way across, just cut out the items, and then just do the spotlight for Snoopy, I think that would look cleaner, and yet still give the feeling of an antique shot.
The fussiness of the Zip-a-Tone kind of works for me, because this is such an unusual, this is among the most unique peanut strips ever, I think.
So what do you see that as? What does that suggest to you?
That you're in an older space, and that older space is imperfect.
Uh-huh, okay, yeah, I see that.
And then the thing that, if I'm looking at this and saying that the things that, if I'm really breaking down and looking at it, the things that jump out of me is like, ugh, is the black shading on the shelves on the right, and you've got a little bit on the left as well. But that black shading is just so randomly chucked in there around the items on the shelves, that that looks like a bunch of marker that someone's just defaced his conch strip with.
Yeah, so this brings up an interesting cartooning point in that, and this is something Michael and I've talked about, well, Michael's talked about and I've listened. That sometimes, like the camera, if you're thinking of the panel as a photo that was taken by a camera, the cartoonists are showing something, then if you show what is really in the space, that might actually in some ways, it's more realistic, but it might make it more difficult to read.
Yeah. I think that's something that every cartoonist has to figure out a way, what to leave in, what to leave out, what to play fast and loose with with details too. It's different on every single panel really.
Yeah.
Cartooning is really stripping all these things away to the essence. This is such a fascinating strip because the point of the strip is that you're not stripping away, you're creating an atmosphere or something that's busy and filled with items is old. Yeah. It's really interesting to see the choices he makes.
Well, I mean, cartooning is not necessarily stripping away. Because I just read an amazing comic. It's a Belgian cartoonist. Basically, it would be like an aerial view of an art deco city, where literally every window is perfect. Everything is perfect. I don't know how this person was able to have a career. Because this is going to take me like six months to do like this one, but just one drawing.
Right. That's true. I guess, yeah, you're right. There's a whole world of cartooning that I'm not attracted to very much at all, but that does go those other places.
Well, that's what attracts me, but it's also like, God, how can he do this? And as friends, why should we can't, if you're interested.
That's one of the things that I loved about Ceravus. They would often say that, oh, Dave Simm and Gerhard work hand in hand, and Dave drew the characters and did the lettering and wrote the stories, and Gerhard drew the backgrounds. And they were, oh, it's like one art, it's really nothing like one artist. It really is the animation approach that we were talking about last episode, the episode before, whatever, you know, where all of this massive detail was in the background.
And often the characters in front were very cartoony.
Yeah.
And I think that works amazingly well. But it might take two different artists to do it.
You know, I don't know.
October 26th, Snoopy is crawling along on his belly. He looks like he might be out to steal a blanket. And in panel two, we see that's exactly what's up. But Linus senses him coming and as Snoopy is just perched about ready to snatch the blanket with his mouth open, Linus says, close your mouth, dog, or I'll floss your teeth with this blanket. And Snoopy then crawls away thinking that was a good one.
I like it when they acknowledge that this is like a ritual they're doing, you know, as opposed to just this thing happening in the moment. I was like, oh, that's a good one. All right, I'll try again later, see what he's got.
Little eye looking up at him in the second panel as he hears Linus' thread is great.
All right, so we're going to take a break. I'm going to get myself an iced tea and then we'll be back. We'll check the mailbox, talk about the Anger Happiness Index and do some more strips.
All right. Hi, everyone. We all love listening to Jimmy describe what's going on in a peanut strip, but comics are actually a visual medium. You can see them anytime you want at gocomics.com or in your very own copy of The Complete Peanuts, available from Phantographics. Plus, if you sign up for our monthly newsletter, you'll know in advance which strips we're talking about each week. Learn more about The Great Peanuts Reread at unpackingpeanuts.com.
All right, so we're back. Hey, Liz, I'm hanging out in the mailbox. Do you got anything?
We didn't get any emails, but I want to give a shout out to Debbie Perry. She listened to our last episode and did some research for us and posted on Blue Sky a couple of the strips that Schulz used photographs for, the one with Washington's Crossing and also one with Ernie Pyle. So check out Debbie Perry on Blue Sky for the Schulz strips with photostats.
Thanks, Debbie.
Oh, well, thank you so much, Debbie. That's awesome. I got something from the hotline. I got a text message and this is from Dear Deirdre. That's how it is signed. D-E-A-R-D-I-E-R-D-R. I've enjoyed the Peanuts comics released from Boom. Often it seems they expanded storylines from the comics or adapted simple strips. Do you each have a Peanuts story you would adopt into a comic book or graphic novel format? Dear Deirdre, what do you guys think?
I think recently I ran across something that I thought would be good, stretched out. I'm not coming up with it.
All right. You think about that for a few minutes. Well, Harold, do you got something?
I'd like to explore the bunny books that Snoopy is enjoying so immensely, and have him jump into those worlds and dance with those bunnies.
Well, it's been a while since we talked about them. Maybe new listeners might not remember the bunny books. Tell us about it.
So, well, I'm kind of conflating two things. One is that in the Frida days, she was wanting Snoopy to be a real beagle and go after hunting rabbits. We have seen some of my favorite strips of Snoopy going off into the woods, meeting the bunnies, and then they have this kind of little ritual dancing together, just utter abandon and joy. They're great. I love those. Then Snoopy was a big fan of Helen Sweet Story's Bunny Oney series, which included, was it the six bunny oneys freak out?
Freak out.
But yeah, that's what I'm referring to. But obviously, I'm referring here now to the book that Snoopy discovered in Charlie Brown's classroom. Given the level of what the teachers are asking of the students at this elementary school, that there's a bunny book also intrigues me.
I don't know if there's any particular story I'd want to adapt. I think I could have fun doing something with the Beagle Scouts and Snoopy, but I'd maybe want to do an adventure that they haven't done. I'd like maybe do a Beagle Scout or a space opera. That could be fun. But I will say this, I have the plot for the Peanuts movie sequel. There's no question about it. I'm not giving it away for free here, but I have it. If anyone's curious, give me a ringy dingy. You can do that on 717-219-4162.
That's our hotline where you can leave a message or you can send a text like Dear Deirdre here. We would love to hear from you. Just anything you have to say about our podcast or the strips or Schulz in general or cartooning, or if you just want to say hi, because when I don't hear from you, I worry.
Hey, Michael, did you come up with anything about trading water for you?
Well, we're talking an adventure story.
It could be anything, any story from the comics that you think would make a good long form piece.
Well, I'll keep thinking if we come across it, I will bring it up.
You wanted Schulz to do Gatsby.
I think that would be really cute.
Okay. Wait, hang on.
As would Ulysses with Peanuts characters, because Lucy is Molly.
Molly, for sure. And Charlie Brown is obviously a ball. Yeah. Okay. You know, Linus is a Stephen. Yeah, uh-huh.
Snoopy has a role because there's that dog. What's his name? The mean dog.
Yes, of course. Oh, my gosh. Well, no. Yeah, Snoopy could also have a role all through Nighttown playing all of the hallucinations to be done by Snoopy. Boy, this is a great idea. Stop everything. Where's my notebook? It's brilliant. Brilliant. See, that's why you're right, because you get stuff like that. OK, so how about we get back to the strips? Yep.
All righty.
October 31st. It's pouring rain and a very sincere looking pumpkin patch. And Lucy is out there holding an umbrella and she says to her soaking wet brother Linus, I can't imagine anything more stupid than sitting in the rain in a pumpkin patch on Halloween night waiting for someone who doesn't exist. What could be dumber than that? And then we see Snoopy, a panel right there saying, these cookies are getting soggy.
There are more cookie punch lines this year than anything.
If I wanted to pick this, I was going to say, I think the Snoopy's cookies are like if we were still doing the tier list of characters, I think they'd have to make it at this point.
Well, when did that start?
Band name, claim it.
No, I noticed that because the cookie thing came in after I'd stopped reading it. So at some point, he got obsessed with cookies and it was in the 70s sometime, I think.
Well, it was when he got Andy.
Yeah, it seems like Andy really bumped that up.
Oh, here we go. Now we're talking comic strips. November 1st. It's a three panel and Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus are hanging out at the thinking wall and Linus looks sad. And Charlie Brown says, Halloween is over and The Great Pumpkin didn't show up again, did he? To which Lucy replies, no, she didn't, did she? This sends Linus's hair straight up into the air. And then a very self-satisfied Lucy says, never even occurred to you, did it?
Right on.
That is as good as it gets.
That's The Great Pumpkinette.
Oh, bite [bleep].
I think that's as funny as any comic he's ever done. I love it because it's so true and it's like a thing that has been around now for decades. And I don't think it occurred to anyone, right? And it's very shameful. And it's a great zinger.
I can't operate on this person.
Yeah, that one puzzle. I didn't get that one.
The doctor's a woman.
Oh, my God.
November 8th, Peppermint Patty is at her desk working out way at her test, and she looks a little stressed about it, and she says, Yes, ma'am, this is a hard test. She looks up and says, No, ma'am, I didn't mean to be sarcastic. All I said was, when I came in this morning, I didn't realize we were taking the bar exam. I thought, you know what, I think Peppermint Patty is being sarcastic though. I don't think she's being completely honest here. I may think it's a really good singer.
November 19th, Sally and Charlie Brown are sitting in their club chair in the living room and I guess watching TV, and Sally says to Charlie Brown, what are you watching? Charlie Brown says, it's a dance program. I like to watch people having a good time. Then there's a silent panel as they both watch it. And then Charlie Brown says, I've always wanted to have a good time.
I love this one.
Great.
This is a great one, but four panels, you need four panels. It needs that pause.
Needs the pause, 100%.
Absolutely. You imagine not having it. How weird that.
I think people watching him, I've always wanted to have a good. Yeah, right. It wouldn't work at all. It would just seem like a run on sentence. With no no weight given to the punchline part of it.
You need the weight to add the weight.
You need the weight to add the weight. He's thinking it's a good one. And, you know, it is we talk about this streakiness thing. Well, I'm working on Tanner Rocks in the next comic is all about her discovering. Well, it's not all about actually, it's it's partly about her discovering Bob Dylan for the first time. So I've been like listening to Dylan like nonstop talking like this and annoying everyone around me. It's been real bad. But it's so bad.
I watched an interview with him where it was from 60 Minutes and they say, you know, you wrote Blown in the Wind and Masters of War and Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. All those when you were a kid. Could you write a song like that today? And he just flat out said, no, couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I can write. And he says, I think I write very good songs. I think I write great songs. I'm happy with myself. I couldn't do that, though. And I never heard someone just honestly say that, like, no.
He's also, I mean, him saying anything.
Yeah, take away the great.
Oh, that is true.
Right.
He'll say anything, I think, just to shock people. But basically said like, yeah, I didn't like it, even like those protest songs. I was just writing them because they were popular.
Yeah, right, right, right. Oh, I've read his book Chronicles, which, I mean, there are chapters that are absolute absurdities, total flights of fantasy, but they're compelling to read. But my point being, is Schulz is able to do some of these strips that could, if you redrew them, could fit absolutely back in the 60s or 70s.
This one for sure.
For sure this one could, yeah. But not as often as then. The batting average isn't as high, but there's still some that he still can hit a home run now and again, no problems. December 8th. Charlie Brown has his sack lunch and he's waiting for the school bus and he says, rats. And then Sally comes up and sees what's going on. She says, what's the matter? And he says, I told you we had to hurry. The school bus just left. To which Sally replies, so what do we do now?
And Charlie Brown says, we walk. And Sally, as Charlie Brown walks away from her, says, walk. There's a beat panel and then she says, you mean with legs? I think I said it before, it was always my dream that one day the school bus wouldn't come and then we could just go home. And I know we probably couldn't just go home, but that was the myth. If it was 20 minutes late, you could go home. Never, never happened.
Well, we always walked and luckily, we walked because there was a drugstore that sold comic books around halfway. Let's go in here and see what, oh, and then we spent our 30 cents and bought three comics.
Yeah, there was a newsstand right across the street from my elementary school and when I walked home, I didn't walk home when I was really little, but starting in like fourth grade, I guess I would walk home every day. But yeah, loved going in the newsstand and picking up comics. That makes me happy. Speaking of happy, Harold, how about the old anger happiness index? Tell us where we are.
Smooth, Jim.
You like that?
Yeah, boy. Sure, yeah. So anger happiness index, we're looking at every strip for the year I am and trying to count the strips that have at least one character showing anger or happiness and seeing how that trends over the years. We are in 1991, of course, and I'll give you the previous three years of where we were. In 1988, there were 69 strips with characters showing anger. In 1989, it went slightly up to 75, and in 1990, it dropped to the second least angry year of all time, 59.
Where do you think we might be out of 365 strips this year compared to last year?
I think we're going to see again a slight tick. No, I'm going to say we're about even. I'm going to say we're about even. If I was going to say we're a slight tick down in both, because I do think as we get further on into the run, we get a little more of the old stoicism coming in. But I'm going to stay with even.
Okay.
I have no idea. I mean, I really have no idea. I'm noticing something very different about the strips recently, but it really doesn't reflect on being on happiness or anger.
But you're detecting a different flavor?
Yeah. I think it might be going back a ways, but it hadn't occurred to me before. But my theory, I think he's aiming a lot younger. Peanuts, we've discussed this back when we were doing the mid-50s Peanuts into the 60s, is these were not strips for kids. I liked them as a kid, but I also liked the fact that if I puzzled out what they meant, I learned something about the world. They used adult language and topics were fairly sophisticated.
Stuff that no kid would really know, name-dropping various things. I started realizing recently, I think most of the strips this year, the five or six-year-old would think was funny. Now, I don't think they're funny because these are the kind of jokes are not as sophisticated as I like, but I think a little kid would get most of these. They're not using really sophisticated language. I mean, occasionally, they'll name-drop some weird philosopher or something. So, I don't know.
What do you guys think? Is there anything to that?
Yeah, that is interesting. I can definitely see that. It does have a more general audience feel. I think it might just have to do with age. So Harold, with all that said, where do we find ourselves on the old anger happiness index?
Well, I was kind of surprised when I was adding all this up. But so I said 1990 was the second least angry year with 59. 1991 was the angriest year since 1970. 107 angry strips.
What?
And to Michael's point, there is a shift in tone and the way we see anger, I think is shifting. And the best term I can use to describe what I'm seeing more and more of is grumpy. It's that ruffled, rumpled look of the characters, like Peppermint Patty with the, the scowl and she's got a ton of lines around her eyes and everything looks really kind of shaky and just a big old ball of upset. Grumpy is something we did not see in 1950s Peanuts, but there's a lot of grumpy in 1991 Peanuts.
So that threw me because it was, like you say, it's a different, there's a different vibe here and how Schulz is approaching it does seem to have changed and probably changed with age. I mean, it kind of makes sense. You know, the famous movie Grumpy Old Man, you don't think of grumpy somebody who's in his 30s or 40s. You can, but you know. So that really, really surprised me.
And then on the happiness side, we went from 88 through 90, went from 76, which was the most stoic year we'd ever had between the anger and happiness, just in total. It was just a stoic year. But 89, we went up to 97 happy strips, 90 strips in 1990. Does that seem to have changed at all in 91 for you guys?
Didn't notice it.
I'm going to say, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and now change my thinking entirely and say that's up to.
So that one.
Because we have things like Snoopy being so happy at the desk. I can tell I'm wrong. But anyway, it's pretty much dead even.
It went from 90 to 89. So yeah.
Oh, that my original thought.
So but I was really interested to see that. And I don't know what was going on the first half of the year, but the first half of the year was off the charts. I mean, of the angry stuff. And then it kind of mellowed a little bit. So yeah, it was, I think they were like, I don't know, 45 in the second half and 62 in the first half of the year. And I didn't see anything regarding any troubles Schulz was going through with the ailments and stuff. We wouldn't know that.
We wouldn't know what he was processing in that year or if that has anything to do with it whatsoever. But yeah, I was really, really surprised that that was now a big piece of the strip. But in a way I don't think I'd noticed before. And maybe that's why I wasn't expecting to see those numbers. Very interesting.
All right, well, we got two strips. How about we wrap those up and then I get your MVP strip of the year and we get on out of here. December 11th, Linus is in a cardboard box on top of a snowy hill and he is shimming it back and forth. He can just tell inside because there's a few motion lines around it. And this sends him sliding down the hill and he topples the box entirely over. And then from inside the box, he says, I hate winter. Now this is a peanut's obscurity.
It used to snow in December. I'm in a t-shirt and shorts now and we're coming up on Thanksgiving. So anyway, but that's fine. It's fine. Michael, why did you pick this one?
Well, actually I did not pick it.
Michael, why did you not pick this one?
I did not pick it because I didn't think it was particularly good. But when I came upon this trip, I assumed this was rerun. And then the next three days is the same gag over and over. And I was thinking that Jimmy has often said that sometime in the 90s rerun really starts taking over the strip. And I remember thinking when I read all four of those strips, well, okay, here's rerun. He finally has something to do. Because this is very un-Linus-like.
So I didn't realize it was Linus till I got to the next year where he's still doing this. Except this time it's clearly Linus because there's other people with him. And I went like, oh, that wasn't rerun. So then I went back, I picked this just so we could discuss this. Linus was always really sort of a little genius and super sophisticated. And so it never occurred to me that Linus would put a box on top of a hill and slide down in a box.
I mean, he would invent something or do something clever. That's why I thought it was rerun. And rerun comes in again in the beginning of the next year, but it's back to the thing where he's riding on the back of his mom's bike.
And actually, we have him in our next strip too.
Oh, okay. But this surprised me. I figured from what we see of Linus here, basically panel one, they're indistinguishable. Plus he has the hat on, so even the difference in the hair wouldn't matter.
And he chooses to give, because we'll see in the next strip that we discuss, rerun basically has the same hat that Linus has in these two. It's almost on the level of how did Windsor-McCain not figure out that he wrote the letters first. Like these super geniuses that have this one thing that they can't figure out, it's really weird. It's like you gotta make rerun look different, you just gotta. Or the bits all have to be about how he looks just like Linus. I mean, you know, right?
I mean, there's no other way to do it.
Yeah. So anyway, I only put this in because I was totally baffled by this.
All right. Well, let's wrap up the year here with good old December 20th. By the way, I didn't use to talk this way.
Now I'm starting to talk that way.
It's terrible. Isn't he walking around? I think I have some good old lemonade. Get it out of there. It's like, oh my gosh, rats. Anyway, good old December 20th. Lucy and Rerun are outside. It's coming up on Christmas time and we see Snoopy standing in as a Salvation Army Santa Claus ringing his bell. And Lucy says to Rerun, Rerun, as your big sister, I feel it is my duty to tell you that what you see is not the real Santa Claus.
She continues, what you're looking at is a dog in a Santa Claus suit. Then Lucy finishes up with, now that I've told you this, how does it make you feel? And in the last panel, Rerun gives Snoopy slash Santa a huge hug and says, I like him. That's a t-shirt, a Christmas sweater or something like that, which is Rerun hugging Snoopy in the Santa outfit. That's cute as a button.
That is darn cute. And to me, this, having experienced rerun right at the end of the run of Peanuts, when we knew Peanuts was ending. And so I was aware of Peanuts and say, oh my gosh, it's not going to be around anymore. And I started to kind of seek it out when I was around newspapers in the late 90s. I have this small memory of Rerun and Snoopy being two buddies. Right. And this seems to be the beginning.
This is like a momentous occasion here where we understand this new relationship between Rerun and Snoopy. That's going to be different than any relationship we've seen before with Snoopy and another kid. So, that's why I picked it.
Yeah, absolutely. This is a great pick. It is a momentous moment. And we're not going to really get to see Rerun become the star of the strip until the last half of this decade. But I think it starts creeping in more and more. And yeah, I absolutely love to see this.
It's so great.
And you know what else is great? I get to hang out with you guys every week and talk about my favorite comic and just about anything else that comes into our head. So we're going to wrap it up here. I'm going to give you my little spiel. Then all I'll need from Michael and Harold is their old picks of the best. They're good old picks. Exactly. So if you want to keep this conversation going with this, there's a couple different ways you can do it.
The first thing you could do is you could go on over to the Unpacking Peanuts website and you could sign up for the Great Peanuts reread. And remember that will get you your one email a month from us. You can also just email us directly. We're unpackingpeanuts at gmail.com. And we can also, I'd love to hear from you on the hotline. We get texts, no one, you know what, I'm going to say it. No one's brave enough. No one has the guts to call us and leave a message. Please leave a message.
I'm so lonely. Please. And of course, I worry when I don't hear from you. But you can do that. 717-219-4162. And you can follow us on the social media. We're at Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and Threads, and at Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky, and YouTube. Liz, did I get most of that correct?
You did. You win.
That's amazing. It's a struggle. The struggle is real here for Liz, guys. She has to make me sound coherent. I cannot imagine a greater challenge. Anyway, so that's it for this year, guys. Just give me your MVP and your strip of the year. Harold, why don't you go first?
All right. MVP, this is a really balanced year. We've been saying this a lot recently, at least I have. Just because there's nothing else that stands out, I'm going to have to give it to Snoopy. Snoopy still has a couple surprises for me. Him in the classroom, this kind of little childlike happiness Snoopy is interesting, and it plays into the little plush toy Snoopy that I think a lot of us have a collective memory of.
That Snoopy seems to really be living in the strip, and not in a pandering way at all. It just seems incredibly genuine that Schulz is now seeing Snoopy. I think through the eyes of his little doggy Andy, who he loves so much, there's an aspect of Snoopy that is sincere and earnest in ways that I don't remember seeing all that much in the strip before. That's why I would give it to Snoopy. In terms of the strip of the year, there are two that stood out to me.
The first one was that surprise strip in August, where it was a beautiful summer day, and Peppermint Patty comes to Marcy's house and says, let's waste it away doing nothing. We could look back on it and regret it for the rest of our lives. And it's just them hanging out at the tree where Marcy's saying, that was a good idea, sir. There's something so pure about that strip, and it didn't have a lot of precursors in this year. It just kind of came out of the blue and popped and surprised me.
And to me, it was kind of delightful. But the one I'm going to pick very much like that is the one we just talked about with rerun and Snoopy. You got the same deal where Lucy's kind of ragging on this fake Santa Claus with Snoopy and you get this surprise thing with rerun that shows something that's going to be happening for the rest of this decade, or at least part of the rest of this decade.
It's introducing that relationship between these two characters where we haven't seen something like this before either. So because that seems to have some historical impact, that's why I think I'm going to go. I like the other strip better, but because this one was also this kind of happy surprise with Rerun and liking Snoopy so much, giving him a big hug, I'm going to give it to December 20.
Great picks.
Michael, how about you?
Well, as opposed to Harold, who picked something kind of heartwarming and positive, I'm going to find something really devious and nasty. I really like May 6th, where Lydia essentially gives the game away. When she's asking Linus if he would ever gone to sea for three years.
Oh, yeah.
When you returned, I wouldn't be waiting for you. He says, thanks for telling me. And she says, it was fun.
Great pick. Great pick. And how about for your MVP?
Yeah, she doesn't get the MVP mainly because she didn't have enough at bats. But for me consistently, the best character in the last couple of years is Sally.
Yeah, that's a good pick too.
I really can understand where she's coming from. She's appearing a lot. And her philosophy is being shaped before our eyes. She's turning into a real scenic.
Those are good picks.
Well, my iPad just died. So I am going to wing it on my strip of the year. But my MVP, I'm going to agree with Harold, is Snoopy. I think something that we're seeing is a version of Snoopy that not only is using Andy for inspiration, I think he now knows what people think of when they think of Snoopy, and what Snoopy means to them. And I think there's more of that in the strip than there was before, if that makes any sense.
I think people had an idea of Snoopy that wasn't always borne out by the strip. And now I think there's more of that coming in. And for strip of the year without my iPad and therefore no dates, I am going to go ahead and I'm going to do Sally waiting in the door for Charlie Brown's bedroom that she could wait as long as it takes. Because there's another strip in that sequence where we find out it's 10 years. And she's like, no problem. I'm a very patient person.
So I'm going to go with Sally waiting for Charlie Brown's room.
It's October 2nd.
All right. Well, that's it, guys. We did it. Another year come and gone. 1991. And you know what? We're going to be back next week. And hey, if you're out there and you're not having a great day for whatever reason, maybe you're a little down in the dumps. I don't know why, but for whatever reason, there are 133 episodes of this podcast that I would just love for you to just hang out with us as often as you can because this truly is my favorite day of the week.
I started doing this, wanted to do this in part because I was in a terrible place, mental health wise, terrible place. And I knew that if anything could get me out of it, it would be my pals and Peanuts. So that's why this is here for you now. Come back as often as you like. We love you. From Michael, Harold and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, be of good cheer.
Yes. Be of good cheer.
Unpacking Peanuts is copyrighted by Jimmy Gownley, Michael Cohen and Harold Buchholz. Produced and edited by Liz Sumner. Music by Michael Cohen. Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark. For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and threads. Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue Sky and YouTube. For more about Jimmy, Michael and Harold, visit unpackingpeanuts.com. Have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.
I hate myself when I do that.