Holy Flashback!
This flickr photo of Dolly Madison fruit pie packages with Peanuts characters gave me a momentary “whoa, childhood flashback” moment. I can remember biking down to the local Circle K to buy them as a kid. Probably the pies resonated so well since they combined two of my favorite things — sugary pastries and Peanuts. Occasionally my mom would also take us to the Dolly Madison outlet store. The long drive into another town just for cheap bread and Zingers personally seemed like a waste of time, but on one such trip I was rewarded a copy of the Charles M. Schulz history Peanuts Jubilee (a book that I still have, twenty plus years later). Dolly and Peanuts eventually went through a quiet divorce that no one wants to talk about.
Speaking of flickr, I just posted something there from Christopher’s childhood — a box of Twinkles cereal from the early ’60s. This General Mills product had a children’s story starring Twinkles the Elephant printed on every box. Twinkles can be seen in his b&w animated glory in this commercial and mini-cartoon. Cute, huh?
July 8th, 2006 at 9:08 am
I religiously read Peanuts as a kid and even then wondered, why isn’t this funny? We’re all reading it and it’s not even funny!
I was surprised many years later when a flurry of Charles Schulz retrospectives pointed out that when Peanuts began it was daringly hip. Charlie Brown’s dark self-doubt and Lucy’s psychotherapy booth were considered edgy for a family newspaper.
I’m afraid that’s not enough to turn me into a Peanuts fan, though. Sorry. :-)
July 8th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
From reading the Fantagraphics books, I noticed that much of early Peanuts taps into that ’50s fascination with psychiatry, melancholy and questioning Why Things Are - very different! But, yeah, even back then Schulz repeated gags and he probably went on autopilot after 10 or 15 years.