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SPEAKER_04: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
SPEAKER_10: And welcome to the podcast.I'm Josh.There's Chuck.Ben's here sitting in for Jerry.It's Ben H. Week in the producer's chair.And this is Stuff You Should Know.
SPEAKER_09: I got a slide whistle in my Christmas stocking.
SPEAKER_10: You realize you got me this slide whistle.
SPEAKER_09: I know, but I got my own now.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, okay.I thought we were talking about me.
SPEAKER_09: No, no, no.I guess you're still enjoying it.You brought it out.Yes.Yeah, I love it. What did you use it for with Peanuts?
SPEAKER_10: I just thought it kind of fit the motif a little bit, comics, you know?Sure.So I've been looking for an opportunity to bust it out, and here we go.
SPEAKER_09: I thought you, because not everyone knows this, and this almost never happens, we started to record.Josh said, hold on a second, and left.And I was pretty convinced you were going to come back with a trombone and a plunger.
SPEAKER_10: It was close.That was close.Man, that would have been something.Now I suddenly am ashamed of my slide whistle. Exactly.That was a pretty good one.Thanks.Hey, while we're on that, Chuck, what you're talking about is the adults in the Peanuts universe.You never see them.You saw them once, and it was just strange.
You can hear them off camera, and they're discussed and talked about.You just don't see them.But in the specials, when they talk... They talk like that, and it's a muted trombone, like you said, a plunger and a trombone.And that was the idea of Vince Giraldi, who was the guy who created the soundtrack for the Peanuts Christmas special.
SPEAKER_09: Dang straight.I think it's the number two best-selling jazz record of all time, right?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, after Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.Of course.Is it Giraldi?I thought it was Giraldi.Is it Giraldi?I think it's kind of like that whole gif-jif argument.The only person who can say is Vince Giraldi.
SPEAKER_09: I was about to say his family's like, it's not like that at all.
SPEAKER_10: So we're talking today about peanuts, in case you didn't know.It's funny.I was researching peanuts, and I came across at least a couple results that were actually about peanuts, the food.It was a little confusing for a second.But for the most part, there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there that people have written about peanuts.And I think the reason why is because it's really cerebral, like surprisingly disarmingly cerebral.And people... have gotten so much out of it over the five decades that it was around, or more than that by now, almost 75 years since it started, that everyone just kind of loves it and has some sort of emotional connection to it.So there's been a lot of good written analysis about it, essays and odes and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_09: Totally.And one thing that I'm sure you can verify is Speaking for both of us, researching peanuts is a hard thing to stop doing.It really is.It's just one of these topics.You can just keep going and going and going because it's all interesting beyond the nostalgic love.It's interesting as an adult. to look back on some of this stuff.Yeah.Because it's really has, you know, the way it's framed in my mind, at least, is a lot different now than it was when I was a kid.
Yeah.Just a landmark comic strip in every single way.One of, if not the biggest and best ever.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it's a very deceptive comic in that all of the characters are kids, grade school kids.But it's not a kid's comic.It's a comic for adults.And I remember being a kid and the extent that I appreciated it was, you know, Charlie Brown flying through the air or Lucy calling somebody a blockhead or Snoopy doing his thing.That was it.I didn't get any of the... existentialism associated with it.Nothing like that.I was totally lost.I mean, and I think that's the way it was meant to be.
You know, sometimes people can, can create works like the Simpsons are a good idea or a good example where like it can be enjoyed on multiple levels.Um, and that's true of peanuts too, but the proportions are off.It's not even like the adult enjoyment of peanuts is far greater and deeper than the kids appreciation of peanuts.You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.I mean, I think it's definitely for kids.Yeah, I agree.I think it's just the proportions are off.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.That's what I said.
SPEAKER_09: I know.But at the beginning, you said it's not a comic for kids.It's for adults.And I disagree.I think it's for kids, too.But I think adults can definitely gain more insight.
SPEAKER_10: You know, I have to say that.
SPEAKER_09: What?Peanuts? All right, so you mentioned that Peanuts ran for almost 50 years.You said five decades, and I know math.It ran from October 2nd, 1950 to February 13, 2000.Yeah.And for almost all of that five decades, one Charles Schultz drew seven Peanuts comics a week.I think the Sundays started in 1952 for 17,897 comic strips. And he didn't farm these out.No.
He did them himself, and he, you found that one thing that was like, he also generally did them in pen as well because he was just so sort of decisive in his work.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.I saw somebody say, like, the average comic artist couldn't, would have trouble keeping up that level of dedication for a decade, let alone five.
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Like, just the amount of dedication it takes. To do that, like apparently Charles Schultz was completely cut out for that kind of thing.He wasn't a big fan of holidays because they got in the way of his work.Like that's what he was dedicated to.I saw one of his family members, either a widow, ex-wife or a child, I can't remember, who said like, oh, I think it was one of his daughters who said like, And his family was not his everything.The Peanuts comic strip was his everything.That was his life.And he built a life for himself and for his family outside of that.But I mean, like, that's what that guy's purpose on Earth was.
And he fulfilled it to the nines.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.I mean, one thing I can relate to, I think both of us a little bit, is doing something with consistency over a great deal of time.We're in year 16.Right.
SPEAKER_10: Can you imagine 50 years?Yeah. No, I really can't.But we've said stuff like this before, so it's entirely possible we'll end up in year 50.
SPEAKER_09: I won't be around, my friend.
SPEAKER_10: That's not true.There's going to be all sorts of great breakthroughs in medicine in the next decade or two.
SPEAKER_09: If I'm a 90-something-year-old podcaster, then something went horribly wrong.
SPEAKER_10: So there's a glitch in the matrix, huh?
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: So one of the things about Peanuts is that it's universally loved because it was basically available throughout the universe.Yeah.2,600 newspapers is at its peak, and it was at a peak pretty much from... the 70s onward, 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries in 21 different languages, and its readership was about 350 million people around the world.And I think one of the reasons why it was so... So widespread is because the thing about peanuts, from all the research I did and just kind of coming to understand what the whole thing was about, is that it's about the universal human condition.It's not just about Americans and what Americans go through.It's not just about Canadians even and what Canadians go through. It's about what every human alive goes through.It's very basic human condition stuff is what they're actually talking about and what are behind a lot of the gags.
And so that to me is pretty much the explanation right there for why it's so universally loved.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.And the human condition thing generally with Peanuts wasn't the thrill of victory, but the agony of defeat.Yeah.Time and time again, these characters suffer pain and failures over and over and over.And even when they're not doing that, there are very few grand victories at all.And it's amazing to look at it now that it was, I mean, I guess people do connect with that, but it's amazing to look at a comic strip in the funny papers about these kids with such pathos and with such failure and such, you know, sometimes clearly depression.It's just, it's really a remarkable cultural staple, I think.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and it's much easier to think of now because it's so widespread among comics.But at the time, in 1950, there was nothing like it.I mean, there had been some stuff about little kids and kid groups, like comics that had focused on that, some of which inspired Charles Schultz.But it was just groundbreaking in every single way.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, totally.So should we go to the man himself?Yeah, let's.All right.So Charles M. Schultz was born in November 26, 1922 in St.Paul, Minnesota.He got the nickname Sparky when he was a kid.Well, when he was a baby, in fact. Because his uncle saw him and thought that he looked like this character from another cartoon called Barney Google named Sparky.So he nicknamed him Sparkplug.
That became Sparky.And apparently everyone who knew him and was close to him in his life called him Sparky for his whole life.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.And apparently he always wanted to draw comics, even from a young age.It was his aspiration that he got to fulfill.So cool.And then some.But his dad, Carl, was a barber and he was, I think, a German immigrant.His mother, Dina, was a Norwegian immigrant.So Charles was a first generation American kid. And he and his dad loved to read the funny papers together.So that was just kind of like his training came from just enjoying it with his father, which is pretty neat.
And then his mother also, and this is fairly rare among Western European or Northern European immigrant families, his mother encouraged his drawing too.It wasn't looked at as just some dumb idol thing that was a waste of time.He was encouraged to follow his Destiny, I guess.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.I thought I was hanging there.I was wondering what it was going to be.Dream?Destiny's perfect.
SPEAKER_10: You don't have to say that.
SPEAKER_09: Slide whistle.So he was drawing, like you said, he wanted to be a cartoonist from a very young age, so he was drawing from a very young age.He got published for the first time when he was 14, which is remarkable, in a newspaper comic, in a Ripley's Believe It or Not comic.
SPEAKER_10: That's awesome.
SPEAKER_09: And it was an image of Spike, the family dog.Not that Spike.We're going to get to Spike later, one of my favorite characters in the Peanuts canon.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah?You like that stache?
SPEAKER_09: I love Spike.He was a desert hippie, you know?Yeah, he totally was, wasn't he?He was the best. But Spike was their family dog.It was signed, drawn by Sparky.So that was like his first little cartoon signature was Sparky.And Spike was a pointer, not a beagle.This wasn't Snoopy yet, but it was the inspiration for Snoopy.I believe Spike was black and white, but was a pointer.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So we've got like, this is a really good example of what Charles Schultz did.He drew from his life.Sometimes drew people's names for the characters that he introduced.Sometimes he would base characters and like their looks or their demeanor on people he knew.And so Spike or Snoopy being based on Spike is like pretty much par for the course for what he did.And so 14, he gets his first cartoon published in Ripley's Believe It or Not, Believe It or Not, like you said. And then as a senior in high school, he took a correspondence drawing class from what was originally called the Federal School of Applied Cartooning, a division of the Bureau of Engraving, which happened to be located in Minneapolis, where he lived, essentially.And that later went on to become Art Instruction Schools, Inc.,
SPEAKER_09: Still not great name-wise.
SPEAKER_10: No, but I know for a fact that you're familiar with this because you were a kid growing up in the late 70s and 80s.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, I know what's coming.
SPEAKER_10: Those TV ads, do you remember?
SPEAKER_09: Well, I remember ads in magazines and comic books.I don't remember the TV ads.
SPEAKER_10: You're slightly older.So my age group had the TV ads.
SPEAKER_09: We didn't have the picture box.
SPEAKER_10: This was what you're talking about were like magazine ads that had Tippy the Turtle, Tiny the Mouse or Pirate. And you could choose which one to draw and you send it in and maybe you won a prize.But really what you were doing was inadvertently sending your information to art instruction schools who would try to recruit you for their art correspondence course.And this is in the 80s.I think they were still going into like – The 2010s, essentially.Oh, wow, really?But that's where Charles Schultz received his initial training.And the cost for that was about $3,800 in today's money.And don't forget, like, his dad's a barber.
Like, barbers have never been particularly rich.So it was like a big deal that his parents were helping him out with this correspondence course fee so that he could go get formal training as a cartoonist.
SPEAKER_09: Totally.He graduated from there, saw it all the way through, went to work doing some various jobs here and there.He was drawing cartoons, drawing comics, submitting them everywhere he could.As many stories like this goes, he was rejected by everybody, basically. The night before he ships off for World War II, his mother, Dina, passes away from cervical cancer.And this was a real sort of lifelong scar for him.And, you know, some people say that, you know, sort of the pathos and the deep loneliness that all the Peanuts gang felt was terrible. sort of him getting this out.And as we'll see, you know, everybody from his wife to people that have studied him have confirmed, and even Charles Schultz himself, that like each of these characters is a little piece of him in some way.
SPEAKER_10: Right.So, yeah, he was he had to grapple with like a basically a one to punch of trauma because after his mom's death, like and he shipped out, he saw combat.He was in combat.So he's dealing with combat while he's also, you know, dealing with the grief from the loss of his mom.Yeah.So that's I mean, that's going to have a pretty big impact on anybody, you know.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure.He makes it through the war, though, obviously, goes back to Minneapolis, goes back to the art school that he graduated from and got a job there.So he was an instructor there.And for about five years, he was still drawing, still, I guess, looking at pictures of pirates and turtles and things.Mm hmm. And he was, you know, he was getting his own style together.He was learning about comics and how it all worked and the business side of things.
SPEAKER_08: Right.
SPEAKER_09: And you said he often named people after people in his real life.Three of his colleagues there was one Charles Brown, a Linus Marr and Frida Riche.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, Frieda was a minor character with curly red hair, but she wasn't the red-haired girl that Charlie Brown had an endless crush on.That was based on another person, a woman named Donna Johnson, who Charles Schultz dated when they both worked at the art instruction school.And she turned him down, and he forever – I guess, kind of pined or kept aflame or something for her.At the very least, she became the red-haired girl that Charlie Brown could never have.
SPEAKER_09: Can you imagine being the inspiration for one of these characters?
SPEAKER_10: I know.It's pretty cool.The guy was like the Taylor Swift of his era.
SPEAKER_09: Hey, she's got heiress.
SPEAKER_10: And then also a little known fact.That was a good one, by the way.Thanks.Donna Johnson, who turned down Charles Schultz and inspired the red-haired girl, went on to marry instead a firefighter named Al Wald.And Al Wald turned out to be the basis of the character Gargamel in Peyo Smurf's cartoon.
SPEAKER_09: Amazing. So in 1947, he got his first big sort of career break when he had his cartoon Lil' Folks, L-I apostrophe L, which is a weekly comic.He got it in the St.Paul Pioneer Press.And then when he was 27 in 1950, he got a syndication deal for Lil' Folks in seven newspapers. Not 100.Yeah.And they had to change the name.There was already a Little Folks, and there was also Lil Abner.And so they said, you know, we can't really do this.
We got to change it.So they changed the name to Peanuts, a reference to Howdy Doody's Peanut Gallery.And Schultz evidently never liked that name, even though it's hard to imagine anything different now.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, no way.Plus also, he's like, Peanuts is too schmaltzy and saccharine.Give me Lil' Folks any day.
SPEAKER_08: Right.
SPEAKER_10: But yeah, he carried that around the whole career.He hated the name Peanuts.He never came to like it, which is bizarre.And then I guess with that syndication deal, one of the really big things that happened was he moved from this space filler company section on like the women's page in the St.Paul Pioneer Press to the comics page, in addition to getting like a huge bump in pay.So now he'd made it as a comic.His comic was now on the comics page, which was a huge deal to him.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, huge bump in pay.So he went to like $30 a week.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he had been making 10 and the editor of the St.Paul Pioneer Press was like, I'm not giving you a dime more than that.
SPEAKER_09: So the first Peanuts comic strip came on October 2nd, 1950.And I think that is a pretty good place for our first break, eh?
SPEAKER_10: I think so.
SPEAKER_09: All right.We'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_01: Stuffed with Joshua and Charles Stuff you should
SPEAKER_09: All right, so the first Peanuts is October 2, 1950.Snoopy the dog appeared just two days later on October 4, 1950.It was Snoopy's first appearance.Snoopy on four legs.I don't think if you're not a big Peanuts aficionado, you might not know that Snoopy started out much more dog-like, and Charlie Brown would teach Snoopy to walk on two legs, and Snoopy's character really... more than any other character in Peanuts changed over those 50 years.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_09: For sure.Even though a lot of them changed quite a bit because, you know, like with anything, with any, even television sitcom, like the characters really grow.Like you cast your cast, whether it's TV or it's a cartoon or a graphic novel.And then as you write, they become real and they change and evolve just like real people.And that's certainly what happened to Peanuts.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it's pretty awesome.One of the other things that's widely recognized about peanuts is the style of the drawing, of the writing, of the lettering, all that stuff.It's just immediately recognizable as peanuts. And Schultz's style was described as a formal minimalism.And he had the four-panel format, I guess, foisted on him at first.Wow, there's a lot of Fs.Alliteration.And he had to work within it.And a lot of times just being constrained by rules can actually produce the best art, you know. Sometimes when you don't have any rules, it's tough to find your way or your direction where you're starting.
Starting in a structure can help a lot.And he really thrived in that, even though he apparently didn't like having that foisted on him.But this minimal style and the proportions between the lettering, like the speech bubbles and the kids and the panels, There was a study that called it Schultzian symmetry, which makes a lot of sense.And that what Charles Schultz did first was draw the panels.Then he wrote the dialogue.Then he drew the characters.And there's a writer named Ivan Brutelli who wrote in the Paris Review that pointed out Um, like if you, if you look at a Peanuts cartoon, you're on like eye level with them.You're not looking up.
You're not looking down.You are on their level.And in, in that way, it draws you into the cartoon and you can imagine yourself like in there with them.It makes it that much more like it makes you part of that world and vice versa.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.That's the one thing I didn't get.Cause that's, isn't that every comic in the world?
SPEAKER_10: So before him, yes.Now, before him, that was not the style.
SPEAKER_09: Did they draw like they were looking down on top of someone's head?
SPEAKER_10: They did whatever they wanted.And each one was giant and took up huge amounts of the newspaper.And they were masterpieces, like they were works of art. oftentimes really surreal.They were all over the place, all sorts of different perspectives.This was new, and it was part of that formal minimalism that it was this one, you looked at it the one way, from the side in these specific proportions.It was something new that he introduced.
SPEAKER_09: A little while ago when you were saying that those constraints can really lead to great things, I thought you were going to say, unless it's family circus.Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Do you not like Family Circus?
SPEAKER_09: When was the last time you looked at Family Circus?
SPEAKER_10: Let's see.Age seven.Okay.
SPEAKER_09: It was terrible.Oh.I mean, I loved that family because I was a little kid that read the comics, like, incessantly.Me too.But, like, humor in a Family Circus con panel, just a single square, was like, you know, Jeffy tripped over the book.
SPEAKER_10: Poor Jeff.That's classic Jeffy.Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_09: The other good thing about getting Peanuts going was that it was known and marketed as a space-saving comic.So those four panels could be arranged however you wanted.If you wanted to draw a square, you could.If you wanted them up and down, you could.So that was a real benefit to a newspaper.When you do newspaper layout, it's a big part of putting together a newspaper, making everything fit on the page.So that was a big plus for him is having that flexibility.I imagine Family Circus, even more flexible.
SPEAKER_10: Sure.
SPEAKER_09: just the one square.But because of this minimalism, it really, the character is what's shown because it wasn't like, look at this outstanding art.It's art we grew to love, but it was look at these characters and look at these emotions that these characters are feeling and how they're insecure and they're frustrated and they're sad.But that's also coupled with the fact that They were also very smart at times.They were it could be very funny, but a lot of times it wasn't funny at all.As far as just like, you know, an LOL type of funny, it was something meaningful.
SPEAKER_10: Right.
SPEAKER_09: But there was always a lot of hope, I think.And, you know, Dave helped put this together.And he points out, which I guess, you know, other people have pointed out that no matter how many times Lucy holds that football, Charlie's going to try and kick it.And it's not because he's dumb.
SPEAKER_10: No.And that's, I mean, that's part of a gag, right?That he, he, um, she's going to pull the football away at the last moment.He's going to go flying through the air.But the bigger part of the gag is that he's going to keep trying and you know that she's not going to let him kick that football.And yet he's going to keep trying and trying, you know, like that's the dual level that, that Peanuts exists on.It's a good example of that.
SPEAKER_09: Who was the, uh, When Peanuts turned 100, there were some of the most major comics did tributes.And you sent along some of those.Was that Mark Trail who let him kick the football?Close. Who was it?It was Gil Thorpe.I didn't know Gil Thorpe.
SPEAKER_10: So if you want to, I actually, tears were brought to my eyes.I'm not going to lie.No, I was crying.If you want to just feel incredibly moved, wait until the end of this episode and then go look up the November 22nd, 2022 comic strip of Gil Thorpe and you will be moved.It's amazing.
SPEAKER_09: All the tributes were amazing.Yeah.And it was so cool to see Snoopy and a Garfield and High and Lois, even though I didn't like them, go in for marriage counseling with Lucy.Like, it was a surreal, like, amazing tribute mashup and pretty wonderful thing.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, it was part of this drive for basically every comic artist working at the time to create a tribute comic on November 26, 2022, which was, like you said, Charles Schultz's 100th birthday.Or it would have been had he lived to 100.
SPEAKER_09: Family Circus didn't do it.They did.No, they said, Jeff, he's got to flush his pencil down the toilet instead.
SPEAKER_10: No, they did something.I don't remember.But it wasn't like, it wasn't dead on.It was a little off now that you mentioned it.Although, so Family Circus has one of the sweetest single panel comics I've ever seen in my life, though.I saw years ago when it came out.And still to this day, I think it's one of the sweetest things ever.
SPEAKER_09: Did Jeffy step in the mud?
SPEAKER_10: No, Jeffy wasn't even in the panel.So you would have loved it.You know, Jeff does the Family Circus now.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, is he the real son?Yeah.I feel terrible.Yeah, you should.This is going to get to him.
SPEAKER_10: He's a huge Stuff You Should Know fan.So little PJ, the baby, is coming up.He's got his blanket with him.He's in his maybe little PJs or whatever.Huge smile on his face, and he's just gotten up from a nap.And it says, the caption is, here comes sunshine.
SPEAKER_09: I love it.See, I take it all back.Family Circus, I loved it.It was wonderful.It was wholesome.But as a kid who's into comedy, it didn't deliver the laughs that I needed.
SPEAKER_10: Sure.I'm trying to think of, for me, The Far Side was the first comic that I ever, like, genuinely laughed at.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, see, that didn't come along until I was older.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, same here.I mean, like it was the mid-80s, so I was easily 10 at least.And I'd just been sitting there dourly reading comics up to that point.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, see, I was laughing at all that stuff.I really don't.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I loved all of them.Like you said, High and Lowest, Hagar the Horrible, all those.I don't think any of them ever made me laugh until Farside came along.All right.Wait, no, I want to talk more about that and that phenomenon.Okay.
SPEAKER_09: It didn't take long for Peanuts to become a really big deal.Just five years in, when he was 33 years old, Peanuts, I'm sorry, Schultz was named Cartoonist of the Year.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's huge.
SPEAKER_09: So that's only five years in.And then 10 years after that, Peanuts was on the cover of Time magazine.It's pretty big, too. Huge, huge deal.I already mentioned sort of like, you know, you're sort of like casting a play or a TV show.But Charles Schultz actually talked about that, that writing a comic is like casting a drama company and that these characters do grow and and change over time.And before he knew it, humor started coming out of their little mouths.And it was he was almost like a conduit, it feels like.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he definitely was.And what's remarkable, though, is over 50 years, he never seemed to have gotten all of it out.Because I think you said earlier, people widely consider the Peanuts characters to all be parts of Charles Schultz's psyche, essentially.Art Spiegelman, the guy who created Mouse, said that Peanuts was Schultz breaking himself up into child-sized pieces and letting them go at each other for half a century. And his widow, Jeannie, said that specific characters were meaningful to Schultz himself as far as the psyche was concerned.He said that Charlie Brown's is wishy-washy and insecure side.Lucy's a smart aleck side, which he enjoyed having because apparently he wasn't particularly good at getting that out in person. Linus' curious and thoughtful side, and then Snoopy, this is important to me, Snoopy is the way I would like to be.Fearless, the life of the party, and brushing off Lucy's bad temper with a glancing kiss.And don't you think it's telling that he made the character that he aspires to be the most, the dog?
SPEAKER_09: Telling in what sense?
SPEAKER_10: I think it just says a lot about him that, like, at the very least, he thought highly of dogs.Oh, he loved his dogs.Right.And I think that it's pretty difficult to dislike anybody who loves dogs like that.
SPEAKER_09: You know, that Garfield guy hates cats.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he loathes them.
SPEAKER_09: I collected those books, too.Actually, now that I think about it, the first one that really, not the first one that made me laugh, but the first one that hit me on a second level was Bloom County.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: I was huge into Garfield and Bloom County.
SPEAKER_10: I loved Garfield.I had those books, too.They were world class.The colors, too, in Garfield comics are really great.
SPEAKER_09: A cat that eats lasagna.I still got all those Bloom County books, too.Those hold up.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah?Are you bequeathing them to Ruby?
SPEAKER_09: Boy, I mean, she won't get them now.No, no.I mean, eventually.Oh, sure.She'll get everything.Yeah.Good.But I want to, like, show her at some point when she's, like, 12.Like, hey, you should check out Bloom County.There's a penguin who's friends with a crazy street cat.
SPEAKER_10: She's going to be like.
SPEAKER_09: So let's talk about some of these.
SPEAKER_10: I promise everybody that's the last time I'll do that.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, no, we'll get emails that people like more Sly Whistle.
SPEAKER_10: I'll bet.
SPEAKER_09: Let's talk about some of these main characters.Obviously, we can't hit them all because there were more than 70 characters throughout Peanuts.But we're going to hit the biggies, of course, starting with Charlie Brown and that iconic shirt.That was another sort of thing with Peanuts is that they would change clothes sometimes.Oh, yeah. But, like, Charlie Brown had that shirt on almost all the time.Lucy wore that blue dress for decades until they phased out the dress in the 80s and then completely stopped putting her in dresses in the 90s.Oh, really?What does she wear?I haven't noticed.
Just pants and a shirt.Like, I think they changed with the time a little bit.Like, why put a 90s, 2000s Lucy in a little, like, 1950s girly dress?Gotcha.At least, you know, full time.But Schultz said that Charlie Brown of Charlie Brown, we all know what it's like to lose.But Charlie Brown kept losing outrageously.It's not that he's a loser. He's really a decent little sort.So I think that's a big point.
Like Charlie Brown is constantly losing, but that's different than being a loser.Those are two different things.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.And in that sense, you can consider him like the everyday person, especially if you're coming at peanuts and life from the viewpoint that the general common sense thread in the human condition is not like winning and feeling happy, but feeling dissatisfied and losing pretty frequently.That that's the thing that all of us are equally accustomed to.And Charlie Brown exemplifies that more than anybody.Although, if you really look at Peanuts, pretty much every character, with the exception of maybe Woodstock and Snoopy, more often than not, did not get what they wanted. They didn't win.They didn't get a good grade.They had trouble understanding things.Like if you look at Peppermint Patty, she was good at sports, terrible at school.
And there were plenty of panels that had her not understanding what the teacher was saying or what she was even saying.Marcy, her friend, really good at school, terrible socially.She was very awkward.I think Charles Schultz described her as a very strange little girl.So none of them were just like – We're just like one dimensionally happy or winning in any way, shape or form.That's just not how Peanuts was.
SPEAKER_09: Or just one dimensional.
SPEAKER_10: No, and that's the other thing.First, there were plenty of like background stock characters for sure that weren't fully fleshed out.But the main characters that we're talking about, they were multidimensional for sure.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure.So back to Charlie Brown, he was bald, which I always thought was very strange.He had that big moon head and that little squiggle of hair up front that as a kid, I even remember thinking like, what is going on with this kid?I'll never understand it. Apparently he patterned that after his own, quote, bland face that he had when he was a baby.So that's Charlie Brown.Lucy Van Pelt is probably, I mean, I would call her the second lead probably.Okay. Wouldn't you?
SPEAKER_10: I don't know.Snoopy's somehow in the mix there.But I don't know if he'd be second lead, lead, first lead.He's just like almost on his own trip.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I think Snoopy is almost his own thing.It was almost like a spinoff within a cartoon.
SPEAKER_10: Weird.
SPEAKER_09: But Lucy had black hair.Again, she had that blue dress for many, many years.She was born, or at least born in the comic, on March 3rd, 1952.And she was a toddler at first. But she quickly grew up.He didn't – I think he realized that there wasn't as many dimensions with a toddler character.Right.She's kind of annoying and just crying and stuff.So by 53, like just a year later, she was the wonderful fuss budget we all know as Lucy.And this is a good example of –
A character being different, like, through adult eyes.When I was a kid, I was like, Lucy is really mean.She's a P-O-S.She is.She's a real jerk.She's super vain.She's always asking people how she looks, and if they don't say she's pretty enough, she gets really upset.But now that I'm an adult, I look at Lucy, and I realize that Lucy is a young... girl who is deeply insecure and who has no idea how to express her emotions in a productive way.And these are like adult things that you realize once you get to be an adult.
But Lucy was mean.She was really, really mean to Linus.
SPEAKER_10: You just made me insecure, Chuck, because I was thinking how compassionate a view that is, but apparently that's just the grown-up view of Lucy, which I haven't attained yet.
SPEAKER_09: You still think she's a jerk?
SPEAKER_10: I think she's awful, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Well, maybe it helps having an eight-year-old daughter, too, and seeing insecurities and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah. But everything you just said are all the reasons why Lucy is the last character in the Peanuts universe who should put out a shingle for psychiatric help.Right.Instead of a lemonade stand, offer psychiatric help to anybody for five cents. What a great bit. She's also maybe the one that's in the best position to give out psychological advice, not with any kind of spoonful of sugar, but telling things as it is.And like not giving you a sugar-coated version of reality, but saying like, you need to just do this.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure.One of my favorite panels that I was or strips that I was kind of looking through over the last few days was because Schultz has talked about every character has their own weakness.And he said hers is Schroeder.Yeah.She could be sentimental with him.And there was one panel where she asked him why he never gave her flowers.And he said, because I don't like you.And she said, well, the flowers wouldn't care. So she had her moments like she was super mean to Linus.She would one of the running bits was trying to get rid of his his little woobie, his security blanket.
Like she buried it.She burned it.She cut it up into little pieces.In one storyline, she made it into a kite. And let go of it.And it flew all over the world.And the Air Force rescued it over the ocean.Nice.And brought it back.So she was really mean to Linus.
But there was one comic where she said she demanded to know from Linus what she has to be grateful for.And he said, you have a brother who loves you.And she busts out crying and hugs him.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's very sweet.
SPEAKER_09: So, again, it's a little girl who's just insecure and doesn't know how to deal with emotion.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, all right, fine, fine.He's great.Love Lucy.About Schroeder, though, so Schroeder's the kid with the piano who plays Beethoven, worships Beethoven.Virtuoso.If you look at the ones where he's playing the piano, in those panels, there is, like, musical scales and notes, like, instead of dialogue bubbles at the top of the panel, right?
SPEAKER_08: Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: Those were all hand-drawn in hand, lettered by Charles Schultz.He found it very tedious but important because they were accurate.They were accurate transcriptions of snatches of Beethoven's music.So if you know how to play the piano and you looked at that Peanuts comic, you could play what Schroeder was playing at that time.
SPEAKER_09: Amazing.
SPEAKER_10: Isn't that amazing?That's serious accuracy.
SPEAKER_09: All right.Hey, listen, I got something to pitch.
SPEAKER_10: What?
SPEAKER_09: This thing is going to be way long.
SPEAKER_10: Yay.
SPEAKER_09: So I say we make this a two-parter.Let's take a break.
SPEAKER_10: Okay.
SPEAKER_09: And then maybe come back and talk about Linus and Snoopy.I say we save Snoopy for part two.All right.We'll take a break.We'll come back.We'll talk a little bit about Linus.And then I'm sorry, everyone.This is just too robust.We're going to make this a two-parter.So we'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_01: Stuff with Joshua and Charles.Stuff you should know.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, Chuck, we're back.We were talking about Lucy.You said she was super mean to Linus.And I would say that's in part because Linus was Lucy's little brother.Is Lucy's little brother.I don't know why I'm talking about them in past tense.They're still very much alive.Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, for sure.I mean, it nails like so many sibling dynamics, I think.While there are older sisters who are very caring and loving for their youngers, there are some who are in older siblings, period, who like did not want that baby around.And from the beginning, Lucy didn't want a little brother.And in fact, when Sally Brown came along, Charlie's little sister, Lucy was very jealous because she said that she wanted a little sister too.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_09: And I'm just like, poor Linus.
SPEAKER_10: Poor guy.Yeah, well, poor Rerun, too.They both had a younger brother, even younger than Linus, named Rerun.I wasn't around for Rerun.When did he come around?I don't know.I wish you hadn't asked me that.But he was around for a while.Okay.
SPEAKER_09: I think that was maybe after I stopped reading the comic.
SPEAKER_10: So let's talk about Linus for a second, because a lot of people consider him some sort of genius or at least precociously intelligent.
SPEAKER_09: For sure.
SPEAKER_10: One of the reasons why is because he frequently cites philosophers.He's just clearly well-read.He loves school.His teacher, Miss Othmar, he's quoted as saying that she's a gem among gems.And he can't imagine that she would ever accept money for teaching because she's just such a purist and so talented at being a teacher.Like what kid says that? Right.So, yeah.And at the same time, though, one of the contradictions in terms of Linus is that he also is far and away the firmest believer in the great pumpkin.Yeah.
There's a really great strip with him writing a letter to the great pumpkin, asking him to bring him some toys.And then at the end of the letter, he says, and by the way, if you're not real, don't tell me because I don't want to know.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, it is very sweet that this kid who talks about philosophy and, like, the high arts is a believer in the great pumpkin and also very sensitive.He's easily the most sensitive, like, kind of purest character in the Peanuts catalog, I think.Yeah.He's got that security blanket, and apparently Charles Schultz... If he didn't coin that term security blanket, he made it what it was and popularized it as such, as something a child will have.Yeah, which is pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so the original security blanket was an actual blanket that you pinned to the crib or the bed so that your kid couldn't move.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, it's called super dangerous.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and also like torture, I think is another word for it. And then the military and defense sector picked it up and used it as a metaphor for the measures and links you went to to keep state secrets secret.But it was Charles Schultz who was like, no, this has to do with angst and anxiety.And it was Linus who spread the gospel to the world about security blankets.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah.I called it a whoopee earlier, and that is stolen directly from Mr. Mom.Oh, yeah.Who I think originated that term.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.Whoopee is a great word for it, too.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, or binky.I'm not sure who made that one up, but binky is a big one.
SPEAKER_10: I don't either.I can't even hazard a guess, but I've heard that one too before.Did you have a binky?I had a blanky.
SPEAKER_09: You had a blanky?
SPEAKER_10: Yes.Man, that thing was tattered by the time I gave that up.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I had a pillow.I don't remember if I had a name for it, but it was this little... kind of like a hand pillow, if that's a thing.It wasn't like a full-size pillow.And I would, oh man, this is just coming back to me.I would rub it between my fingers, like over the finger and then down the little valley between the fingers over and over and over.And I would also stick it in my ear.And I remember this was a white pillow and this thing was so disgusting. By the time I got rid of it from like earwax and finger gook that I don't mean my mom certainly would have never said like it's time for that to leave.Right.
But it may have just, you know, disappeared.I don't remember.
SPEAKER_10: You went to go live on a farm.Exactly.No.Yeah.With my goat.That's exactly what happened.What else you got?
SPEAKER_09: Well, nothing.I mean, that's all I got on Linus.I think that's a good robust part one.
SPEAKER_10: I think so, too.So let's start part two in a minute, okay?
SPEAKER_09: Sure.Reminder to everyone to go out and get tickets for our live show this year.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah.
SPEAKER_09: There won't be any listener mail, so we'll just throw in a live show tour plug.How about that?
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, so go to stuffyoushouldknow.com or linktree.com and you can get info and tickets.Yeah, that's a great idea, Chuck.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, so don't wrap up an email and spank it on the bottom yet.You've got to wait, right?
SPEAKER_10: Not yet.Here's the awkward, non-clapping transition for a very special two-parter.
SPEAKER_05: Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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