How Charlie Brown and Snoopy stole our hearts

By Kylie Warner

Like many Americans from the Midwest, I have fond memories of marking the autumn and winter holidays with “Peanuts” television specials. At Halloween, my brother and I would swap candy from our plastic jack o’lantern bowls over the tinny voices from “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”. A few weeks later, in the endorphin-induced sleepiness following the Thanksgiving feast, we would laze around watching “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” while trying to psych ourselves up to follow Charlie’s example and kick a football in the backyard.

My background might have given me a greater affinity with the “Peanuts” characters – their creator, Charles Schulz, was a born-and-bred Midwesterner and gave his comics with romanticised Midwestern touches, such as wholesome swear-words (“Rats!”). But the comic strips, books, TV shows and memorabilia penetrated the cultural imagination of places far beyond the American Midwest. Between the genesis of the series in 1950 and his death in 2000, Schulz made 17,897 comic strips – all in his own hand – which ran in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. Over the decades, many of the strip’s characters came to inhabit particular niches in popular culture: Charlie Brown embodies the lovable “everyman”, while his dog Snoopy represents both wisdom and child-like innocence (and perhaps appropriately, has been co-opted as the safety mascot of several organisations, including America’s space agency, NASA).