Welcome to Unpacking Peanuts, the podcast where 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. This is Unpacking Peanuts, and today we're starting a brand new year, 1992. I'll be your host for the proceedings. My name is Jimmy Gownley. I'm also a cartoonist. I do things like Amelia Rule, Seven Good Reasons Not To Grow Up, The Dumbest Idea Ever, and you can read my new Amelia Rule's comic, Tanner Rocks, for free over there on gvillcomics.substack.com. 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 of Amelia Rule's, and the creator of such great strips as Strange Attractors, A Gathering of Spells, and Tangled River. It's Michael Cohen.
Say hey.
And 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.
And Liz is here too. How are you doing, Liz?
I'm doing great. Glad to be here.
Oh, good. I'm glad to be here too. Well, we're starting another year, another fantastic year of Peanuts, 1992. Again, this is like the height of my youth. I was 20 years old in 1992. I remember it well. Great year for me personally. Harold, do you know anything about Mr. Schulz and where he was at in good old 1992?
Well, thanks to our good friends, editor and publisher. I have some interesting stuff of, again, where Schulz is in terms of his popularity in 1992. And I really do find this fascinating as we're reading this because the sense that we've had is from our experience at our ages and how we look at this, that the 1990s was, you might say, a winding down of the strip, super grateful that he was continuing and was able to continue to do the strip.
But there was this sense like, in my case, I had stopped reading Peanuts on a regular basis long ago. And so it's so fun to be finding a whole new cache of Charles Schulz work that I practically haven't touched.
And so my sense was, and I think we talked about this, that Peanuts, by the 1990s, when Schulz would do something in the strip, let's say, was really clever or whatever, back in the 60s, we would see it would become a part of the culture, or the 50s, the security blanket and Snoopy on the Moon and Joe Cool and all that stuff.
And when I'm seeing something in 1990s Peanuts that I think, wow, that's really clever, or he's repeating something over and over again, you kind of get the sense that, oh, maybe he, he's obviously still swinging for the fences with the strip. He's trying to get out there and do the things that he's been successful at in the past in terms of really reaching a public and seeing the public respond back. And so the question is, how did people view Peanuts in the 90s?
Were they still engaged in a big way? Because we know it's in lots of newspapers, right? It's just the question, where is he in people's minds? And I found this article that I thought was pretty interesting. So there are these reader polls we've been talking about and seeing where Peanuts is in terms of popularity with the other strips. And so here's something from the Portland Maine Press Herald. They voted Peanuts their favorite comic.
In the most read category, Peanuts was followed by Dennis the Menace, then Blondie, Fred Bassett, the Bassett Hound comic, and Frank and Ernest. So it's obviously people are seeking out Peanuts, making sure they read Peanuts every single day. But then in the most intensely liked category, Peanuts was number one as well. Wow. Followed by Calvin and Hobbes, Dennis the Menace, Fred Bassett and Blondie. So isn't it interesting that Calvin and Hobbes doesn't make the top five most read?
Fred Bassett is above Calvin and Hobbes.
Yeah.
I don't know what that says about newspaper readers, but I thought that was fascinating in 1992. Then the Ottawa, Kansas, Harold top five finishers in a recent survey. Number one was Beatle Bailey, then Peanuts, then Blondie, Garfield, and Gasoline Alley, which had been still in a crazy round.
Gasoline Alley. That has to be on the fourth team by that point.
Yeah. Although I would say at least it was the... I'm not sure how many teams went. This was Jim's... I don't know how you say it. Is it Skankerelly or Skancherelly or I'm not sure.
Yeah. Because he was not the guy that took over after King. That was Moore, I believe, Dick Moore maybe. So yeah, wow, that's a legacy strip of a legacy strip.
His Gasoline Alley was really good. I mean, it was very different from the original, but it was certainly a very presentable strip. Oh yeah. But then the big news that I thought was fascinating because the question is, okay, older readers. So also in this, on the same page in this thing, they have this discussion of the comic strip Mary Worth.
All right, Mary.
And Mary Worth had been around how many years? From the 30s. And it was like one of those continuity strips. And they're really struggling in the 1990s. But there was this, I thought this was a hilarious article. The title is A Baby Boom Mary? And it says, the founding of youth for the title character in Mary Worth is being turned off.
A recent LA Times story noted that new artists, Joe, I don't know if this is again, kind of pronunciations, Giela, had started making Mary look a lot younger last year. When surprised Mary Worth writer John Saunders brought this to Giela's attention, it was decided to gradually age the character once again. Mary is supposed to look like she's in her 60s. So this is one of the situations where the writer sends his scripts to this new artist.
The artist is like, hey, I'm gonna, Mary looked pretty young and good-looking, and then apparently Saunders doesn't see this thing until it's in the newspaper. So he's like, what the heck? What have you done with Mary Worth? So then they have to age her back. We know newspaper readers even in the 90s, this is right before the internet starts to take off, are older, but not as old as they are now.
But the fact that the strips have this incredible staying power, if you bonded with a strip when you were little, you're probably still reading it. And it's hard to kill off a strip in this time, but there were some amazing strips like Farsight and Calvin and Hobbes that really did punch their way through still in the newspapers in this time and reach people and build massive followings. So this is what really fascinates me, is there was a survey by the Gallup Youth Organization.
They had a Gallup Youth Survey and they asked people 13 to 17 what they thought of the comics. So I thought this is prime.
And they said, that's square daddy-o.
So this is 13 to 17 year olds who are encountering peanuts in 1992. So does it even rank anywhere? That was like, oh my gosh, for 13 to 17 year olds, then they're just probably experiencing peanuts, at least as far as the comic strip is concerned, in its form from the late 80s and the early 90s. And that's what they're experiencing, right? Most of them, I'm guessing.
And maybe, of course, the animation's gonna skew them as well, but what they found out, any guesses as to what the number one favorite comic was in 1992?
I'm a purist, I'm gonna say it was Peanuts. Because I don't think even in 13th, the only thing that I could possibly imagine, if I wasn't gonna just bet house odds to say Peanuts, I would say the top three would be Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts.
Interesting.
You have any thoughts on that, Michael?
Nope, can't say I've got any idea at all.
All right, well, number one is Garfield.
Oh, Garfield.
Which is in over 2300 newspapers at this point.
Wow.
Then number two is Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, like you were saying. Then number three is Peanuts.
All right.
And number four is The Far Side.
Okay.
And number five is, of all things, Blondie, which has been around since the 1930s, like Apple Annie, Mary Worth, yeah.
I mean, 13-year-olds reading Blondie, it must be being done under duress. Like, why would they be relating to? Oh, sleeping on the couch and having sandwich with the wife.
Those sandwiches, they love the sandwiches.
That's true.
But that's interesting to me because of all of those, Calvin and Hobbes is only being experienced in the newspapers because he was against licensing. So we know that's just kids experiencing Calvin and Hobbes as its pure comic strip form. And the same is true for Blondie. I mean, how many Blondie lunch boxes were there out there? How many Blondie TV series? I mean, unless they're watching old Penny Singleton movies from the 30s.
I like those movies actually. I used to watch them with bananas.
But yeah, so I thought that was interesting. That's really a neat snapshot to show how teenagers were relating to Peanuts. It's doing okay, number three, among some really amazing strips from this era.
That's really, really impressive. Yeah, on all accounts, seeing those two new strips shoot up there is very, very cool. So Peanuts hang in there. I forgot about the juggernaut of Garfield.
Yeah, Garfield was big. Even then, there were some specials, and obviously there were tons of toys and things, but the toys really came out of the strip.
Well, there was the Saturday morning show too, which actually I think was-
But that stuff happened after. It seemed like the big thing that happened to Garfield was the plush toy. That was the next thing that blew up, and then they caught up with, takes a long while to make an animation. So yeah, the fact that the newspapers were that powerful, that kids would be reading newspapers, even in the late 80s, early 90s, or even into the 80s. It's just something to remember that the power of the comic strip was still quite strong in the United States.
Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. Well, thank you for that trip into 1992. I appreciate that, Harold. I always appreciate your research. And thanks to editor and publisher, wherever you are. All right, so how about then we just hit the strips, and if you guys wanna follow along out there, there's a couple different ways you can do.
First thing we'd love for you to do is go on over to unpackingpeanuts.com, sign up for the great Peanuts reread, and that will get you one email a month, letting you know what strips we're gonna cover on that month's episodes. And then you can just go over to gocomics.com and read these strips, you type the date in, and there they are. All of them are free right there on the website, and you could just read along with us, which would be great. So if you've done all that, let's hit the strips.
January 4th, Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy are all hanging out at the thinking wall in one long panel, and Charlie Brown says, I mean, how can you tell one person you like her more than the other person without hurting that person's feelings? Linus is contemplating it, but Snoopy just thinks, if it were a mouse and a cat, I'd have no trouble at all.
It does make sense, but you gotta think about it first. All right.
It's a thinker.
It's a thinker. Puzzle me through. Oh, because, wait, no, I don't know. Explain it to me.
It's really a difficult way of explaining it. What he's presenting it here is not clear.
So he likes the mouse. He doesn't like the cat. He has no trouble telling the cat he doesn't like the mouse. Oh, I see.
But they're not people, so it doesn't read well.
Well, also because we haven't seen Snoopy have a relationship with mice. If it were between a cat and a bunny.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But then they...
Yeah.
Once again, we improve.
Oh, my gosh.
You're welcome. Yeah, right? It feels so weird. Like, feel dirty saying those things.
Then we'll just go in to the museum, ask to see a few originals, get some whiteout.
Oh, no, no, no. Stop.
Stop. That would be terrible.
Oh, my goodness.
That was a joke.
This was a joke. We're not going to do 133 episodes.
We are never, never be invited to the museum now. It's over.
You know, I'm like that, too. I listen to, like, Beethoven. I go, What are you nuts? That note's really wrong. Give me the sheet music or I'm going to fix it.
Freaking Beethoven, my God.
All right.
Well, I learned something. Hey, you know what? That's a completely new way to draw a tree on the right. He's never drawn a tree that way. And I think that's kind of cool. Like 40 some years in, hey, it looks almost more observed than a lot of his other cartoony trees. I think there's something about these drawings in this that makes me feel like he is kind of looking, you know, life drawing kind of stuff.
He might be going out and sketching and doing things that he didn't do as much. I've heard stories of him going out and doing like life drawing or sketching. That's interesting. Yeah, I never once have heard him say, oh, I like, I love to do this, you know, on the weekends, I like to go out, sit at the golf course and draw trees, you know. But you get evidence that he's doing that.
Well, in the interview with Gary Groth, he goes on and talks about that he does mental sketching where he will sit and look at something and sort of mentally imagine drawing. How would the ink line go? Which to me, oh, yeah, which sounds that's actually called OCD. But I think he put it to a fantastic use and it may be something like what he's going through here.
Can you put a disorder to fantastic use? Well, then it's not a disorder.
If you make the same mistake every four bars, it's no longer a mistake. February 2nd, it's a Sunday. Speaking of some drawings, this one features a big drawing. Snoopy is playing golf and Charlie Brown is his caddy, and Charlie Brown says, I thought I heard a splash. Then Snoopy walks off in the direction of where he hit the ball, thinking to himself, I wonder where you go to give up the game.
Then in a panel that takes up the entire rest of the Sunday strip, and in some newspapers would be the entire Sunday strip, it is one gigantic panel of Snoopy and Charlie Brown well in the rough, off by a water trap with plants and things higher than their heads. And Charlie Brown says, in the second chapter of Exodus, it says that Pharaoh's daughter found the baby Moses lying in a tiny basket by the edge of the river.
And then Snoopy looks at his golf ball in the water trap and says, I don't think this is Moses.
Yeah, he's really breaking all the rules. His rules. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think they'd cut the first two panels?
Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Some papers.
Some papers, but definitely would have. Yeah.
Well, that'd be weird because yeah, he's never done this for the Sunday before. So I'd say he was trying to do a shortcut here, but then again, he is putting a lot of work into the plants. So this fight didn't save him any time.
No, but I think it's, I think I see like what I'm talking about where it's, I would rather on some days draw a big complex thing that will take me a long time rather than eight tiny panels that are basically repetitive.
Yeah, like last year, I was saying he was really experimenting with the daily panels in ways that seem to be exercises. I can do something different now. How can I change up the beats? I mean, he was really seemed to be thinking about that in ways that I didn't notice when he first had the freedom to do the strips. It just seemed more like he was, I don't know, it seemed like how he got to them was the old way, how he got to the panel breakdowns.
And now he's like, oh, because I have this, what can I do different? How can I make this fresh?
Yeah, absolutely. This actually, it's like a clear line, almost European inking style. You know who this was not good news for? Whoever was doing the color steps.
Yeah.
That's a lot.
Well, and they were switching over to computer coloring at this point, so maybe this was a good time to be making that switch.
This looks a lot like a coloring book.
I was just thinking that the adult coloring book craze that hit in the 2010s, this would be absolutely looking exactly like the books you could buy. I was thinking, yeah, Schulz is ahead of his time again. Here he is.
I think it looks like those dinosaur drawings from the world we live in, from Life Magazine, nevermind.
I know, my favorite book of all time.
Wait, what was your favorite book of all time? The dinosaur collection?
No, it was a science book for kids, but a beautiful dinosaur paintings from the 50s, which you weren't seeing a whole lot.
Yeah.
Wow, that's cool. I love when you see children's book illustration for when everything was like gouache paintings. Yeah, it's amazing.
Love that. So beautiful.
February 4th. Linus and Lucy are having breakfast. Well, Linus is attempting to have breakfast and Lucy comes in with her bowl of cereal and says, do you have to chew so loud when you eat? You're dripping milk all over your shirt. This is pan after panel. Third panel, she says, you took all the sugar again. You never refill the bowl. And then the fourth panel, Linus says, good morning.
I selected this strip because I had been married a year and a half to Diane. And we discovered this, it clipped out and on the refrigerator of my in-laws with Lucy labeled Diane and Linus labeled Harold. So this is one strip I very much remember from the 1990s.
This is great, right? I mean, that's a great four panel comic strip. This would have been a great four panel comic strip 30 years ago in the 60s. It's great in the 90s. It's great here in the 2020s.
It's a good one. Yeah, it's totally classic. I'm going to put a little star by it so I can remember it first strip of the year. So I didn't pick it, but it should have.
Yeah, it's a real good one.
I'm feeling a little too much identification with it.
I don't drip milk all over my shirt.
I mean, you never refill the sugar.
I drip yogurt all over my shirt.
Well, that's different.
I'll tell you this, there's no one in my life that will think of this because there's no chance I would be up in the morning. Unless it's to record Unpacking Peanuts and then even barely as we know from today.
Is Lucy having like a morning salad in Panel 2? I can't tell what she's making there.
Yeah, we don't know. Is it Snickers snacks?
Yeah, it's Snickers snacks, lettuce shape.
Spinach edition.
I watched a whole little 20-minute YouTube mini documentary on the Monster cereals. Remember, you know, Boo Berry, Captain, and one of the Catchhawks and stuff like that. But the only reason I watched it is because I went on an internet rabbit hole search for Captain EO after we were discussing it from a few episodes ago. Well, Harold, if you want to relive it, you can see the whole thing on YouTube.
We're going in.
Yeah, we're going in.
So did I do justice to his line?
No, you should have redubbed the entire thing. He's much, much worse than you. Here's a much better version. As a matter of fact, the way I got to see the entire movie was, I watched a little documentary in the making of it, and the filmmakers were like, can we dub Michael Jackson's voice? Can we get someone to ADR? And they're like, no, you can't. And I'm like, oh no, he sounds softer and stranger than the Muppets were used.
So what does that have to do with Frankenberry?
Oh no, then the next one up was about Frankenberry, and that was just fascinating too. I just wanted to throw it in there.
Oh, okay, it was just recommended for you?
Yeah, just recommended for me, yeah.
Do you know how to use a notebook?
Oh, okay. We were just talking about this before the show started, and what was recommended for me was a YouTube video, How to Use a Notebook, and I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. So I actually typed in how to use a notebook. There were dozens of videos with hundreds of thousands of hits, explaining to people how to use a notebook.
But it's one of those skills, I guess.
You're right in it.
Maybe you haven't.
You open it up and you write in it.
That's it.
There's nothing else.
There's no hack that's going to make it.
There is nothing more exciting than a fresh notebook. I mean, this goes back to my love of Harriet the Spy, fourth grade, and she kept a notebook. I literally started keeping a notebook in fourth grade because of Harriet the Spy and I never have stopped.
That's great.
And actually, now that we're thinking about this, Michael, I have a question for you. So you're working on finishing up Strange Attractors, the great science fiction strip that you started in, what, about a year after, next year, right? Ninety-three is the first year of Strange Attractors.
Well, I had my own little version of it before we did the version we published. So yeah, I was working in 92.
So what's that process like in terms of just how it starts? It starts with a conversation, but then is a script created that you draw from? What's just like the point from when you guys are talking about it to you have to drawing it? What's that like?
I did around 50 pages of Strange Attractors by myself. I was just learning to draw, so it was pretty awful. But anyway, Mark's a writer.
What's his last name?
I think he was a writer.
Mark Sherman.
Yeah. Anyway, I came back from a long trip and decided I was going to publish a comic book for the first time in my life. I had never written anything really serious, so I called my old writer friend, Mark, and said, hey, let's collaborate on this Strange Attractors thing and totally reboot it. Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to get into all the details.
Basically, I remember we found an empty room up at the college with a big blackboard, and we just sat there for hours, and we thought of every cool idea we could think of, and we wrote it on the blackboard.
That's great.
I would love a photograph of that. That makes you wish there were phones back then.
Yeah. But actually, we were trying to capture every cool thing from everything we ever liked.
There's something about writing on a blackboard, you know you have this vast expanse to work from.
Yeah.
You can just fill the whole space with your creativity.
Yeah. So we basically hammered out, you know, several sessions, hammered out a tight plot. And then Mark would kind of do a page a week of script, which I would draw and alter. I was free to alter it or add stuff. So it was a very good collaboration. Except now I would never collaborate again. Except I'm collaborating again, because we're trying to finish this draft.
Yeah, but he's grandfathered in. That's the same collaboration.
So that doesn't count.
Now, why do you say you wouldn't? It's just too difficult to work with two people.
I just, I know where I want to go. And I want to go like, well, if I change this, then this will hurt somebody's feelings. You know, I just want to do what I want to do. And generally people don't like it. So it's working.
Imagine being the artist of Mary Worth.
Well, right. Yeah, and that, this is actually, it's kind of one of the reasons I want to talk about that was coming up after the Mary Worth thing. But cause you know, when I work for Disney, they don't even tell you who the artist is going to be until it's already in process. So I have to write the only thing that-
So there's no collaboration. There's no way you could talk to somebody and say, hey, where do you want to go? Or are you okay with this?
Right. So then it's like you think, okay, oh wow, I'm going to do a two page spread of Donald Duck running across the campus and there's all these- and you're like, is this- am I giving this person the best day of their week or am I torturing them?
Right. How good are you at drawing strip waffle?
Yeah. What do you think? They have to do it and you'd never know. It's a really, really awkward way to work. I actually kind of enjoy it and you have to turn your brain off to a certain extent and just accept that something's going to come out of it. But it's very strange to get the book back and it's usually great. I mean, it always looks great. I mean, they're professional.
Do you get feedback at all when you send the script in or do they freely change whatever they want apart from you and then you discover what it is when the book comes out?
Oh, no. I have to make any changes. I have to make.
So they will honor you, the writer, to ultimately make the final.
I can't believe how, in that sense, I can't actually believe how easy it is to work with Disney. I guess also I know what the rules are and I'm not trying to break the rules, but they'll let me bend them for sure.
How often will they come back and go, that's a step too far for us, or please change that or back it off?
Certainly less than 10%, maybe 5% at the time. Not a whole lot.
Which probably sounds like a good thing. If you're not doing that, you're probably playing it too safe, right? Then if you're testing the boundaries a little bit, you're adding something fresh and new, and every once in a while they're like, well, okay. They'll head back, but we appreciate. Well, when you said that five to 10%, what percentage of it do you think you are innovating that might have been objected to? Because it was out of the box.
What they'll object to are things like there'll be a Disney. There's a Disney rule, for example, against a food fight because it's wasteful. That's not something that they don't have a book of everything in the world that you can or can't do.
Well, then how do they know there's a Disney rule if there's no book?
I mean, they have one, I'm sure, but they don't give it to every freelancer.
Well, that's odd, if the editor is looking at it.
Well, maybe they've given-
Is that because it's giving away secrets that maybe they don't want to be outside the Disney organization?
Well, you actually have more questions than I had because they said it's against Disney rules and I said, all right.
But that wasn't in your 800-page manual.
No, there are 150-page manuals for each character. Wow. Nothing like that. Wow. Yeah. So it's really, it's generally things like that or, and I never get something about the characters being wrong, but then again, I really try to make them the characters. Everybody knows. So, yeah, it's a weird place to be though, to be in a collaboration and not know who you're collaborating with. Well, to wrap up this diversion that started off on, what did it start off on? Captain EO movies or whatever.
I would just like to say that.
Boo-Berry.
Boo-Berry. There you go.
Back to Boo-Berry.
The original Boo-Berry, Frankenberry, and the Count Dracula cartoons were animated by Bill Melendez, who did try the round Christmas. So there you go. Bringing it all back home.
All right.
We are going to take a break, get some water and a snack, come on back on the other side and we'll check the mailbox.
Hi, everyone. We love it when you write or call to tell us how much you enjoy the show. But don't just tell us, tell your friends, tell complete strangers, share your appreciation in a review. It doesn't have to be on Apple Podcasts. 60% of you listen on other apps. Some of those apps have review sections. Think of all the poor Peanuts fans out there who haven't found us yet. There are review instructions on our website at unpackingpeanuts.com/spread the word. Thank you for your support.
And now let's hear what some of you have to say.
And we're back. Hey, Liz, I'm hanging out in the mailbox. Do we got anything?
We do. We got an email from Tim Young, who writes, in the latest episode, you mentioned expressions that originated in comics. Recently, I've been attempting to compile a list, and I have a few you didn't mention. And he starts with Jeep, which Michael did mention, from Popeye. And he says, Eugene the Jeep was a creature in the strip who could teleport. Allegedly, World War II soldiers were impressed with a new vehicle introduced about them. And named it after the Popeye character.
And then he adds Mary Jane Shoes from Buster Brown comic strip. Dinty Moore was a character in the strip bringing up father, and Hormel licensed the name to use as a brand for some of their products.
Right.
Oh, wow.
And Skippy Peanutbutter, of course. Yeah.
It's as though you were reading the email with me. He says, of course, Skippy also came from a strip, but controversially, there was no licensing in that case.
Yeah. Wow.
And Tim adds, also, since the strip format changed in 1988, there have been a number of one-panel strips of Schroeder playing the piano with several measures of music shown and some gag involving the sheet music and Snoopy and or Woodstock. You haven't discussed any of these, so I'm wondering what you think of them. Cute, lackluster, inventive, boring. What's your take?
Postmodern. Yeah, no, I haven't picked any of them because I don't particularly like them. Yeah, it seems like it belongs in a different strip because clearly what he's drawing is not what's happening in the strip. What's happening in the strip is the music he's playing seems to take physical form and does things. It's just kind of a surreal thought.
Yeah. Yeah, which he's been doing for years, right? But he really does get to accentuate it with a single panel, and he doesn't have to commit to a whole Sunday. Yeah, I see them and visually they're interesting, but I guess a lot of in comics for me is the element of surprise in a humor strip, and it's hard to surprise you with something that's kind of ritualistic like that.
Well, yes, and it's hard to surprise people who read it at the level that we read it, or even read it at the level we read it when it was just coming out in the newspapers when we were kids.
We are super fans, I think, and I think sometimes especially with the thing that's like a daily strip, you go back to some things maybe just to keep them in the ether, and just to keep them as part of the strip as a seasoning, even though it's never going to be necessarily the most important thing, but it does keep the Schroeder meme, for lack of a better word, alive.
But it doesn't do anything that has to do with characters. I mean, Snoopy, as I recall, Snoopy is the one who's watching these notes fly around in most of these. So it really doesn't have anything to do with Schroeder other than he's playing piano.
I do appreciate it for just being purely visual. It seems like Schulz really did enjoy doing the staffs and the actual music from whatever he's playing, and you can go in and see that it's real music. It seemed like something that he enjoyed coming back to, it's a change of pace.
So that's it for the mail.
Okay. So we got a voicemail from Captain Billy, and this is what Captain Billy had to say.
Hi. I don't know what you guys are going to do for the next show. I do know the name of the show, Jangly Blacks and Approachable Hats. In reference, I'm a couple of episodes behind. I had the last one I heard was the 1990 part 3, which you guys are talking about to television, black and white television and movies for kids. I tried watching, showing my kids black and white movies as a child. They claim that the black and white burned their eyes.
So I don't know if that's true or not for a certain generation. I did get my son to finally get to watch the March Brothers and some Free Stooges strips of movies. So I don't know if that might help or not. If I think the kids can find it funny. I did get my youngest daughter to watch a Lon Chaney senior silent film. I think it's He Who Gets Slapped. It's about 40 minutes long as I remember. She was about six years old and I had to explain it to her.
But I got her to watch that, but I don't know if she's watched anything in black and white since.
Yeah. I never heard that about the black and white hurting somebody's eyes. I think they're just bored by your movie choices. That's what I think. As a father myself, I think.
I love old films and I've avoided He Who Gets Slapped. I would definitely be doing Laurel and Hardy, Mark's Brothers. There's my best shot, I think.
I've never heard of, what's it called? He Who Gets Slapped?
He Who Gets Slapped.
Who Gets Slapped. Wow. That's a title.
Well, now I got to go see it. Very cool.
Well, thank you. Thank you so much for calling in Captain Billy, and hope to hear from you again.
Yeah, it was a whizbang.
Okay. Back before last episode, I said we had gotten spammed by a bunch of political calls and stuff. Well, in that, I missed several texts from super listener Joshua Stauffer.
Oh, you thought it was super PAC?
Yeah, I did.
Oh, so first off, he sent us some fan art of, he's a cartoonist himself who did a book called Zoe Richards. And it's Zoe experiencing her own unrequited love. So we can put that up on our social media because it's really cute. And then on October 11th, he wrote and said, Hey, if you guys ever do an episode on the weirdest peanut strips, you've got to include June 16th, 1957. That's the one where Snoopy eats a soap bubble and his face goes completely wacko. It does not look like Snoopy at all.
His head looks like the floor attachment of an old vacuum. And his ears remind me of other cartoon thing, dogs like Kipper and Blue.
Yep.
So not Schulz.
I remember that strip.
That's a great strip.
Yeah, that is a great strip. And I love that the description of his head looking like an old vacuum. It's exactly what it looks like. And one more we missed from him because I am not good at monitoring this.
Well, it's that Pennsylvania area code got you nervous.
That's it got me. And Joshua writes again, Did Peggy Jean ever appear in the animated specials? Yes, but only once in the early 90s special. It's Christmas time again, Charlie Brown. They collage together various Christmas themed sequences that came after the original Charlie Brown Christmas, including the story where Charlie Brown sells his comic book collection to buy gloves for Peggy Jean. That was her first and last appearance on TV, and it was the final new Peanuts special to air on CBS.
Be of good cheer, Joshua.
Wow, and then CBS unceremoniously dumped peanuts. And ABC said, thank you.
I mean, you know, what does it take, CBS? This reminds me of my mother. She bought a refrigerator, a Frigidaire, in the 1950s, and it lasted until the 90s. And she was so excited. She's like, can you believe it? What a product, that's incredible. I'm gonna write to the company and tell them, I said, well, I'm assuming you've got another Frigidaire. No. What does it take, mom?
What does it take?
My my grandfather, that's the same with CBS here. Come on.
My grandfather was a refrigerator, refrigerator, Frigidaire salesman and repair guy for Neosho, Missouri. So I'm very glad to hear that. Yeah.
Yeah.
The Maytag repairman had nothing.
Nothing on Frigidaire, baby. And that's it. That's what we got from the old hotline. So if you want to...
Thank you, Joshua.
Yes. Thank you, Joshua. Sorry for the delay in this. That was the system got to us, my friend. But if you want to give us a call or leave a message or a text message, you can call us at 717-219-4162. And we would absolutely love to hear from you because remember, when I don't hear, I worry. And if you're a traditionalist and you want to do things the old fashion way, I suppose you could send us an email. And that is unpackingpeanuts.gmail.com. And we'd love to hear from you.
Thanks.
All righty. How about we get right back to the strips? February 8th, Snoopy and Woodstock are sitting atop the doghouse and it looks like it's a twilight evening. And Snoopy says, did you know that birds navigate by the stars? You should try it. Then he points to the sky and says to Woodstock, fix your eyes on that star and then follow it. And we see Woodstock just beginning to take off. But then in the last panel, clunk, he falls off the doghouse, probably on his head into the supper dish.
And Snoopy says, but watch where you're going.
Schulz at this point goes like Zip-A-Tone crazy.
Zip-A-Tone crazy.
He got the sampler pack. That's right.
I tell you, when I read this strip, I was so overwhelmed by the Zip-A-Tone, I didn't even pay any attention to the words.
So how do you describe the Zip-A-Tone, Michael?
Well, this was actually very popular back in the early 50s in EC comics, which were in color. Yeah. But this effect really made things looks very science fiction-y.
Yeah. It's a half-tone gradient, meaning that one end of the tone is completely black, and the dots get finer and more further apart as it goes down. So it gives the illusion of going from dark black to pure white.
Yeah. But it is totally overwhelming. And you expect to see sort of photorealistic characters in front of this. So yeah, it's really jarring to see cartoon characters with this background that makes things look kind of three-dimensional.
I think I like it, actually. I mean, I agree with everything you're saying, because it is jarring and something we've certainly never seen before. It's not like I need to see it again and again in Peanuts. But I think it looks okay in the first two panels. I think it looks not as okay once he tries to put the lettering over top of it. I think that's the clunk and stuff that's very hard to read.
We've talked about this in the past, about how difficult it is to draw a cartoon for the newspaper. Because it's not just one press that's running this, it's thousands of presses that you can't control. They're printing with this ink that really never dries. If anybody's ever experienced old newsprint, it'll rub off on your fingers like 60 years later, the oil is still there.
What happens is when it runs over the newsprint, it hits and then it just slowly, slowly starts to spread because it's not drying. Now, modern newspapers have a heat thing that will seal that instantly and it won't go anywhere because it is fully dry and that's why you don't get smudges from most modern magazines or newspapers.
But back in the day, Schulz has to be drawing this with an understanding that some of these papers, and also the plates that they're printing from, sometimes it just spreads everything out. I've seen some early 1970s original strips by Charles Schulz. They look incredibly light with the pen line. It looks too light, but that's because he knows that's not how people are going to experience. They're not going to experience the original art, they're going to experience that prints on newsprint.
If you want to see what we're talking about, this is the perfect one to do a little dive if you have the fanographics books, and if you have access to go comics, which you probably do. This strip is fascinating to look at in the fanographics book because that clunk that he writes for Woodstock falling off of the doghouse. To us on go comics, what you see is the blend of the Zip-A-Tone straight into the letters, the K-L-U-N-K.
It almost looks like clunk because it seems to fill up with where the dots happen to fall on the lettering, and then there's this weird dot between the top of the exclamation point and the dot. It's a white dot there. But if you go and look in Phanagraphics, which is much truer to what he was drawing from, even that there's probably a little bit of a spread in the ink. Believe it or not, he has white outline around every single one of those letters. Wow, really? It's gone here. It is gone.
Totally. He probably didn't revisit this because he was so unwieldy. When he saw it written in the paper, he was like, I can't keep doing this because I cannot control people's experience.
I used to do in Amelia Rules, I had the idea that when someone shows a photo album of their past, it's going to be old comic strips. Then that became a little thing I did throughout.
That is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in comic. No fooling.
I just brought it up because I knew Harold would say.
It brings me to tears every time I see it. It's so beautifully done. Seriously, Amelia rules when the past is the present, volume four, check it out. It is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen in comics.
Well, thank you very much. Well, anyway, what I did to make it look extra newspaper-y was, I would expand the ink line by half a pixel or do one pixel, but do it on the ink line so then when it looked like it was cut from the newspaper, those lines look different.
Who would do that? That's genius.
Can you explain that a little bit more for those of us who are not comic artists? I don't crock it.
Okay. Basically, like what Harold's saying, when the comic art was printed in the newspaper, because of the ink and the porousness of the paper and everything, it would expand just a little bit so that that's why the printed comic just looked different than the original art. But what I did in the past and the present, I drew the comic strips separately as if they were, as if I was Charles Schulz and I'm drawing this comic strip and it's going to actually be its own thing.
But then when I scanned it in, in order to degrade the art, to make it look like it had been printed in a newspaper, I just expanded in Photoshop how wide the lines were. So I would select all the lines and then expand the whole thing by one pixel, but on either side. So it's really only a half pixel all around. And kaboom.
Because Jim's printing is on, you know, it's on a coated paper stock usually. And so, and in that heat set, we'll just lock it right in. So you're not going to get that spread. So to make it look like it had to artificially do it, you got to fake it.
February 28th, Charlie Brown's sitting in his favorite chair or reading his little book there. And Sally comes up with one of those paddle and ball combos, you know, the rubber ball and paddle. What am I looking for? What's the easy way to, what are those things called?
Paddle balls.
Paddle balls, not paddle and ball combo. So Sally comes up with the paddle ball and says, may I try this ball and paddle thing, big brother? And Charlie Brown says, be my guest. Then we see Sally walking off with it and then she holds it out in front of her, the ball just dangling at the end of a string. And then she calls back to Charlie Brown. What does it do?
She forgot to put the battery in.
Oh, was anyone good at these?
It was fun till you like break a lamp.
Break this. Everything's fun till you break a lamp.
And the quality of the paddle ball does make a huge difference. When we put out Mystery Science Theater merchandise, I was so disappointed. They made a little crow paddle ball and it was for the live tour. And I don't know where they got this rubber band, but it was the thinnest rubber band in the world. And I messed with it for like three minutes and it broke. And I'm like, I feel so bad. Or anybody who actually didn't want to do anything other than hang this on their wall.
Oh, well, most people, because it's a merch for Michelle, probably would just hang it on the wall. But yeah.
Yeah, well, there you go. The thing about this, he uses the Zip-A-Tone on this paddle. And again, he's not going all the way to the edge. That paddle looks exactly like a ping pong.
Yeah, I was just thinking that. Because this is like the cheapest product to make. Somebody got rich off of it. Because it's like plywood paddle, no padding, a piece of string and a little piece of rubber. And they probably sold it for some ridiculous amount, like 50 cents or something.
One of life's great joys.
That was a great, you know what another great useless toy was from the 20th century? I don't even know what they're called, but it's a magnet on a wheel.
I was just thinking of that, yeah.
It's on two tracks in your hand and you just get it spinning around. It's so satisfying.
That was a blast.
Never, never hurt them.
The fidget spinner of the 1970s.
Yeah, basically, yeah. Those things probably have a name, too.
Cap guns, that's what I like.
Oh, the smell of cap guns. February 29th, Snoopy's out on the links again, and Charlie Brown's is caddy again. And they're both on the green, and Charlie Brown is trying to talk Snoopy through this putt. And he says, it's a tough putt. How much do you think it breaks? And then Snoopy answers, about a quart.
This was my big question mark.
Huh? I don't get this.
Of the year.
I mean, I don't know golf.
I have no idea.
This does not seem to make any sense to me.
Well, what breaks a quart?
Well, you people are completely ignorant. I cannot believe. I have no idea what this means at all either.
All right, listeners, help us out, please. We don't get this voice.
Here's a pitch. Does it have to do with a quart of like break fluid? And that's a pun on the word break?
No, no.
That wouldn't be good.
How do you think it breaks? Well, I'd say it was good. How much do you think it breaks?
Yeah.
I just can't add it up.
One of the great mysteries of our time is the strip.
Maybe it makes no sense because it's February 29th.
Oh.
It's leap year.
It's a leap year strip.
It's like April Fool's of other days. Well, listen, here's what we have. February 29th is the April Fool's of all other days. Here's what we, yes. Finally, we're making sense of this all.
Here's what we got to do. Every four years, we got to come back and ponder this strip.
Until someone has the answer. Sadie Hawkins' strip.
That's right, exactly.
Maybe Jeannie's like, oh, I can tell you exactly what this means.
I'm just thinking about a court. Or here's what the most likely thing is. At this point, his interest in whether he has to entertain everyone in the world is down to zero. Someone said this on the golf course and he's like, yeah, that's great.
I love a good non-sector. Yeah.
And we know how much Jimmy likes the golf strips.
Oh, well, I love the golf strips. That's just, I will say this.
That sand trap is pretty nice.
I was going to say, there's one thing that will possibly, and I'm stretching because I do not like golf strips in general. I do like Charlie Brown's hat though.
Yes.
I think it's a very good floppy.
Approachable.
It's totally approachable.
Well, I have to say to everybody, those who've been worrying, staying up at night about my approachable hat, I must say that my wife, Diane, has been cutting my hair with the comb pal. We want to find a great home way to cut your hair. Now, I have approachable hair. I have approachable hair. Problem solved.
I have to say, one of the most annoying things for me about this whole podcast is how much hair Michael and Harold have.
I thought that would be your number one.
Harold will grab his hair and move it physically to the side because it's just too much. He could hold it. And I just look at him. I go, you know what? Go to hell. It annoys me beyond belief. March 16th, Snoopy is sitting on an ottoman leaning up against, or no, I guess it's a chair. He's leaning up against a little pillow and he's thinking to himself, I wonder if that roundheaded kid is ever going to come and take me back home. They say dogs have no, oh, this is a part of a sequence.
Okay, sorry. So they say dogs have no sense of the passing of time. I wonder if he's been gone five minutes or a hundred years. And then Lucy, who is watching Snoopy at this point, says, I told you that in our house, dogs aren't allowed on the furniture. And then we see Snoopy under a kitchen table chair, looking a little bit forlorn thinking, I think it's been a hundred years.
I thought, I like this little sequence where Charlie Brown is leaving and has to have someone take care of the whole family. I guess the whole Brown family is leaving. So Snoopy winds up at Linus and Lucy at the Van Pelt's house. And there's some interesting strips here that kind of reveal some things about the characters that I thought was enriching the strip.
Well, like what? Give us a for instance, if you might.
Well, obviously you feel bad for Snoopy here. Having to stay with Lucy, and so she gets to boss him around more than usual. That's kind of traumatic for Snoopy. And to see he's really, well, he's missing. He's missing that roundheaded kid. And again, this is just the Andy version of Snoopy. There's that Andy piece of him that I really hadn't seen before in the strip. And it's kind of cool. And to see that Snoopy really has some connections to Charlie Brown that he won't always admit.
And that's kind of cool. There's a really cute one where he's looking really sad, and he's kind of got his snout over what is a little Ottoman. And Linus is saying, I suppose he misses his owner, and maybe you could give him a toy, Lucy, to play with or something to cheer up on the last panel, is this depressed little Snoopy holding a balloon.
It's so good.
Lucy tried, right?
Absolutely. Now, one of the things I think that's interesting about this particular panel is we see like human Snoopy in some panels and puppy Snoopy in some panels. And we're definitely, he's going for trying to get us to empathize with Snoopy's situation. What do you guys react to more? And Liz, I'd like you to input on this one as well.
Would you like, do you feel more for Snoopy, the dog leaning or the person leaning up against the pillow or do you feel more for the middle Snoopy or the last Snoopy where he's more of a puppy?
He's established Snoopy is not being a dog for so many years. That, you know, that middle panel is, first of all, he looks a lot younger there for some reason. Yeah. Yeah, I find that more jarring because he never, that's the classic, you know, sad little puppy pose and I don't remember him ever doing that.
Yeah. Liz, what do you think?
I respond mostly to the last panel, both because it's forlorn and it's also kind of Snoopy. I mean, it's the, it has his attitude. I think it's been 100 years. So it's both.
Yeah. For me, the middle one really works because he does look like a dog and he looks vulnerable and that I can relate to a part of Snoopy that, again, we have, you know, it is a little bit jarring, but at the same time, it is Snoopy. And to see that vulnerability of him being a dog and at the mercy of what happens when, you know, he can't take care of himself. I mean, Spike can, but he's making it look like he can't take care of himself anyway in these strips.
Obviously, we've seen Snoopy go off to, on long jaunts around the country on his own. But that is a really beautiful drawing in the middle there of Snoopy, but it is not what you'd expect.
Yeah, for the fact that it's not what I expect, the second one I find very moving. But I think...
The second one?
Or not the second one, the third one, the middle one, the one that I'm agreeing with you.
There's five panels.
Right, right, right. The middle strip, or middle panel. But I think if you're gonna do the punchline, it does have to be the more, I don't think that middle panel could have delivered the punchline as strongly as a more classic looking Snoopy.
Interesting, yeah.
And we see also in that middle panel, we see the white outline around Snoopy that you were talking about around the letters.
Well, he's trying that.
Survives here.
He's doing zipperton tricks again. It's the one that fades out, but he only uses it in the top half of the panel.
Yeah, this is almost like never use too many fonts in a design.
Because he's also using-
There's like three different zippotones in here.
Yeah, because isn't he also using the bottom half of- So like Michael said, he's using the top half of the fade, like in the middle panel. But is the bottom half of the fade on the couch in panel four sideways, though?
Because those are like square dots in that fade, and then you've got the round dots, and it's a mixture of the two and at least it from a cartoonist perspective. When I see that, it seems a little jarring for him to be mixed up the way it is.
And he really doesn't need it.
In panel two, isn't there just sort of a black blob?
Above his head?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's just solid black there.
Is there a reason for that?
He's mixing it up.
Oh, what is that supposed to be? I didn't notice that.
I mean, are you talking? Well, there's also on panel four above the couch. Is that what you're asking? They kind of bookend each other as solid black.
He's just creating tapes here.
Yeah, just for depth, but it does look weird.
And I would say, having said that, it really gives atmosphere to the strip. You kind of get this feeling of darkness. I don't exactly know why he doesn't do it in the last panel. That's kind of an interesting choice where everything brightens up actually while he's looking depressed under the kitchen chair.
Well, because it's a different room.
Right. But just emotionally, he could have chosen a place that was even darker and he doesn't. That's why I'm wondering why. But yeah, you're right. He's obviously moved to a new place, which also has some impact, right? Because he's not allowed to be in this space.
Yeah, it's sort of cold.
The fact that he's moved, you know that now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it does feel like a kitchen to me.
Yeah.
There's nothing to absolutely say that, but it's just the floor is white, the background is white, and there's no straight line across to represent where the floor ends and where the wall begins. So he's kind of in this weird limbo. He had such a situational first four panels where you know exactly where he is.
Absolutely.
April 19th. It's a Sunday page and we see Snoopy standing atop a mountain, just kind of looking off into the distance. Then he takes a seat on this side of the mountain and he pulls out a map to orient himself. And then we see again an entire Sunday strip, all what would be the remaining two tiers other than the throwaway panels on the top tier. And it's just a gigantic exotic cartooned landscape with a caption that reads, Every year, thousands of tourists visit Victoria Falls in Zambia.
Yeah, where would this is like beyond weird. This is nuts. Yeah, this is a clear way. I think I might have to call this the weirdest Peanuts strip of all time. Well, I mean, there is no joke, but also, well, there is a joke. Well, but the Snoopy is drawn there. I mean, he had, it looked like some kind of outdoorsy hat on the first two panels, and suddenly he's wearing like a swimming scuba mask.
And he's standing, from my point of view, it sounds like he's standing near the waterfall, which is all of like eight feet high.
I never even, I didn't even notice Snoopy in that last panel until we were talking about it here. He's so tiny in that space.
Yeah, I didn't either.
But he's way too big.
It's like, where's Waldo?
Yeah.
And then that super sketchy line like we saw in that previous golf strip.
Yeah, he's like 20 feet tall or more. Cause this is the biggest falls in the world, I think.
Yeah, maybe, you know, just to guess, I mean, do you think this is one of those deals where he had to do something fast? Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you think he was in the hospital for some tests?
Well, do you think he, or do you think he was on vacation and visited the falls? And it also ties in with why Snoopy is staying with the Van Pelt's and he's feeling guilty about leaving Andy behind.
There is no, there's no indication.
Yes, there is, there's gotta be.
Not at all on this.
Online, I looked to see if there was any connection to him or if anybody said, oh, that's because Schulz, and he really wasn't traveling a lot at this time, but it's possible, or he knew somebody who was there.
I think he was straight here making a sketch based on a postcard.
Or a, yeah, National Geographic.
Yeah, if he was there, because this is not his style of doing the landscape.
It does look like observed, maybe some observed choices here for sure. You know, beyond just taking it from a photograph, it kind of looks like something you might pull from life.
Yeah, and it's very sketchy.
I don't see any indication he was in, I mean, Zambia, that's quite a travel for a time.
Yeah, but every year, thousands of tourists go there.
Yeah, I think he is right. No, that's true.
So that's the joke that there's only one tourist there?
Yeah, what is the joke?
I think Snoopy with the snorkel is the, That's a joke. Is a hint of the joke. But yeah, I mean, it's like, you have a good chance, it's like, I'm guessing, like me, I don't know how they colored it, so I'm looking at the black and white version of the Fanta graphics book. But as colored, maybe Snoopy was a little more obvious because it was all, it's right in the middle and there's color all around and there's a little, little white dot of a bit of Snoopy.
But wearing the black snorkel outfit kind of takes that away too. So, you know, this is just Schulz going, you know, throw away these panels, buddy.
Right, yeah.
Otherwise, you may never see any Peanuts characters in there unless you're looking hard.
But those two panels don't relate. I mean, he's looking at a map and then he's suddenly somewhere else.
Well, and you look at those two panels and that looks like classic Peanuts line work. And then that last one looks nothing really, well, not much like the line artwork in the throw away.
So why is there a square cloud?
No, that's that's a sighting. That's something that Snoopy is about to be beamed up pretty wild, pretty weird. How about we leave it on a wild and weird place? Is that cool?
Sure.
All right. Because that's how we like it here in Unpacking Peanuts. You never know what we're going to get. So I'm excited to tell you though that the one thing you do know is that we'll be back next week. And guess what? We're going to be talking about more comic strips by Charles M. Schulz, because that's the way we like it. If you want to keep this conversation going, there's a couple of things we'd love you to do first.
Like I said earlier, go over to unpackingpeanuts.com and we're going to need you to sign up for that great Peanuts reread that will give you one email a month where you get to hear what we're going to be covering. You can also send us an email. We are unpackingpeanuts at gmail.com.
Yeah. In those reviews, we love to see reviews and we might read one if you put it out there.
Welcome to all the new Blue Sky followers.
Yeah. If you want to be one of those, you can follow us on Facebook, Blue Sky and YouTube where we're at UnpackingPeanuts. We're also at UnpackPeanuts on Instagram and threads. We would love to hear from you because remember when I don't hear, I worry, and for all our listeners in the good old US of A, happy Thanksgiving. Other than that, we would just love for you to come back next week where we go deeper into 1992 and this comic strip that we all love.
Until then, from Michael, Harold, and Liz, this is Jimmy saying, be of good cheer.
Yes. Yes.
Be of good cheer.
Unpacking Peanuts is copyrighted 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. Clunk.