I stumbled across an article on The Times Online about a biography coming out this week based on Charles Schulz, the creater of the Peanuts comics.
Snoopy's unhappy father, AKA Schulz, apparently lead a dark life behind the scenes and let it out through his Peanuts characters. According to the writer of the article, Tony Allen-Mills, Schulz was never very happy in life. The biography, written by David Michaelis, tells about Schulz's life and why Peanuts was the way it was.
Michaelis said that adults who were familiar with Peanuts probably saw Snoopy as lonely and underrated. He assumed kids just saw him as a cartoon dog. Schulz molded Snoopy a particular way for a reason.
At the end of the Peanuts run, Michaelis discovered that of all the cartoons, Lucy always snatches the football away from Charlie Brown and Charlie Brown never got a Valentine on Valentine's Day.
According to Schulz, it was because unhappiness was funny.
I found this article highly interesting and well researched. I had NO idea that Schulz was such an unhappy person. As a critic from the New York Post said, you'll never watch Peanuts the same again after hearing these things. It's true. Next time I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas (like I do almost every year), I'm going to notice the sadness in the characters and I'm going to connect it to the sadness in Schulz's life. I imagine people who read the biography will do the same.
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That makes perfect sense. If you watch Peanuts you can see how badly the other characters sometimes treat Charlie Brown. I guess Schulz thought of himself as Charlie Brown and that's why he always had so much material. The article is definitely disturbing because no one ever thought of Schulz as having that kind of life. I think that the Times is well suited to carrying this article because they do so much serious news that they can venture away from it every once in a while. It was a great and insightful feature piece into the life of someone that everybody loved.
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