A sad anniversary
Kyrgyzstan is pretty hot on celebrating almost any anniversary.
Well, today marks a sad anniversary, although it has passed without any comment … well, that’s understandable … I doubt if many people here have heard of Charlie Brown.
February 13th, 2000 saw the publication of the last ever original Peanuts cartoon strip, a specially prepared cartoon published the day after the cartoon’s creator, Charles M. Shultz, died.
Shultz had been drawing the cartoon almost 50 years before, and apart from taking a five week holiday in 1997, it appeared daily throughout the whole of that period, a total of 17897 strips, not to mention a television series, the films, (A Charlie Brown Christmas, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown’s All Stars, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown to name just a few), theatrical productions (including Broadway musicals) and numerous commercial tie-ins.
It probably counts as the world’s most successful cartoon and the longest running story told by one man.
When the first four panel strip appeared in October 1950, it was in fact his second cartoon featuring Charlie Brown and his friends, an earlier syndicated cartoon called Li’l Folks had appeared between 1947 and January 1950.
Shultz hated the title “Peanuts” as it was meaningless and had been adopted to avoid confusion with other cartoons that were published at about the same time.
One of the features of the cartoon is that the characters never really get any older, and so each year there are stories about Christmas, the Easter Bunny, the Great Pumpkin, the Baseball season, Charlie Brown’s attempts to kick the football which Lucy van Pelt whips away causing him to fall flat on his back, his run-ins with the infamous Kite Eating Tree, Snoopy’s exploits against the Red Baron and his progress through Wimbledon, and not forgetting, of course, Beethoven’s Birthday– just to name a few of the recurring themes.
He managed to explore a wide variety of themes in the fifty year history of the cartoon. Some of the cartoons were just humourous jokes, but others seemed to have a serious message or observation about life which gain additional gravitas when uttered through the lips of an eight year old.
One of my favourite characters never actually appeared, (or at least I never saw them in any of the cartoons that I read), World War II, the neighbour’s vicious cat who could instill fear and dread into Charlie Brown’s dog, Snoopy and his little yellow bird friend, Woodstock.
Over the years I read the cartoon in the newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Observer magazine, and I also collected the entire set of paperback books published by Coronet.
“Peanuts” is one of the things I miss here.
There is no real tradition of cartoon strips here. The newspapers often carry columns called “anecdoti”, short jokes or anecdotes, and just occasionally there might be a “political cartoon”, but the idea of a comic strip just hasn’t taken root here.
Bishkek