The Family Van Pelt Episode 1 - Schulz Tackles A Baby

Jimmy: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It's a new year here on Unpacking Peanuts, and we are absolutely happy to have you back. And I'll be your host for the proceedings. My name's Jimmy Gownley, and joining me, as always, are my pals, co host and fellow cartoonist Michael Cohen.

Michael: Say hey.

Jimmy: Harold Buchholz.

Harold: Hello.

Jimmy: And our producer and editor, keeping us out of trouble, Liz Sumner.

Liz: Howdy.

Jimmy: Today we are going to discuss the Van Pelts. This is our new season. We wrapped up our understanding Snoopy. So this is the family Van Pelt. I'm excited to talk to you guys about it because I know you guys are very excited about this character. And by you guys, I mean, Michael and Harold. So tell me, so, Harold, starting with you, what are your thoughts on this trio of characters from the Schulz universe?

Harold: I guess, I mean, the family. Van Pelt is the family I relate to the most in this strip. And certainly as a little kid, I've said before, Linus was more real to me than my next door neighbor when I was growing up. I mean that as a person, and given that he was a bunch of little dots and lines with india ink. That blows me away. And I think that's been an inspiration to me my whole life as a cartoonist is how did Charles Schulz make this world of this little family so real? And so it, just helped me understand my own life better. does that make any sense? 

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: You know, there are things you go through as a kid, and you don't feel like you have reference points for it because it's just happening to you. But you don't see it necessarily in a neighbor. You don't see it in your classmates or anything outside of your family. And so it's just the actual experience of it, and there's nothing to give it context, or comment on it except Peanuts. I mean, Peanuts was the place where I would see things in my life, and like, oh, that's. That's kind of where I am. And you got the. I had an older sister by just under two years, Sarah, and she was not a Lucy. But I said before, I kind of married a Lucy. So, so there are all. All of these amazing dynamics that I find in Peanuts that I totally relate to in the Van Pelt family. And then you throw in Rerun, and, you know, he's an artist. So it's just crazy how all of these different angles on these characters in this family, I, I relate to them. It's helped me understand myself. I think it's helped me figure out who I should be in my family, who I should be in society, who I should be as an art. I mean, it's crazy. But that I, I don't think I'm overstating that. It was super profound.

Jimmy: No, I absolutely hear you. I understand that. And Michael, how about you?

Michael: Well, I don't think my thoughts are as profound as Harold's, but that's too.

Jimmy: Well, that goes without saying.

Michael: Yeah, it goes without, saying.

Jimmy: That's why we have Harold, because we have, semi profound thoughts and he.

Harold: Has actual profound thoughts. We need somebody pedantic.

Michael: Yeah, well, you got me.

Jimmy: We need some profound.

Michael: Yeah. Going back over these early strips which, which we're going to be doing in this episode, I decided to cut it off with the first time Linus actually speaks. And what's interesting for me is when people talk about Peanuts, especially in the year, you know, the 50s, they talk about, you know, how it's children using sophisticated angle adult language. Which is true, which is no one ever did before. But here we have a sequence of strips where there is almost no language. Linus is a baby. And this is the first time we've seen Schulz tackle a baby. You'll see that Lucy comes in different, different terminology. Yeah, he's tackling babies. What can I say about this guy?

Harold: Is that the title of this episode.

Jimmy: Schulz tackles a baby.

Michael: Anyway, we'll see Lucy, she's still a baby, but she's already, she's probably like two, I'm guessing when we, when we first see her. But we're seeing Linus, you know, he's completely non verbal and he's able to create what seems like a fairly well rounded character without using words at all. so that, you know, I think most strips, you know, coming along when they're, you know, starting out this strong, would stick with Linus's baby because, you know, time has no meaning in these strips. Because he's getting a lot out of it. But no, this period lasts like a year. so you'll see all of that or not all of it tonight, but mostly picking strips that we haven't discussed. So this is new for us. We haven't talked about most of these strips before.

Harold: Right.

Michael: And yeah, you'll see Lucy assuming a sister role sometimes good, sometimes bad, that she's she's not just a bystander to this. She's actively playing a role in helping this little kid get along in the world.

Harold: Yeah. Jimmy, can you think of a comic strip where. I mean, it has to be comic strips, because, I mean, you could also think of TV shows and things that have families, but those people grow. Right. I guess it could be animated, but can you think of a comic where the relative ages of child characters move the way they do in Peanuts?

Jimmy: No. I remember someone describing it and some other cartoonist, I think, in Comics Journal, like, just saying how strange it is. They're born as babies and then age to roughly Charlie's Brown. Charlie Brown's age, and then just stop.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: And it's such an idiosyncratic thing. It could only happen in a comic. Well, no, you know what? Actually, it makes me think of, like, Family Ties. I remember, like, they, like, the mom had a. A baby at the, like, season finale of Family Ties, and the next season they come back and he's like, six.

Harold: Okay, so there's. There's an example. Yeah. Or, you know, the kids are just aging out of a family show and they add Cousin Oliver to.

Jimmy: I, by the way, huge fan of Cousin Oliver. I was the cousin Oliver of my family, the younger only child.

Harold: So, Cousin Oliver spoke to you. He was more real to you?

Jimmy: He was more real to me than my actual cousins.

Liz: Well, and then Ernie on My Three Sons, who was the fourth son.

Michael: can't handle perpetually aged kids. I mean, it's a real problem with having kid characters in the series.

Jimmy: it's even a problem, really, for animated shows, because they have to keep getting new voices and stuff. When I was doing the, the, If you're a Patreon of ours, if you join our Patreon, every once in a while, I hop on the microphone and just watch a Peanuts cartoon and chat about it. There is no insight into the process. So you will not be a better person, but you'll have hung out with me for a half hour. But I was watching You're a good sport, Charlie Brown. And for whatever reason, you know our pal Duncan, who we've had in the show, He's Charlie Brown in that show, and he's doing a great job. And then they just splice in the OG from the original Charlie Brown. Oh. And it's so obviously the wrong. It's a different voice, but I guess no one noticed, cared or whatever. But I think it was just so iconic, they couldn't get a new kid to do the sound again.

Harold: Wow, interesting.

Michael: Well, there. There were a few baby characters in comic books anyway. I'm thinking of Sugar and Spike, Baby Huey. Yeah. And in that case they just totally ignored the fact that kids grow up pretty quick. But I really think, looking back on these, especially these early Lucy strips, that I think he was seeing what his kids were doing and saying. I think a lot of these are not. Are more like journals about the kids growing up rather than him creating.

Harold: Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. They're growing. Growing up with whatever he's experiencing and then he locks it in.

Michael: Yeah. So he really nails, especially with the early Lucy's, which, you know, I don't particularly like because she doesn't quite have the personality yet, but it's just very, very kid like. And the humor really comes from. Yep. That's what these little kids are like rather than any, you know, brilliance, brilliant writing.

Jimmy: well, you know, observation can be its own type of brilliance, I would imagine. Now, we talked about a lot, and I think, or. Well, I don't know if we talked about it a lot. We talked about it somewhat though, and other places have mentioned that Lucy in particular could have been inspired by his oldest daughter, Meredith. and I wonder if then you could extrapolate and say, do you think his oldest son, Monty, would possibly be an inspiration for Linus?

Michael: Well, does it work age wise?

Jimmy: Yeah, roughly. Yeah.

Harold: Well, she was born in February of 1950, Meredith. So that's what, about eight months before the strip debuts. And then he's working four weeks in advance, so that's nine months when he starts the strip. And of course, Lucy doesn't show up until when, Michael.

Liz: It looks like 52. Early 52.

Michael: So that works out pretty good.

Jimmy: Okay.

Harold: Yeah. You got a toddler 2 year old around the time he chooses to add Lucy, which is. Yeah. that's interesting.

Liz: You know, do we know from interviews the personality of Monty?

Jimmy: Well, he's an artist. He's published several novels. He's. Yeah, I've only seen him from interviews. He seems like a thoughtful, nice guy. I could definitely see that. Doesn't look like he was dropped on his head like Linus.

Harold: That's look, that's good.

Jimmy: This is all high minded and wonderful, the psychology and Schulz bringing in characters and aging them in certain ways. What I want to know is who dropped Linus on his head to give him that dance? That is what I want. Of all the weird character design things, the shape of Linus's head has baffled me since I was a child.

Harold: Well, that would mean that Rerun had to have been dropped on his head, too. Right.

Jimmy: Well, again, this will be what we get into in this family. What's going on with the dad there? Because my dad, the first time he took me to the park when I was a kid, let me go up on the sliding board and I fell off and landed on my head.

Harold: Oh, no.

Jimmy: So I assume it's a similar situation. I guess everybody could have guessed there was some sort of head injury for me.

Harold: Well, okay, so Monty is born almost exactly two years after, Lucy. So I think she's born on, like, the 5th of February, 1950. He's the 1st of February, 1952.

Jimmy: Wow.

Harold: So, yeah, it kind of lines up, right?

Jimmy: Yeah. No, absolutely. And it plays into. What Michael's saying is that he is doing this as a form of almost diary writing or observation, at least.

Harold: Yeah. I mean, how could you not? You're doing a strip on kids and you got kids and they're right in that sweet spot. Or you make them in that sweet spot by introducing them because they weren't there before. This makes sense.

Jimmy: Yeah. One of the questions I sort of have about this is you're asking about the. Have you ever seen anybody else do ages like this in a comic? Can you think of antecedents for these type. These two particular characters at all?

Harold: Like.

Jimmy: Like, I. There are plenty of sad sacks in comics, so making a sad sack a little boy, okay, you know, that's an innovation. And, you know, obviously Charlie Brown becomes, you know, a brilliant character in the soul of the strip. But you can see there have been characters like that before. There's been wild, dogs in kids strips before going back to Skippy and whatever. But Linus and Lucy together are. They're way more modern, and they don't, to me, seem like they have such an obvious antecedent. What do you guys think?

Michael: I can't think of sister, brother, little kid combos, but I'm. I don't know.

Jimmy: Or even. Even just as individual characters. Forget them as a duo. Just. I don't think of a character. There's a character like Lucy in comics before Lucy, and I don't think there's a character like Linus before Linus.

Michael: Yeah, probably not.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: I mean, they feel suburban. I mean, by that, I mean that, you know, given where the world was going at this time, that you would have, like, a middle class that is doing as well as it was, say, in the United States and in the early 50s. You've got. They're not. You know, typically, characters like this that had the things they had access to in the past would have been the upper crust and usually be making fun of them or having to put all these layers of aristocracy and stuff on top of them.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Michael: These kids are not working in the mill when they hit three.

Harold: Right, right. They're just, like, right in the middle of this American experience in the 50s, and they're. They're living it out where they don't. Yeah, they're not in. Exactly. They're not working in the mills. They're not working on the farm. They are kids who are, you know, jumping rope and going to school, and they are. There's not danger around. There's not a lot of depth around them. It just is a different vibe. That is kind of unique for this era.

Michael: Well, we're talking about a fairly prosperous era now. We're talking. I don't know what the Van Pelt parents do. We can speculate, but, for a barber to have his own suburban house was possible.

Jimmy: Right?

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: Right.

Harold: Yeah. And so you got. You got. And you said, you know, Charlie Brown, the sad sack takes a while to become the sad sack in some ways and some. Sometimes. Yeah. It was there from his first strip.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: But Lucy. Yeah, Lucy is. Yeah. There's so many words we could use, and I'm sure we'll come up with some for Lucy, but she is. She is unique. And I think one of the cool things about Lucy is you can't just put one or two words on her. She is complex and things I think that would have been judged and made fun of or squashed in a strip, the things that she had as a female character. Schulz doesn't do that. And I think that's incredibly unique, you know, doesn't draw attention to itself, that she's a strong female character. Usually if you saw a strong female character, which there were certainly plenty of them.

Jimmy: Right.

Harold: But the whole point was, look, this is a strong female character. Right. You, know, this is. This is the typist who can get everything done. This is the. This is the flapper who can run a household. And in a certain way, it's like, this is a type, and I'm. I'm selling you a type so that you can experience vicariously this type of care.

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Harold: And she's not that.

Michael: Yeah. I'm wondering. I don't know it from the newspaper, but I know it from comics. Little Lulu seems the closest.

Jimmy: Yep. That's a great call, kids.

Michael: You know, it seems suburban. It seems like there's a little gang of kids who, you know, have adventures together. but I don't remember any sibling interactions.

Harold: Yeah, she had her cousin. Was it Alvin? And then, of course, Nancy, when we, you know, Nancy feels slightly more urban, but also it really is a suburban feel to it.

Michael: I don't want to talk about Nancy. Little Lulu. Yes, now there's a little girl. Little Lulu has a little girl companion, Annie or something, but I don't think it's a relative.

Harold: No, I think she babysits sometimes.

Michael: Okay.

Harold: Anyway, I don't know. I'm not an expert on the little Lulu, but, yeah, I do agree. Those are. Those are two examples, I think, that absolutely are coming before what we're seeing here in Peanuts that you could, you could make a connection to.

Jimmy: You know, I think it's interesting that Peanuts is having such a cultural moment with Gen Z, but the thing that Gen Z gravitates to the most is Snoopy. And I don't think it's just because Snoopy's, you know, an icon, a cute icon. I think Snoopy, sits at a keyboard at his house and fantasizes, you know, and like, the, the react. The world of Peanuts. I mean, I know this from Amelia talking to, you know, kids who are now in their 20s or ever, who had Amelia even. Amelia felt like a fantasy to them. Just kids running around in the neighborhood wildly free to do whatever they want, that this, none of this exists anymore. So even if you had, Like, there's an element, I think of it, that in. In real world childhood, at this period, you could go out and become a Linus on your own or become a Lucy, as opposed to being shuttled from event to event, where you're becoming just occupied. You know, your time is being occupied, you're doing your thing, but you're not exploring freely the world, your peers and yourself.

Harold: Yeah, it was interesting you say that about Snoopy, that, you know, Snoopy is the one who. It's. It's in mostly in his head, or you could argue it's mostly in his head. And, you know, if you, your, your free moments that you have are, you know, online or, you know, just you in your room drawing or whatever you might be doing, reading, you know, that's, that's the life I, I relate to. But I think, yeah, it's. It's true that there seems to be less agency for kids to just do their own thing, especially if it means, I mean, you can do your own thing. Inside the house, Right.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: You know, you probably have the freedom. A lot of kids do, but in terms of pulling together a whole gang of kids from the neighborhood to do something that seems to be a little less common. A lot less common, I guess.

Jimmy: Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, like I, I talked about in the show where we would just have, you know, two week long, or a week long, rather doubles tennis tournaments in Girardville just organized by the kids and be like 20 kids playing. That's never. It's unimaginable.

Harold: I think, I think something is super indicative of that. You know, you look at how kids have engaged with music over the last 80 -100 years, you know, you know, back in the 30s or 40s, you try to join a big band, right? And you know, who started that? How did that happen? You try, you want to be part of something, then rock and roll comes along and everyone wants to form a band. Now you look at, at. Yeah, it's like if you have a band, it's been organized by somebody and you know, some company owns a K pop group or whatever. It's like who's creating a band, right? From the band members and they're sticking together and moving around. It happens. But it's so much more. It's all these solo people because people don't have the opportunities to.

Liz: But solo people can create all the instruments on their devices. They don't need a band. They are the band. They can create the band.

Harold: Right. Which also means the personality that comes out of having a five member group and each of them putting something in so that it feels, rounded in a way that it's just a different experience. It's all these personalities finding a way to work together. You don't get that in the single person figuring out how to do the drums and figuring out how to, you know, do the backing tracks for themselves.

Michael: Now we're sounding like a bunch of old farts.

Liz: Yeah, well, we are though.

Jimmy: But let me just end with one thing. Like, I know, I know that feeling though. Just be the difference between this podcast and the podcast I do on my substack, gvillecomics.substack.com but because there's just a limit to one person. there just has to be, you know, I know what I know and I can do the things I can do. But when I'm doing my podcast alone and I stop talking, there's nobody to pick it up and take it to the next thing. To the next place or the next insight. Yeah, okay. Well, with that prelude said, let's get into looking at some of these strips starting like Michael said, with good old lucy. This is 

March 3, 1952. Charlie Brown is sitting on the curb playing with a little toy truck. And from off panel we hear someone saying, one, one, one. And this, captures Charlie Brown's curiosity. And we cut to the second panel where we see it's Lucy who's skipping rope, saying 1, 1, 1. And she's a toddler at this point. Charlie Brown yells out to her to Lucy, 2. And then we see Lucy continuing to Skip rope, saying 2, 2, 2. 

Jimmy: Yeah, this is the earliest version, of Lucy. We got the big saucer eyes. She's just trying to figure out her way.

Michael: She really looks totally baffled.

Jimmy: Oh, that last panel.

Michael: Well, all at this early, this is the first Lucy. But yeah, for, you know, the first six months she was just this really baffled kid. She didn't have the clue what was going on.

Liz: But Charlie Brown knows who she is.

Michael: Yeah. So I, I think Schulz might have tried a few other introductions that didn't make it to the, to the page.

Harold: Yeah, the Saucer Eyed Lucy is not.

Jimmy: He has the saucer eyes. And we also. He has not gotten to the point where he knows his iconic poses well because he's two years into the strip. Right. I think there's a real awkwardness to the drawing of Lucy's body in the last panel that works great because it's a little kid who doesn't know what's going on and is just trying to learn how to skip rope or whatever. But yeah, I, you know, later when you think of some of those stunning rope skipping panels with the, you know, the, the ropes spinning around them and the, the feet not even visible. They're just strokes of the pen like from Snoopy when he's dancing. He's a long way from that at this point.

Harold: Yeah. Feels much more grounded in reality. And yeah, there is a look of awkwardness. Although I will say she looks like she got at least nine skips in in this four panel strip from Pretty Good. You can tell.

Michael: At this point I don't think there's a character there. There's just maybe the, the, the daughter, the two year old daughter was just had these glazed eyes or something. It was just like a visual joke.

Harold: Yeah, it's a, it's, it's almost like she is this kind of not a blank slate, but she's, you know, she's yeah, she's, she's a baby. She's a baby. Yeah. Yeah. And we don't know what's going to come out yet.

Jimmy: well, 21 days later, we're getting an inkling because on 

March 24, 1952, Lucy is in her crib. She's just about right. She's in her feety jammies. She's getting ready to go to sleep. And she calls off panel, night, night, Daddy. She's sitting there with her little teddy bear. She then quite happily picks up the teddy bear and then throws him out of the crib and yells, daddy. And then leaning over the rails of her crib, yells, I want my teddy bear.

Liz: That feels real.

Jimmy: Oh, my daughter Anna, had a stuffed toy. Has a stuffed toy named Callie, an octopus. And this was her go to move when she didn't want to go to sleep. Eventually, we have to tie Callie's tentacles to the railings.

Harold: Oh, I love the big smile that she has at the first panel saying, you know, she knows exactly what she's going to do because she's going to get to see Daddy the second time. That's really sweet. She's singing to herself, humming to herself.

Jimmy: Oh, yeah.

Harold: She goes pick up the big,

Jimmy: On, Well, in all. Well, in the first three panels, in a way, but especially 1 and 2. What do you think of the saucer eyes? Just as a character design, you know, just purely visually.

Michael: I don't like it.

Liz: The eyes are disturbing.

Michael: Yeah, it is disturbing. Yeah. I don't think it's good. Look, I'm glad it went away. It makes me nervous.

Jimmy: Well, I think it doesn't. It really doesn't look Peanuts-y.

Harold: No, I mean, I guess if it had gone on for 50 years, we would have said it was, but, you know. Well.

Liz: Right.

Jimmy: Yep.

Harold: I would think most people would say, I prefer when they turn into the little parentheses rather than the full circles and that they're just floating right in the middle of the eyes. It really does suggest this kind of wide eyed. I don't know if it's innocence or what it is, but it's. Yeah.

Jimmy: now, I wonder, now that you mentioned that we've talked before, that the Van Pelts, Linus and Lucy and Rerun all have those parentheses on the sides of their eyes that give them that sort of perpetually worried look.

Jimmy: The other characters in the strip get that when it's an emotion, likes anxiety or something like that. Do you think it's. It comes from, like, the evolution of him losing the eyes, the circle around the eyes, rather, and just tweaking it to be on the side.

Harold: Well, take a look at the second panel of this. That looks, He does not complete the line of the eye because he wants the pupil to kind of be floating and you draw your eye into it where it's not touching anything. And that is so close to the later Lucy. There's a little more arc over the eye to suggest the angle of the eye. I don't even know what the parentheses is supposed to represent to them in terms of anything physical in an actual person versus, you know, somebody else in some other family in the strip.

Jimmy: Right.

Harold: I don't know what that, why they look like that. Except as you said, maybe it just evolved out of cutting down.

Jimmy: But I think it today.

Harold: Yeah. And it's weird. I mean, look at the teddy bear. It's got the same look in the second panel. It's got those wide eyes with the circles around them. Yeah. It's almost like. Yeah, there's a. I can't find the right word for it. But yeah, there's a simplicity and a purity to this little baby. And that's gonna, that's gonna go away. But, but Lucy had a look and I guess we could go back and we could, you know. When does it change? That's when you probably can find the panel. When you have a head on version of it and all of a sudden the circles are gone.

Jimmy: Yeah. Well, shockingly, just by May, which is when our next strip is going to be. They're gone.

Michael: Yeah, no, they're gone. It was a very short period. But by the way, before we leave this strip, look up the signature.

Liz: Yeah, yeah. Daddy.

Michael: For Daddy.

Jimmy: That is neat. I did not notice that. So. Wow. That is definitely just for Meredith. Really.

Harold: so sweet.

Jimmy: That's amazing. Boy babies are hard to draw like, like that. If you really start looking at Lucy in that first panel, just like, you know, really stare at it for a while.

Liz: I don't want to.

Jimmy: Yeah, it looks more doll than a child.

Harold: Definitely. Wow. You think that's the one strip that Schulz didn't sign? Schulz in the history of Peanuts?

Jimmy: It might be.

Harold: That's cool.

Michael: Good thing we're looking real close.

Jimmy: Real close. Good catch. 

May 14th. Here is a really rare eight panel daily strip. He has taken the four traditional panels that he's given as his space saver strip size and he's divided each of them in half, vertically. So what it is, is Lucy building a tower out of some building blocks. And in the first four panels she builds them up, you know, to a quite High tower almost, you know, up to her forehead in height. And she stands up there, and then by panel five, she just kicks it over into a million pieces, looks absolutely delighted, and then starts over again. And I believe we're meant to believe that the cycle just continues.

Michael: Well, the bit. The sigh is really unusual. what is she happy about? Is she happy that she built it, or she's happy that she was able to destroy it?

Liz: It's complete. It is now ready to be kicked.

Jimmy: Yes, exactly. That's what I think. Yeah. She's satisfied that she has done the work part, so now she can have fun by knocking it over.

Liz: Yeah.

Michael: Okay. This is a hint of her personality.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Michael: Definitely torn between the urge to destroy and the urge to create.

Jimmy: Yeah. That's a very famous Lucy strip. Right?

Harold: Yeah. This. This also rings very true to me. and one of the things that's a little bit odd about this is that as she's stacking her blocks, she has two different sizes of blocks. And so she will. It looks like she's alternating them as she's. So, I mean, that's not what I would typically see. If someone was just thinking of the idea all of the blocks would be the same size.

Jimmy: Right.

Harold: It's like Meredith maybe had two sets. I'm just guessing here. And one was bigger than the other, and you play with both of them, and you just combined them into your. Into your toolkit of things you could do. So that's why this one kind of also feels like, oh, this might have come from observation.

Jimmy: Yeah, I can see that.

Liz: Is, she humming? she was. She had a little note in the last strip, too. Is she just sort of making music to herself with her.

Jimmy: Yeah, that's what I think. Just that kind of thing.

Michael: There's no one to talk to.

Liz: Yeah.

Harold: And so happy. Now, this is a very, very cute Lucy. That first panel and the second panel particular and the last panel are just. And you know, when she's happy standing over the pile of blocks she's just knocked over.

Harold: It's a very appealing character at this point. And you go back and you look at Lucy just from a little bit earlier. He's come a long way in making a really appealing design.

Jimmy: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. As she has a classic early Peanuts look right now.

Harold: Now, this is all from the side. And so we just see the parentheses around. He's. He's taken the arch that's kind of over the eye the way we saw earlier when we saw the side of Lucy that was not A complete circle. And now it's. Yeah, it's just the parenthesis instead of almost a complete cartoony, you know, Bugs Bunny style oval. And it looks really good.

Jimmy: Yeah, it does look really good. Any inklings at this point? What do you think the parents are doing? We have no clues yet. Nothing. No clues that can point us to what's going on with these kids.

Michael: Do they ever. Do we ever get clues?

Jimmy: I don't think we ever hear a, mention in 50 years of what either of the parents do for a living. Although, what did we decide? Like psychiatrist and college professor? Is that what we decided?

Liz: Yes. Or two psychologists and two professors.

Jimmy: Maybe that makes sense.

Harold: They're both working. Working parents. Yeah. That's the, that's the vibe.

Jimmy: Yes.

Harold: Yeah. I mean, and does seem in really early on, there's not a whole lot of these references, but when you do, it seems like, yeah, she's a daddy's girl.

Liz: We're all daddy's girls.

Harold: When she's relating to the mom or the dad. I'm trying to think of. Are there strips that we can think of where she's. She's somehow responding to her mom or reacting to her mom. You know what that dynamic is like?

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we definitely hear, you know, mom giving orders now and again through Lucy. so we'll have to be aware of that.

Harold: So as maybe a, you know, strong, strong mom.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: Maybe daddy's the pushover who will come and she knows if she calls her mom to get the teddy bear.

Jimmy: Yeah, yeah. That didn't happen.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: Oh, well, Dad's obviously always going to be the pushover. Especially then because the mom has been dealing with Lucy all day.

Harold: Right, Right.

Jimmy: She's not interested in picking up this stuffed animal.

Harold: She knows the game. Yes.

September 19, 1952. Charlie Brown sitting there reading. Is this the first appearance of the book that Charlie Brown never finishes? So he's sitting there reading this book, and Lucy comes over and says, my baby brother can sit up. Charlie Brown follows Lucy off and he says, really? All by himself. Then they run through the gate to Lucy's house. As Lucy says, almost. I only had to prop him up a little bit. And then Linus, is sitting there. Charlie Brown sees him, and Linus is in fact sitting up in his diapers, but he is propped up by a series of boards nailed into the ground that is keeping him sitting upright.

Harold: That's disturbing those nails.

Jimmy: it really almost bothered me as a kid.

Harold: Yeah.

Jimmy: Like I could feel the raw wood up against Linus.

Harold: Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy: Now we notice he hasn't been dropped yet.

Liz: Oh, well. But it's the back of his head, right?

Jimmy: No, no, it's the top. It's the top. It dents in on that.

Harold: That is the fullest head of hair I've ever seen on Linus too. That's a lot of hair. So, okay, so, you know, the new baby in the house around the time this was drawn would have been six months old.

Liz: And we have the right eyeballs now.

Michael: Yep.

Harold: Yeah. Linus never has the. The round eyeballs, does he? He. He's immediately got the little parentheses eye.

Jimmy: Yep.

Michael: Yeah, but it looks like Schulz didn't want to bother with a little baby on his own again. And, like, he did it. There's probably not a whole lot of material there until the kid becomes active.

Jimmy: Unless you're focusing on the parents.

Michael: So he kind of. He's kind of skipped, the tiny baby phase.

Jimmy: Yeah, because, like, in strips, like, Baby Blues or whatever, so much of it is the parents dealing with the little baby, because the little baby. Unless you're gonna do, like, Trixie in Hi and Lois or something, where you can listen to the baby's thoughts somehow.

Harold: Right.

Liz: How about Sally? How old is she when she appears?

Jimmy: Oh, a baby. She. Her birth is. Happens in the strip.

Liz: But do we see her any--

Jimmy: Yeah, she's in a stroller.

Liz: Younger than. Than Linus is here, at least this age.

Jimmy: She's in a stroller, and Charlie Brown's pushing her around, and he's not able to play in the baseball game. what does she say? I'm only six months old, and already I have guilt feelings.

Michael: Okay.

Harold: Yeah. And it is interesting that with Linus and Lucy, you don't get some of the accoutrements that you get with Sally. Like you said, a pacifier and bonnet and a stroller. It's almost like the Van Pelt Adults don't believe in those, those things for children.

Jimmy: Yeah. The kid's sitting here in his diaper, held up by two by fours.

Michael: Well, he's sitting on the ground outside, which is weird. You wouldn't let a baby do that?

Jimmy: no, not traditionally, no.

Liz: No.

Harold: Ah.

Michael: But here we have Lucy trying to help. I mean, it's bizarre.

Harold: Yeah.

Michael: But she is trying to help him.

Harold: Those nails, to me, I don't know if Lucy put them in or these are just rejected boards because the nails are just loose and dangerous and. Yeah, I love that Schulz adds that to the. To the look, because it does feel a little. A little dangerous. For Linus to have Lucy as his big sister.

Jimmy: Well, it's funny, too, because Linus is just happy sitting there. But he could have looked concerned.

Harold: Yeah, yeah.

Liz: You know, like, little concern.

Jimmy: Yeah, he does. Yeah. He could be looking at Charlie Brown like, you know, get me out of here. If he's not, he's happy.

Harold: Which suggests at this early point that the Van Pelt kids are a little clueless and a little. You know. You know, you're on the edge here with them because they. They will do things that. And it wouldn't happen.

Jimmy: Remains clueless. All the changes is her. Well, it doesn't even change. It's. She just becomes more and more confident.

Michael: Uh-huh.

Jimmy: And I don't know if you've noticed in the world, but you can be quite clueless. As long as you're a confident loudmouth, you can go pretty far.

Michael: Yep.

Liz: We could take a break now, by the way.

Harold: Perfect.

Jimmy: All right, we'll see another time.

BREAK

VO: Hi, everyone. Thank you for listening and engaging with us. Your appreciation makes this effort a real pleasure. And now we're asking that you support our work. If you enjoy the show, we hope you'll join us on Patreon as a contributor. Those of you who can't, for whatever reason, that's okay. We've been there. We're glad you're here. Thank you for being an essential part of unpacking Peanuts.

Jimmy: And we are back. All right, Liz, we're hanging out in the mailbox. Do we have anything?

Liz: We do. We heard from a couple of people. regular contributor Aaron Forringer sends us a link from Laughing Squid that says it's ranking the Peanuts characters by impact. His comment in the email is that it's more Peanuts characters defined because it doesn't really do any ranking. But, I can post it so others can weigh in.

Harold: All right, cool.

Jimmy: Thank you very much for that.

Liz: And Patrick McMullen writes hello to the unpacking Peanuts gang. First, I just wanted to thank you all for the thoughtful and fun exploration of Peanuts. It's definitely made me appreciate the masterpiece that Schulz created, even more so than I already did. I've been particularly loving the Spotlight series on Snoopy. I'm definitely of the belief that he is the greatest comic character of all time. My wife and I particularly love a Snoopy scene outside of the comic strip. It's from the Great Pumpkin cartoon when Schroeder is kind of piano playing with Snoopy's emotions, to the point that Snoopy lets loose a sorrowful howl and then is immediately embarrassed by his instinctual reaction. We howl with laughter every time we watch it.

Jimmy: Awesome.

Liz: Just curious if you all have any favorite non comic strip Snoopy moments. Or maybe this will be explored in a future episode. Thanks again for such a great podcast.

Jimmy: Oh, well, thank you for writing and you're welcome for the podcast.

Harold: Yeah. Thank you. For me, the Christmas special always comes to mind. We were watching, watching a lot of it. You know how you watch the reaction video of someone watching something for the first time? You know that that's always, you know, it's, it's, it's absolutely irresistible. If there's something you love and some, you know, someone's going to watch it and fall in love with, you get to watch them fall in love with it. That, you know, I can't help but watch those things. So we watched some people watching the Charlie Brown Christmas and so you see little clips of it often without the sound or like it's just little so they don't get shut down by YouTube. And it is really. There's so many adorable Snoopy moments. You know the one where he's listening to the piano and getting into the music and he just turns super joyful and starts dancing and dancing and dancing. And then Schroeder stops and Snoopy realizes that everyone, you know, all eyes are now focused on him, disapprovingly. And then he kind of shrinks down, slinks away. It's so great animation that there's so many beautiful animated versions of Snoopy in that Charlie Brown Christmas when he's skating on the ice, when he's. Yeah, it's just, just. That's the stuff that I remember of Snoopy that's not from the strip itself.

Jimmy: I like it when he's in the hospital bed reading Play Dog and you're. You're a good sport. Charlie Brown made me laugh at five. Made me laugh at 53.

Liz: That's pretty funny. And, Deb Perry, super listener Deb Perry writes, listening to your latest Understanding Snoopy episode and flipping through various Peanuts collections. Snoopy does seem to have had more design changes than the rest of the Peanuts cast. Yet in a way, each of them is suited to the role Snoopy is playing in the strip in a given time period. Cute little puppy Snoopy. From the earliest strips, the wouldn't have worked as the vulture, the World War I flying ace, or the world famous grocery clerk. If you sat puppy Snoopy down in front of a typewriter, you wouldn't get a cliche filled novel. You'd get a paw print. As much as I liked Snoopy as we know him now, I still have a soft spot for Snoopy's early years. The early Snoopy would have made a cute little golden book character. I've enjoyed reading the Snoopy little puppy. You probably could work up some sort of kid's picture book from those early Snoopy strips. Although it would probably feel a bit dated. Maybe I could send the idea along to Peanuts Worldwide.

Jimmy: Do it, Debbie. That's your thing, man. You gotta do it. You gotta keep pitching. That's what it's all about these days.

Liz: And Jason Bullett writes, I'm writing this email on the 60th anniversary of the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas. This is my favorite Christmas holiday special of all time. I watched it so much as a child, I was able to commit Linus's speech at the end to memory. I later found out it was also the first Bible passage I memorized. Luke 2: 8-14. Happy holidays to all and be of good cheer, Jason.

Harold: Oh, be of good cheer, Jason. Isn't it funny you  know that? And then that's. And it's Linus who has. I can't memorize these lines. And here Linus helps you memorize them.

Jimmy: There you go.

Liz: That's it for the mail.

Jimmy: We heard some stuff on the, the hotline. We heard from super listener Jim Meyer who wrote and requested an all Woodstock season. This came in before our Snoopy and Woodstock episode. So I'm not sure. Maybe a little went a long way. But yeah, we're all Woodstock fans here. Do you think you could do a whole season though on Woodstock, guys?

Liz: but we could try. I would enjoy trying.

Harold: Yeah. Well, if we threw in the Beagle Scouts and Harriet's seven minute frosting, maybe we could.

Jimmy: We heard from super listener Captain Billy, who also says, Re: Snoopy Part 5, that he hopes the next phase of the show will be the ten part unpacking Shermy.

Harold: That might be a little more challenging.

Jimmy: So if you guys want to reach out to us, we would love to hear from you. You can email us. We're unpacking peanuts. gmail.com. sign up for the great Peanuts reread over there on unpacking peanuts.com and if you want to leave, a voicemail or text us, you can do that at 717-219-4162. But, like Captain Billy did here, you gotta remember to identify yourself. Otherwise I won't know who you are.

Harold: Well, there's some big news in the Peanuts world in recent, weeks.

Jimmy: Oh, right, yeah.

Harold: So Sony bought a bigger stake in Peanuts. What does that mean? That's not the easiest thing to answer, but they bought a 41% stake. So the family, the Schulz family, owns 20%, and that's been set aside and kind of the understanding was they would contain 20% of. Of Peanuts as a business, I guess you could say. Right. And they also have certain approvals that I think the family has to be involved in, even though they own a minority share. Previously, Sony had owned 39% of Peanuts, and they bought that in 2018 for $185 million. So this gives you an idea of what's happened to the value of Peanuts in the last, what, seven years? Right. So Peanuts, as we know, stopped as a strip in the year 2000. And a lot of things, they kind of slowly lose value over time, and other things seem to just build it as an iconic part of culture, and it just seems to grow. And that's what's happened with Peanuts. So they, for 185 million, they bought 39% of Peanuts. This time in 2018, they bought. What was this? The $457 million. So what is that? That's like two and a half times more or less what they paid the first time around to be owners. 

And it's interesting, you know, you think about Wild Brain was the company that owned it before now Wild Brain, like outright Strawberry Shortcake and, Teletubbies. And what they were saying on the Wild Brain side is we sold this off because as licensing companies, it's a lot easier for us not to have to deal with partners. Well, that might. Of course, the 20% Schulz thing, it kind of is referred to obliquely here. The idea that it's not that they can do whatever they want with, you know, Strawberry Shortcake, and they don't need somebody to approve it. And so they were saying, we can make a whole lot more money off of something we own completely than is something that we have to share with others. So they were. They got a nice profit, sold it off. Sony was originally an electronics company, and it's a Japanese company. So now a Japanese company owns 80% of Peanuts. And, you know, they've been really heavily investing, and if you think of what everyone's trying to do and they're trying to grab onto the biggest. The biggest, IP that you can, since there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of new IP being created now, because everyone's so fractured. So it's like Marvel was, you know, was bought by Disney, Star Wars, you know, it just seemed like everyone was trying to kind of grab as much of the remaining culture that everybody has in common from a common time when there weren't as many versions of media out there. 

Now Sony has doubled essentially their ownership in Peanuts, and it's going to be. I don't expect much of anything to change. Apparently there's, a Peanuts movie that's in the works that Wild Brain the previous owners had helped make happen. Maybe it's going to be straight to streaming, I don't know. But I think that stuff's going to continue to happen. I don't know that we're going to see much else that changes with Sony kind of just being the majority owner now because, you know, 20% owners for the Schulz family, that doesn't change. Whatever input they probably had with two companies, now they just have it with one. I'm hoping that won't affect anything as far as the. Them being happy with the, the brand that they're shepherding.

Jimmy: Hey, look, I'm just, I'm a simple small town cartoonist, but the one thing I know, anytime a gigantic multinational corporation takes over a beloved artistic statement, it goes great. Everybody think about it, guys. I mean, Think about how much you love Rings of Power now we'll be able to get that version of Peanuts, the Rings of Power version.

Michael: Yeah. It's horrifying. I mean, we had a guy with a pencil.

Jimmy: Oh, no, it's one of those, what do they call them? Oh, dystopian nightmares.

Michael: Yeah, pretty much.

Liz: I think the family is going to.

Jimmy: Oh, yeah, 20% with five kids versus soda.

Liz: They, they will have stipulation. I think that everything will be fine.

Harold: to me, what it looks like is the fact that, you know, you had a 41% and a 39% and a 20% share of ownership. You know, they still owned more than what the family owned. I don't know what was in that 20% deal that gives the freedom of the family to veto or, you know, direct.

Jimmy: I'll tell you, I know nothing about it. Nothing. Nothing.

Liz: We'll see. We will see.

Harold: Well, all I can say is the integrity of Peanuts relative to other, other brands. I'm, pretty impressed given that he's been gone.

Jimmy: Oh.

Harold: Up to this point.

Jimmy: Absolutely. It'll be interesting to see what happens going forward. All right. Is that the news in the mail?

Liz: That's it.

Jimmy: All righty. Well, let's go back and check out those strips. 

September 30, 1952. Baby Linus is sitting there in

Jimmy: Excuse me. And I start, I got the hiccups. Unbelievable.

Liz: that's funny.

Harold: What an influential strip.

Baby, baby. Linus is sitting there in his diapers, and he has the hiccups. Hic, hic, hic, he says. Or maybe he's just insulting Charlie Brown and, he's a rube. But it appears as if he has the old hiccups. And then Charlie Brown runs to Lucy and says, hey, Lucy, your baby brother's got the hiccups. He shouldn't be hiccuping, should he? And Lucy says, why not? And Linus continues, hick, hick Hicks. To which Lucy replies, he hasn't got anything else to do.

Michael: Well, if it bounced you off the ground, it might be fun.

Jimmy: That's amazing.

Harold: Yeah. My memory of the Linus strips more than the Lucy strips was that he's often just off on. He's just on his own. He's falling over because his head's so big. I mean, there's so many jokes about that. I mean, Schulz, that was the go to repeatable joke for Linus in his early years is his head's too big, so he falls over and hits his head, which may be where your theory of what's happened to the indentation that could be right there in the strip.

Jimmy: Yeah, you know what? That could be it. Because if you look here, if you look super close on that first panel, you can see the rounded line that describes Linus's head. Not dented.

Harold: And he does have a fuller head of hair than he does in later strips. He's,

Jimmy: No eyebrows in the first panel.

Harold: Yeah, the eyebrows definitely come and go in.

Jimmy: Yeah. Because there's none on Lucy either in the second or third panel or fourth panel.

Harold: It's like the eyebrows are for emotion and not by necessity, you know, and.

Liz: She's playing with her blocks again, and.

Jimmy: They're small ones and tall ones and big ones again.

Harold: Yeah, very interesting. Yeah, it's, Yeah, Linus is. He's talking about a blank slate baby. You know, since we're getting into Linus earlier than Lucy, I think in the strip, really as a character. And again, maybe because of the ages of his kids, again, we're still in that place where we're only six months into the second Schulz child.

Jimmy: So I like the 50s stuff a lot. I like specifically, I think, you know, having gone through our best ofs and stuff from 1954 though to like the end of the 50s. But what I not crazy about, there's a couple things I'm not crazy about in this really early stuff. One of the things is the way he draws their hands and arms. They look like, in some instances they almost look like penguin like flippers, you know, that one like Lucy looks very strange. in panel two. So does Charlie Brown.

Harold: You know, I see what you're saying out of the forearm. Yeah. I think design wise, later Peanuts look so cool. And here it's got, I don't know, he makes better and better and better choices as he goes on as an artist.

Jimmy: Yep. Not seeing any of Linus's personality of course at this point.

Michael: Well, he seems to be happy.

Harold: Yes. He seems to be kind of easygoing.

Michael: So he doesn't seem to have anxieties at this point.

Harold: Yeah.

Liz: No need for a blanket.

Harold: No, not yet. No need for clothes.

Jimmy: Put a shirt on, kid.

Michael: Hey, he's going to get a striped shirt before too long, huh?

October 18, 1952. Linus is just sobbing. He's sitting on what looks like a big sheet of newsprint, or some sort of paper and he's just crying. And Charlie Brown tries to comfort him, says Linus, please. And then Charlie Brown goes over to Lucy and says, you, baby brother's crying, Lucy. And I can't make him stop. And Lucy says, give him a comic magazine. And then Charlie Brown runs over with the comic book and says, I don't see what good this is going to do. In the last panel we see baby Linus eating the comic book. And he looks absolutely delighted to be doing so. 

Jimmy: There's some teething going on in the household perhaps at this point.

Harold: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. And you got Lucy playing with the odd sized blocks again. And at this point she's trying to. She's a little checked out. She's been hearing a lot of crying, I guess.

Liz: And that's a baby blanket. Not a newspaper.

Harold: A blanket.

Liz: Yeah, a baby. I mean he just put something down on the floor so that the baby.

Harold: Origin and first appearance Linus is blanket there it is not necessary.

Jimmy: That could be it.

Michael: Amazing.

Harold: Yeah. This looks like the stuff we laid out for our dogs. That's what makes it. I feel a little weird.

Jimmy: Yeah, well, yeah, that's exactly what it looks like we've had. Yeah. All right, so halfway through the first episode here, almost halfway through the first episode, what there, are we picking up anything that we can possibly say about the Van Pelt family? That we haven't any new insights.

Michael: Well, I think you're right. Lucy's getting a little bored with this baby.

Jimmy: She's had enough.

Michael: Yeah. Then soon it turns so she becomes violently evil.

Harold: Yeah. And the parents are not opposed to these very young children having access to comic magazines and reading material, especially in 1952.

Michael: God only knows what that book is.

Jimmy: Yeah.

Harold: What would that have been worth if he hadn't been sucking on it?

Michael: Can you imagine in terms of, like, Web of Horror?

Liz: Oh, yeah.

Harold: yeah, it's like CGC graded. It's like buckling in the upper left corner. Moisture.

Jimmy: My daughter Anna took a comics class in college, and she said, did you know that in comics-- And I said, yes. And then she was annoyed by that, and she goes, no. Did you know that there was a doctor that in the 50s that hated comics and wrote-- I'm like, yes, I do. Dr. Frederick Wertham. I know all about him.

Harold: My pal, Dr. Frederick Wertham.

Jimmy: Who knows, he might have had a point.

Harold: I remember. Yeah. I think I talked about this before, but that book was mythical. You know, this 1954 book that caused the comics code stamp to be on comics for, you know, 50 years or whatever. 40 years. And, you know, I'd read about it, and I'm like, okay, this is a rare book. So when we would visit, a, family in Neosha, Missouri, went down to the public library, this little town of 8,000 people or whatever, and they had a copy sitting on the shelves of Seduction of the Innocent. So I would go down and I would read it every time I got a chance because I had no access to this as a kid.

Michael: Oh, you got corrupted by all the pins going into eyeballs.

Harold: Oh, my gosh.

Michael: That's why you like old horror movies.

Harold: Oh, man. But, yeah, the fact that that book was still circulating in the library in the late 80s is pretty wild.

November 26th, 1952. Here we have Linus. And he's actually, wearing a shirt. And not only is he wearing a shirt, he's wearing a striped shirt just like his iconic one, but no shoes. and he reaches. He sees a little ball, and he's kind of reaching. He's reaching for it. He's barely tipping over to get it. And then Lucy comes in and says, here's the ball, Charlie Brown. I found it. And then Linus is just frustrated, alone.

Michael: I don't think she's being mean. I think she's, oblivious to him.

Harold: Totally oblivious.

Jimmy: Yeah. Just like you would think of your baby brother, probably. Linus does not look anything like Linus in panel three.

Liz: No, in any of the panels, really.

Jimmy: Yeah, three. It looks really off. And it takes him a while to get that hair in because he definitely has like a middle aged cubicle worker haircut or maybe like a right wing podcaster in panel four. Like that is a very specific middle aged man's haircut. You know, it's the put instead of the comb over, it's the comb forward.

Harold: Yeah. It is a very unusual look for a little kid.

Jimmy: Yes.

Michael: And also that strange little halo in the last film. I mean, it reads. Well, it's like anger and frustration, but I don't remember seeing that anywhere. It's like a chainsaw.

Jimmy: yeah, he does it really strongly here. It's lots of peaks and valleys, but he will do that radiant line. Remember, the kids chasing after Lucy when she's frustrated and inhibited? They all have like the anger line radiating around them.

Michael: Yeah.

Jimmy: I'm not sure if that is a Schulz. I mean, obviously, you know, things in the air indicating emotions have existed for pre Peanuts, but I'm not sure about that one in particular.

Harold: Yeah, I, I don't, I'm, I'm assuming he saw it somewhere, some form, but I don't know.

Michael: Yeah, if I used it, people would go like, what, is there some kind of weird star appearing behind her or something?

Jimmy: Yeah, well, it's, it's, it is strange. And I think, I. We said this before, but like, because you're doing a science fiction comic, even though it's really like a science fantasy comic, it has to be more grounded than just a bunch of kids in a neighborhood. Because like you say, yeah, if there's a glowing something around the person's head, you might think that, oh, the person's actually glowing.

Michael: Well, I got, we're going to get way off topic here, but okay, I've been re reading Scott Pilgrim, which is my favorite comic of all time. No offense.

Jimmy: Wait, okay, so just Michael's, favorite comics of all time so far have been Scott Pilgrim. Love and Rockets, Peanuts and Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

Michael: this might be the most enjoyable, but anyway, that's not important. He's sitting with his girlfriend and he says, what's that with your head? What's going on with your head? And I'm looking at the panel and I'm going, oh, your head looks normal. And you know what's, Nothing seems weird about her head. And then like 20 pages later, again, he's with her and he goes like it's happening again. That stuff with your head. And I'm looking at it, and I went back to the first one. I realized it was this, this halo. It wasn't halos. It was these white spikes coming out of her head, which I didn't even notice.

Jimmy: Uh-huh.

Michael: It was like an emotional thing. I figured, well, okay, she's maybe a little upset. But he was seeing it and I didn't see it, even though I was studying those panels, looking what the problem was with her head. You get so used to these things in comics that you're not even, aware that they're really bizarre.

Jimmy: Yeah. 

December 4, 1952. Linus again sees a ball just out of reach, which he stretches for. For three panels. But by panel four, he gives up and just falls asleep. 

This could be like a YouTube video, right? You know, like, baby loses motivation or whatever.

Harold: Yeah.

Michael: I mean, Linus just had a real difficulty with the world.

Liz: He's a baby.

Michael: Yeah, he's a baby. But they look at each other. He soon becomes like a master of everything.

Jimmy: What happens next is his origin story. Here on 

December 11, 1952, Linus is sitting way far away from a very early 50s looking television. 

Jimmy: It really gives you the idea of how old this strip is. Looking at that tv and that's. Is that a gramophone next to it?

Liz: Yeah, it was a stereo console or something.

And Lucy comes in and says to him, you can't watch television from way back here. Linus move up where you can see. And then she puts him about three inches away from the tv, to which Linus looks out at us and he has been completely discombobulated by the tv.

Michael: Yeah. But he's got Lucy's eyes. This is like. This is like an alien strip.

Liz: It's like he's turned into one of the Charles Addams.

Harold: Yeah. That's a very, very creepy. Creepy. How do you describe those eyes to those listening here?

Michael: Google eyes.

Jimmy: Well, but they're just scribbling spirals, that indicate that his vision, at the very least, has been, damaged. Scrambled by the tv.

Michael: He didn't get whacked in the.

Liz: We really were told not-- never to sit closer than six feet away from a television.

Jimmy: You're gonna ruin your eyes.

Michael: Yeah.

Harold: Now, was that. They said there was radiation. I don't know what the. What the purpose of. I guess there was radiation of some sort, but I never, did fully understand that. And then I guess the rules changed when they made TVs differently.

Jimmy: So I don't know and as we can see in panel four, clearly, Linus has not yet been dropped on his head.

Liz: But he has been damaged in other ways.

Jimmy: He has been damaged in other ways. And I, We know where Rerun got the hand me down overalls. There were Linus’ right here.

Harold: Yeah, that's a very weird first drawing of Linus too. It's like, oh, yeah, three quarters from the back or whatever.

Jimmy: The ear doesn't work.

Liz: No.

Harold: Yeah, he's struggling with this one. I don't think he's drawn from this angle much at all before, but great.

Jimmy: Looking tv, great looking little stereo system.

Harold: Is that a stereo system or. Those are bookshelves.

Liz: Oh, maybe.

Jimmy: Oh, that's probably the 12 volumes of the Interpreter's Bible down there.

Harold: Well, again, all of those books, you know, makes you wonder about the Van Pelt parents.

Jimmy: Yeah, they're definitely a, more widely read. Charlie Brown only has that one book that he's trying to get through for 50 years. But they have a whole library, you know, not just in this panel, but like we've seen in other things with Linus where, you know, they have lots of books in the Van Pelt.

Michael: I don't think those are books. We had something like that. And it slides open. It's a sliding door. And your albums are in there.

Jimmy: Oh, it's for record albums. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting. Okay, we'll see. Here's the thing, if you think about it. Linus, the character was named after one of Schulz's friends in Minneapolis. This is the period of time where he's at probably first encountering, you know, like, modern sophistication. It's when he's getting into classical music. It's when he's hanging out with all the art friends. It's where he's, first discussing his theological, you know, ideas with the people from his church. So, like, it does make sense that he'd be like, yeah, let's put this thing where all my classical albums are in. You know, that's kind of almost like a signal.

Michael: And they're like. They're all like box sets of 78.

Jimmy: Yes, right. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Because, yeah, if you got a symphony on record, it would have to come on at least four albums. 

February 15, 1953, a beautiful looking Sunday. As we see Lucy playing with some blocks again, and Linus, a happy little Linus who looks like he's had a haircut, crawling towards her. And Lucy says, linus, you go way and leave my Book alone. This is my book. So this is two separate scenes. The first is Lucy playing with her blocks. This is now Lucy playing for reading a book. Now Linus is reaching out for one of her dolls. And Lucy says, linus, you leave my doll alone. In the next panel. This is my ball. You can't play with it. Then again, you leave my blocks alone. These are my blocks. You leave them alone. Then Lucy is going around the living room and Linus is crawling after her. And the mother calls from off panel, Lucy, what are you doing? Rare appearance of the adult voice. And Lucy says, I'm playing with Linus, mother. And then the mother. All right, but you be nice to your little brother, Lucy. Yes, mother. And share your toys with him too. Yes, mother. And then we see Lucy surrounded by all her toys with Linus way off in the distance. And the mother from off panel, again, you are sharing your toys with him, aren't you? Oh, yes, mother. And we're having a swell time playing together too. To which Linus responds, ha!

Michael: Well, yeah, this is really an important strip. I mean, this defines Lucy as we know her. she's not just oblivious. She's like purposely cruel and selfish. And he knows, he understands what's going on.

Jimmy: He understands what they're saying because he has had the mystical experience of the TV set. He's, bombarded by culture. It's a real twin peaks X rays.

Michael: Yeah.

Harold: Got his superpowers. The X rays of the TV set. Yeah. Is that the first time we hear Linus say something? I guess.

Michael: Oh, yeah, yeah. This doesn't count as first time he talks. So. At Wikipedia.

Harold: Okay.

Liz: he makes noise.

Jimmy: Why does that not count?

Michael: Well, Wikipedia recognize this as his first words?

Jimmy: Well, I do because. Ha. Because he's not laughing. He is sarcastically making the sound which is speaking.

Harold: Yeah, yeah.

Jimmy: Yes, exactly. Yes.

Harold: Yeah. And the Van Pelts, I think they, you know, they seem to be somewhat stylish too. They have like some mid century modern stuff in the previous. Previous thing. So, yeah, they seem to be, a fairly relatively well to do middle class family. Right.

Michael: Not a whole lot of furniture in that.

Liz: Yeah, this is a different room from the one with the TV because the drapes are different.

Harold: But look at, look at the little weird sculpture in the first panel in the second tier that's on the table. That doesn't seem like something that would be part of the children's things. That's something that the Van Pelt parents have purchased.

Jimmy: And it feels like a bigger house because the mom's obviously In a different room, yelling in. You know, it's not one. It doesn't seem like it would be one of these little GI houses where the parents would be two feet away from them.

Liz: Uh-huh.

Harold: Yeah. It's a big, big room that they're in. And, you know, we don't. We still don't know if, mom's a working mom because this is Sunday, right?

Jimmy: Right. That's right.

Harold: So she could be off work, and.

Jimmy: I'm just, on Dent watch. I still don't see when it happens. So we have to be real careful, because I think we can probably. This is like a cold case, and I think we could figure out who dropped Linus and bring some charges.

Liz: When we were talking before about children aging so that you couldn't do use the same children for voiceovers, I was thinking about Aziza getting. I think she just turned 12.

Michael: Wow.

Liz: And so we can't have Aziza, do. It's Dent Watch for us.

Harold: Favorite panel on. This is the second panel. that little look on Linus's face as the book is being snatched away and his arms are outreached and he's. How do you describe that? It's a somewhat complex little reaction. He has to have that book taken away. And classic cartoony Lucy with a brush line, unibrow being upset. That looks much more cartoony to me than what I normally see in Peanuts. I mean, if I just looked at Lucy's head by itself, it just almost feels like a different artist who is more of an animator style the whole movie.

Jimmy: Like the contrapposto of the one leg forward as she swings the other arm.

Liz: It's nice, but we can see her underwear.

Harold: Yeah. And there's your little Lulu influence right there.

Jimmy: Yeah. The weird things about old pop culture. Well, we haven't solved the mystery of the dent, and we quite haven't figured out exactly who the Van Pelts are, which is exactly what. Where we needed to be because we have several episodes left. And of course, we would love for you to follow along with us. And if you want to know what we're covering before we do, you go over to that unpackingpeanuts.com and you sign up for the great Peanuts reread, which is over, but that doesn't mean we're over. So you could click on that and find out exactly what we're going to be talking, about next. You can email us at unpackingpeanuts@gmail.com and if you want to follow us on social media, we're unpackpeanuts on Instagram and threads and unpacking peanuts on Facebook, Blue sky and YouTube. 

If you want to help me out. The new 25th anniversary editions of Amelia Rules Volume 1 and 2 are out. This is the 25th anniversary of Amelia Rules.

Michael: I have a question. I have the box set. And after I finish my third reading of Scott Pilgrim, I'm going to do a massive complete Amelia reading. All eight books from the box set. Is there anything in the new edition set is not in the box set?

Jimmy: Yes, There are new 10 page stories in volume one and volume two set. During the time of those books. Since you know the a cartoonist, I could get you those stories ahead of time.

Michael: Yeah, well, if it's the continuity, I need it.

Jimmy: Well, we're all here. I'll tell you what it is. You know how like Billy Joel would release greatest hits and then they'd put two new songs on? Yeah, that's what it is.

Liz: All right.

Jimmy: That's cool.

Harold: New new Amelia. That's. That's historic.

Jimmy: I'm very excited. Well, first, thank you, Michael. I. I feel like. I also feel like I have to apologize. I'm not sure you're going to read eight volumes of it.

Michael: I'm going to read it in one night.

Harold: No, you're not.

Michael: My eyes are going to look like Linus.

Jimmy: Well, everybody out there, pray for Michael. Keep him in your thoughts. 8 volumes of Amelia Rules. Harold, where are you going to be coming up? Oh, we don't know yet.

Harold: Well, we don't know, but I did want to say hello to all of our new listeners. Thank you everybody for getting the word out about unpacking Peanuts. We are currently number two visual arts podcast in America, United States. Thanks to you guys. And we're so happy to say hello to our new listeners and we hope you're enjoying the show. There's a lot more to discover going back into the vault of unpacking peanuts. 50 years of strip reading. But we're really enjoying this new path where we're focusing on the characters and, maybe a lot of you have discovered us around the time we were doing Understanding Snoopy, which is obviously a hot topic in the Peanuts world.

Jimmy: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. It's my favorite day of the week. Not just because I get to hang out with my pals and talk about comics, but because we all get to hang out together and just, m.

Harold: And there's one other thing I would like to mention for those of you who love the movie It's a Wonderful Life. I had the honor of being interviewed by Ted Koppel on CBS Sunday Morning the Sunday before Christmas, because I was up giving a presentation on It's a Wonderful Life in Seneca Falls, New York, which claims to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls. So we will. In the obscurity section. Is that right, Liz? Of the.

Liz: I'll put it in the show notes.

Harold: In the show notes. Oh, that's cool. All right, we'll give you a link to that very, odd. Very odd piece on It's a Wonderful Life from CBS Sunday Morning.

Jimmy: That is so cool. It's so great that you got to do that. And by the way, to bring it back to Amelia, that's Rhonda's celebrity crush, Ted Koppel.

Harold: Oh, that's right. Wow. Rhonda would have been just beside herself over the moon.

Liz: Well, and since we are talking about our individual work, Michael's Strange Attractors, the new.

Jimmy: New work.

Liz: New work is now on substack.

Jimmy: Absolutely. How does that feel, Michael? They finally get new Strange Attractors out after lo those many years.

Michael: It's pretty weird, but I'm rewriting and rewriting and rewriting because I keep finding weird continuity problems. Actually, tomorrow I'm going to be finished and I'll send you a PDF. Yeah, the first 64-page. First issue.

Harold: But, man, 64 pages.

Michael: Yeah, I have to go back and check, like, you know, stuff from 1992, and they go like, oh, no, I'm contradicting this completely.

Jimmy: I watched the Stranger Things finale with the kids. I don't think you need to worry about that.

Michael: Well, unfortunately, that's my personality. It's got to make sense.

Jimmy: I understand. Hey, that helps me a lot. I have to make in the Real Dark Night. My book. I'm serialized on a substack is so strange and surreal. But I have to pass in my mind the Michael Cohen test. Does it make sense? I'm absolutely 100% serious. I think about all the time. Does it actually, though, make sense? And if. If it passes the Michael test, then you hit publish.

Michael: Well, it's totally passed the Michael test.

Harold: All right, cool. Oh, and. Well, one more thing, one more thing. plugging books. So I got involved in a Kickstarter lo these many years ago, where we were doing a 3D comic book version of the classic 1953 3D monster movie, Robot monster of the iconic monster that's made of a guy in a gorilla suit wearing a deep sea diving helmet with the antenna attached. I got to do a 10 page riff, mystery Science Theater style of the, of the whole movie. And they took stills from the 3D print of the movie, which 3D Film Archive, who, who published this new book also did the restoration of Robot Monster. So they had some beautiful 35 millimeter prints to work off of. And it's a 64 page book with 15 different artists with some eye popping. Six level, 3D, old school blue and red glasses, analog. If you're interested in picking up a copy, go to haroldbuchholz.com and you can find it and I will sign it for you if you're interested.

Jimmy: There you go.

Liz: And I know that some of our listeners were part of Kickstarter for that.

Harold: Oh, that's. Yes, that's true. And thank you guys so much for, for making it happen. It was, it's. It's been quite a journey getting it out and to see it in its, in its final form, it is, it is one of the coolest 3D comics I've ever seen. I don't think I've ever seen one that had so many different art styles. So it's like flipping. Every page is a different 3D experience because every artist is different in how they approach what they do. And it was incredibly cool to see that book come out.

Liz: Congratulations.

Harold: Really grateful to have been a part of that project. And I will also say I had somebody come to the Philadelphia Punk Rock flea market in, in December who specifically said they did, I think because of the newsletter.

Jimmy: Yay, Liz.

Harold: They, they saw that I was going to be there and they made a point of coming down to say hello. I think his name is Jeff. I apologize if I'm misremembering that, but it was so, so cool to meet a, Peanuts Unpacking Peanuts listener and get to meet you in person. So thank you.

Liz: And I don't have anything to report, so I just sit here editing Unpacking Peanuts.

Jimmy: Well, I think the fact that you're, the producer of that number two visual arts podcast, that's pretty darn good. Yeah, we would be the number nothing.

Harold: It wouldn't be number two. If we didn't have you, Liz. We wouldn't have any podcast.

Jimmy: We would have four unused episodes on a hard drive somewhere.

Harold: Lost episodes.

Jimmy: All right, listen, thank you all for listening. More from Linus and Lucy next. next time. Until then, for Michael, Harold and Liz, this is Jimmy saying be of good cheer. 

LH&M: Yes, Be of good cheer. 

VO: Unpacking Peanuts is copyright Jimmy Gownley. Michael Cohen, Harold Buchholz and Liz Sumner Produced and edited by Liz Sumner Music by Michael Cohen Additional voiceover by Aziza Shukralla Clark. For more from the show, follow Unpack Peanuts on Instagram and Threads. Unpacking Peanuts on Facebook, Blue sky and YouTube. For more about Jimmy, Michael and Harold, visit Unpacking. Have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.

Jimmy: It's Dent Watch.