1965 With A Charlie Brown Christmas, America’s most popular cartoon strip took to the air. Over half of the country’s television sets were tuned to the half-hour cartoon produced and directed by the former Warner Brothers animator Bill Menéndez. The theme was the discovery of the true meaning of Christmas beneath the tinsel, the buying and selling, and the highly organised secular festivities.
Though Snoopy the Beagle enters wholeheartedly into festooning his doghouse as part of a competition for best Christmas decorations, the girls in the story – always the iconoclasts – have already faced down the hypocrisy behind the season’s gift-giving. Lucy van Pelt doesn’t want a ‘lot of stupid toys’ for Christmas; she wants real estate. Sally Brown dictates a letter to Santa asking him to ‘just send money’, preferably in tens and twenties.
It’s left to Sally’s older brother Charlie, always the worrier, to puzzle over the meaning of Christmas, to roll back both the cynicism and the commercialised sentiment. After he buys a tiny tree, the only living thing in a lot featuring plastic and aluminium imitations, the other kids join in the search for authenticity, borrowing from Snoopy’s prize-winning decorations to adorn the vulnerable plant, after Lucy’s brother Linus recites the gospel account of Christ’s birth.
The fact that A Charlie Brown Christmas was itself a species of commercialised sentiment didn’t prevent its winning an Emmy and a Peabody Award for excellence in radio and television – and probably ensured that it would go on being shown and seen as a perennial Christmas favourite. But the real story behind the programme’s success was the enduring popularity of the strip itself, Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, which appeared over half a century in (at its peak) over 2,600 newspapers, read by 3.5 million people in 75 countries.
Peanuts started back in 1950, when American Sunday papers all had their cartoon strips set apart in brightly coloured comic sections. Popular strips included the very different humour of The Captain and the Kids and Li’l Abner, but not all were funny. Some, like Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, followed detective or adventure plots. The Captain was a comedy of situation, while Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner told a serial story, to be continued the next week.
Peanuts was both comic and serial, which meant that, in the words of Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, it grew into ‘arguably the longest story ever told by one human being’. It also carried the plot into four-panel monochrome strips in the daily papers, which widened its social and economic readership beyond the usual ‘funny pages’ audience.
What made it so popular? Partly the way it reversed expectations. The characters were drawn as children, but their dialogue was adult. Or rather, they interacted as kids but moved into adult concerns. Girls were mean to boys rather than the other way round. They didn’t always succeed – the strip was very un-American in that way, and quite unlike the usual English children’s story too. Charlie Brown managed a Little League baseball team that never won a game – except when for some reason he couldn’t play.
Why did Peanuts endure? Its longevity must have had a lot to do with its running gags: Lucy’s sidewalk booth selling not lemonade – the usual kids’ venture – but psychiatric advice, for 5¢ a throw; Linus’s security blanket; Schroeder playing Beethoven on his toy piano; Snoopy on top of his doghouse, forever fantasising about being a First World War flying ace; Lucy holding a football for Charlie Brown to kick, then pulling it away at the last minute, causing him to cartwheel backwards and land on his head – and Charlie Brown falling for the trick again and again.