HE KICKED THE FREAKING BALL, ALREADY, ALRIGHT!!! Roctober Salutes The Genius of Charles Schulz
By Jake Austen (From Roctober #27, 2000) With the passing of the great Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts , there was a massive outpouring of public and media response. There's no way the man was under-eulogized , so you'd think everything that could be said was said...but my beef is what was said that shouldn't have been! In almost every newspaper article it was lamented that Charlie Brown never got to kick the football. Well I'm here to tell you people that several months before the strip ended Charlie Brown did kick the football! Or at least he might have. For those who don't follow the funny pages with the religiosity they should, allow me to extrapolate, after a bit of brief backstory Charles Schulz was cursed with the great fortunes of having the merchandising of his characters become humongously successful and the animated adaptations of his work be of extremely high quality. Those may seem like pure positives, but the curse lies in the fact that Schulz was first and foremost a master cartoonist, and his true artistry is often eclipsed in peoples minds by the indelible imagery of his merchandising and animation. This would be akin to equating the Beatles body of work with their charm bracelets and 60s TV cartoon. Far too many people's gut response to the word " Peanuts " is to hear Vince Girauldi's music, think of the musical incoherence of the cartoon adults or to picture their childhood Snoopy electric toothbrush. This results in one of the worst injustices to Schulz' work: fans who freeze their memories with the 1965 | |
|
