I might even go a bit back and forward, say 1957-1973...What year did Rerun first appear? I think it was downhill after that.
I love the strip from the very beginning up until the early to mid 1970s. I think the peak years were 1965-70.
Shultz's divorce in '74, I think it was, sparked (heh) an uptick in quality around then, by his own admission. I think that was peak Peppermint Patty era.
Yes, there was a lot of Peppermint Patty in those days, she has never been one of my favorite characters. I quickly grew weary of all the PP-Marcie strips.
i devoured peanuts collections from the '50's and '60's as a child, didn't really get into the '70's, '80's and '90's until I was middle-aged. I think it remained a great strip until the end, there's some really surreal storylines in the later years.
Count me among the people who don't care for PP-Marcie. I love everyone from Shermy to Frida, yet whenver PP and Marcie showed up, I knew I was going to be irritated. Just PP's attitude alone in the Thanksgiving special is enough to make someone sick.
I agree with these assessments; that it was always a good strip at some level, even if from the late 70's till the mid 90's (it started to get itself back together in the late 80's) it was running on an Elvis style autopilot. Generally, as I recall there was very little imagination put into the strips in those years, especially with the plot lines. Not a huge fan of the "Schulz & Peanuts" biography as I think it ended up so one-sided, and the biographer is known to have rejected a lot of stuff from the POV of Schulz's first marriage, but there is a great quote from Jean Schulz to the effect of that you could just see and feel the strip becoming mellower, that even Lucy was just bored and tired, and I wholeheartedly agree. Rerun's early appearances were a bit cringe inducing (not to mention repetitive, as it was essentially the same gag of his mother not knowing how to handle a cart/carrier) but his reinvention in the late 1990's brought the strip out of its rut. By casting him as almost an outsider looking in, and deconstructing the strip and examining the characters in a way that hadn't been done in years, the whole thing became so much more interesting again. To me, Peanuts was always (even in its earliest days) a strip both satirizing childhood and adult culture simultaneously, but also explaining why it does so by having characters question others on why they are the way they are. This creates conflict, and is the bread and butter of the strip's finest years. Get rid of this inquisitive nature, replace it with complacency, and you lose the magic.
great assessment--i think there were great storylines in the 70's and 80's too, though. the one where lucy throws schroeder's piano down a manhole, the one where linus meets a girl in a barn, and ends up competing w/ Snoopy for her affections...the way patty and marcie formed a weird love triangle w/ charlie brown that just got weirder and weirder... so many great ones.
Back in the late 90s, I was working for Hallmark. Someone there had gone to the trouble of making a Charles Schlutz font for their Peanuts cards. It was a thing of beauty, and had something like a dozen different variations of the letters "a" and "e" and the designer had gone to the trouble of pairing each in hundreds of letter combinations. I wish I still had it.
To this day, when someone tries to get me to notice something, I say, "I'm lookiting! I'm lookiting!" God bless Peanuts. I don't know of any collective work of literature, including the Bible, that has helped more people understand other people.
Rerun debuted spring 1972. As a five-year-old, I joined the local pee-wee soccer league that fall, and my team was the Reruns. (All the team used Peanuts names.) I was excited that I was on a team named after a new character!
I was living in Washington, DC when I'd heard the news Charles M. Schultz had passed away. That weekend friends were coming down to visit and one of our regular haunts was a piano bar called Mr. Smith's in Georgetown ("The Happiest Place in Town"). The kind of joint where you stuff money into an oversized brandy class and call out some Elton John or Billy Joel songs... Well, that night the fellas and I were into the drinks and I threw a $20 into the jar and simply said "Linus and Lucy" - the piano player launched right into it and the place erupted with applause. Then, going to the bar to get another beer...I saw people wiping tears from their eyes.
I thought it was cool that Charles Schulz had a listed phone number. I read about this in a biography and checked by asking the UK operator for his number - the operator offered me a home and studio number.
They showed it twice, which I think they do every year. Last week when they played it, they edited some stuff out (the first thing that comes to mind is the scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie). Last night's version had everything.
