14 February 2000
You’re a good man, Charles Schultz - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER - Last spring, or probably before that (I didn’t check), Broadway saw a new show debut on the Great White Way. It was a musical, but then again, it wasn’t all that new. It was a revival staged by Michael Mayer, the director in-charge of staging the year’s best new play, Side Man. The revival was that of Charles Schultz’s creation, Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown the musical? Well, yes. You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown was a musical based on the Charles Schultz comic strip, and was originally staged in the 1960’s.
This brand spanking new production coincided with Peanuts’ 50th anniversary, a landmark year in animation and in the life of Charlie Brown, Sally Brown, Schroder, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus and the others whom I’ve forgotten, as well as Charles M. Schultz himself. This past weekend saw the final original Peanuts comic strip. The last daily one ran in January, this happens to be the last weekend one. I guess, I note Peanuts’ passing in this column, as a passing of an era gone by. Gone are the days when comic strip reading was simple rather than convoluted. Nowadays, glitz and glamour, cool colours or neat storylines win glances in the funnies. Peanuts stayed close to the heart of how it was started; simple stories, simple jokes, simple drawings that made difficult and incomprhensible, simple. Not in that demeaning, simple way, but the way that made us human; it made us human together. The elements that made this strip successful, interesting and long-running are probably Mr. Schultz’s doing, but they are the heart of the characters we grew up with. Sure, we don’t look like that, but these small almost inhuman-looking characters, has humanity that taught us the most challenging of lessons of life. It made people cry, laugh and more importantly look at ourselves in these drawn figments of Schultz’s minds eye.
Comic strips and animation have gone high-tech and somewhere else. I don’t know if they are still making us laugh, or if they’re still teaching us the lessons we need to know the most, but I do know that their world is awfully smaller now that Schultz and Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang have left the pages of our newspapers.
50 years of just being there have made this legacy one hell of an act to follow. It’s charm won us over, and that’s how we should remember it. Charles Schultz, really is a good man. Thanks Sir, for everything.
Questions and comments may be sent to: editor@thecommentary.ca
An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .