Notes while working towards a book on Charlie Brown, Linus, and company and the 1960s Peanuts specials

Thursday 4/30/26

Obviously, I've written and published much about Peanuts, and given quite a few interviews pertaining to Charlie Brown and company (most recently with a Chicago Tribune op-ed. For a while, I've had a plan to write a book on Rankin/Bass's 1964 Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which I've also written about (most recently in a Best Classic Bands feature) and been interviewed regarding many times.

But going back three or four months, I started envisioning a book that looks at how that special, along with 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas from 1966, changed Christmas itself in this country. The big three. Premiering in three successive years.

Together they did for American Christmas what Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol did for Christmas in England. And now they represent something we've lost, which we need. I don't mean solely Christmas-wise; I mean at the human level.

But I've been torn, because I also want to write a book just on the 1960s Peanuts specials (and a sole theatrical release). The art therein, the philosophy espoused thereof. What those specials have to say to us about human nature, humanity at large, the living of a life and a life well lived.

Charlie Brown, for instance, lives life well, or is on the path to being someone who does. But things often don't work out well for Charlie Brown, do they? And I know there are people who'd substitute "often don't" with "never." But he's more human than most. So what does that mean? Where does that leave him? Or us? And what are we to do?

The talents of the voice actors are integral to Peanuts specials. After 1969, when Peter Robbins, the original Charlie Brown, aged out of the role, they're not that good, and they no longer rise to the level of art. The contrast between the 1970s fare and, say, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, is striking.

But as with Thoreau's journals (and this very journal), and Montaigne's writings, and those of Emerson, the Peanuts specials from 1965-69 are like this fused and complementary beacon that can help illuminate your way, and the corridors within yourself.

You can live to that work, if you follow me. It isn't something you consume. It's something you learn from and grow with; it becomes a part of you and vice versa, which is ultimately part of a process of you becoming you. A process that needs to be without cessation. From day the first--or close to it--until minute the last. Always be becoming more yourself.

Those early Peanuts special assist us in this matter. And that's a very big thing. An invaluable thing.

But would the one Peanuts-related book preclude the Peanuts exclusive book, which draws on a special that is 1/3 of the content of the other book? Is it a case of do this or do that, but not both?

And I think that speaks more to a hang-up of mine than practical and artistic value. I'd be pretty deep in the Peanuts-y woods with the Peanuts-only volume, and it isn't like I'd be repeating myself. I think I should do both. It would be unwise not to, because too much great stuff wouldn't be written.

I feel like that's been decided then. Good.

These are the 1960s Peanuts specials:

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Charlie Brown's All Stars (1966)

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966)

You're in Love, Charlie Brown (1967)

He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968)

It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown (1969)

Then there's the theatrical release, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, from 1969.

Say "1960s Peanuts specials" to people, and almost all of them will think that means A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and will have no clue that these other works exist.

Said works are of a piece, too, with the two famous specials. For instance, You're in Love, Charlie Brown, has as much to teach us about love itself, and I'd argue more, than Stendhal's book-length treatise on the subject. (Isn't it interesting that You're in Love, Charlie Brown, came out during the summer of love, less than two weeks after the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper?)

Whereas Charlie Brown's All Stars, in my view, is the best baseball film there is. The best sports film at that. Because of its life quotient. It transcends sport while positing much about sport and the real value of sport, which, too, is beyond sport. Needs be, or else it's just sports, and "it's just" is never a good way for anything to be, or for us to be.

This book would also deal in the comic book itself and it's narratives and characters over the years, and much else besides; other films, books, systems of philosophy, theology, music, literature, sports.

There's this scene in 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown in which a disheartened Charlie Brown and his best friend Linus are having one of their philosophical colloquies on a backdoor step while nonchalantly playing tic-tac-toe.

Charlie Brown has been getting knocked around, literally and figuratively. He badly wants to win at baseball and for his team to break their epic 999-game losing streak or, that failing, have a year in which they score a run. A single run.

Because not only are they beaten time and time and time again, they're shut out. We've seen Charlie deliver a pitch on the mound only for the batter to line a rocket back at him, knocking him out. We know this isn't "merely" physical, but speaks to an existential crisis. Helplessness. Floundering. He's spiritually overdrawn.

What we ought to note here is that to lose all those games in a row, you must keep showing up. There's something very admirable in this. People are lazy in their thinking when they think at all, which is usually just a case of repeating what they've heard and crediting themselves with having had a thought.

For instance, people love to say that do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the "literal" definition of insanity.

This is false, or, at the least, not automatically true and often an indication of something else; probity and a probity of the soul. Fealty to a cause, because of what an outcome can mean, be, and do for the good.

The people who say this have no idea what devotion is, and less of a clue about purpose. There are many things we can try however many times and they don't go right. We fail. Or they can't be done. Or can't be done unless you've tried 999 times. Learning as you go.

A break can all of a sudden come after all those instances when it one didn't, but if we're not around to make the most of that break, it's moot, as if it didn't happen.

And one way we stick around to make the most of it is by trying. Again. Despite the outcome being the same all the times up until then, with perhaps no reason to think it could be anything else, and losing faith and hope.

Charlie Brown doesn't have either. But he still shows up. He is a leader, though no one gives him credit for this. If, for instance, Schroeder was captain of this team (he is the catcher, after all), do we think its players would all still gather, year in, year out, game in, game out, to compete? Or would the squad disassemble?

I think it's a pretty safe conclusion that this team plays because they are led by Charlie Brown. He isn't making them play against their will.

The idea of Charlie Brown as (paradoxical) leader strikes me as an important point. It isn't for nothing, even if perhaps none of the other characters would admit to being led by Charlie Brown. They may not realize it, either.

But they are still making a kind of choice. You get your glove, you go to the field. You play. You've decided to.

We likewise make a decision to live, or not to live. Even if we, too, aren't often aware that that's what we're doing. Did.

In A Charlie Brown Christmas, we sense that Charlie Brown is made director of the pageant as both kind of a joke and because no one else wanted to be bothered.

Plus, it'll keep this guy out of everyone's hair. He's not well-liked. Linus likes him, but Linus is different and takes a different approach to life. He is one who tries to be present in order to see life for what it is.

Being present also means being separate. We don't talk about this. You're both in the game when you're present, and you're watching with the bird's eye view. Or the view from the bench.

This is an exceedingly rare type of duality. Linus possesses it. Sometimes, it gets away from him a bit, as when he gets caught up in all things Great Pumpkin. He loses his bird's eye view then, and is down in the scrum where he wrestles with his own beliefs and deals with the mocking tones, doubts, and ridicule of others.

As Charlie Brown and Linus sit on the step, they each have a stick and they're drawing in the dirt caking the walkway to the house. These aren't people of privilege. We're talking decidedly public school kids. Not future MFA students. Kids who'll go out into the world as adults, rather than bunker into a subculture or sect.

There's a rurality to the Peanuts specials. This isn't an agrarian community, but it isn't suburbia, either. A pumpkin patch is in walking distance. Life is in some part measured by what's within walking distance, especially for kids. These are children of their own imaginations. As the best of us as adults are as well.

Linus starts doodling these math equations. We know his mental wheels are turning. Persiflage isn't to follow.

You never have a chat with Linus. I think this is important. I know someone who is wholly unreliable, perpetually in the midst of denial, lying to others after first lying to himself, a person who lives, if you can call it that, in such a way as to prevent truth from ever reaching them, who always uses that word "chat." They never think in terms of talk. Talking and chatting are hugely different.

I always have to have the truth under me. No matter how awful the thing is--and it could be that my life has no purpose, I have no reason to live, and it will only get worse, and I'll die and it'll be as if I was never here, and everything I created and was and strove to be and became was for nothing, save suffering and more suffering and more suffering, alone, unknown, without hardly anyone even knowing, let alone the extent of all of it--the pain, the genius, the art--I want to get the truth out into the open.

It's something. Without truth, there's nothing. Truth is always something. Even if it's all there is. And you must have something, if you're to live to tomorrow.

Truth is rock under your feet. It's the difference--and sometimes the only difference--between falling through space and vomiting and then being made to pass through your own vomit, and standing on solid earth, no dizziness, no disorientation, not passing through your own sick.

Most people live lives bereft of any truth, now more than ever. They have other things, though, as stand-ins. They're helped out, as such, by their lack of intelligence, insight, commitment to being human, and cowardice. They are thus protected. But to live like this isn't to live at all. There's no difference between this and being dead--or never born--save that they were technically here.

A kid goes to class, he doesn't pay attention, he learns nothing, adds nothing positive, takes away nothing positive. But the teacher marked him down as being there when she took attendance. That's how we live, for lack of a better term.

Especially in 2026. And likely more this way in 2027, and so on. We're dying as humans. I don't mean in terms of mortality. I mean that we're dying as humans, with everything that being human actually means. In the being. And the being is everything.

Imagine whatever that is like some monster--if it's bad--on a dolly and you wheel it out into the middle of the room. Other people spend their time keeping whatever that is the dolly it is on in the shadows. Then they can tell themselves other things to try and believe.

It's a form of prevaricating, of distracting yourself. It's similar to a deadline that you keep extending. You're not dealing with what you're not dealing with. There's a prevailing hazy amorphousness.

But the time is melting away. And then on day, it's your last day, and you're dead. The deadline was still in front of you, because you kept pushing it further and further out so that you didn't have to look at the work you had to do, the task you were facing, the problem you needed to solve. You didn't so much as look at any of that to positively ID what it was.

So I need to always start by rolling out the dolly. No matter how invincible the monster on it might be. I feel better knowing than pretending. If I have no chance, if I'm doomed, if there's nothing I can do, I want to know that.

Then I go from there. Which, paradoxically, doesn't mean I do something else. Now, that can be a matter of not having anything else. No other option. With writing, with my art, it's more than some activity or pursuit. It's everything I am. It's more than that. A lot more, actually.

This speaks to the worse-than-hell reality of my life. A life wholly of suffering. It's almost like pursuing the most amount of pain possible. The most loneliness. I have nothing to live for. There's only this. But I still can't leave that monster on the dolly in the shadows.

I feel worse then, if that's possible. I feel worse when other people because of their selfishness and their own shortcomings insist on leaving that dolly of my life in those shadows, because now I'm fighting another battle to get them to see what is right here, right out in the open, lit up and plain as plain can be, and I feel even more alone.

At the same time, if there is by some miracle a solution, a way out, it can't happen without me getting the monster on the dolly out into the open. That's always phase 1.

Phase 1 can continue as you're doing phase 999. Phase 1 isn't part of a sequence. It's the ongoing part, as you yourself are ongoing and your attempts may be ongoing and also your attempts may be sequential. This gets us to this to that to this to that. But still, there persists phase 1. Concurrently.

Linus tells Charlie Brown that he doesn't believe someone loses indefinitely. As they're talking, they're having that game of tic-tac-toe, and, ironically, Linus ends up winning practically by accident, and, of course, Charlie Brown loses.

Linus is speaking generally, though. As if Charlie Brown simply has wants to have one thing, whatever that is, in which it goes right for him. It's understandable that this is Linus's understanding, especially as we've seen how so many things have gone for Charlie Brown over the years.

This is the film in which Charlie Brown enters a spelling bee, a sort of baseball substitute. It doesn't mean to him what baseball does. What winning a single game does or would. Or putting a few runs up on the scoreboard.

Linus doesn't do for Charlie Brown here what he does for him in A Charlie Brown Christmas. He's trying to help, but it isn't going so well. This doesn't mean that it won't go better the next time the two are sitting on this step or hanging out at the brick wall because Linus is trying. He isn't resolute about leaving the monster on the dolly off in the shadows.

We at least have the feeling that if matters don't improve for Charlie Brown, then at least he won't have to indefinitely fight the battle of trying to get Linus to see what he knows to know avail. It's better when others can see what is your monster on its dolly. You can't be looking at that alone. It can't be like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, with this being the hellish version of that.

In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Linus teaches a lesson about faith, which isn't quite the same thing as hope. Should we have faith when we don't have hope? There's a right way to be and a wrong way to be. The problem in this world right now is that doing what's right and being what is right, essentially, makes your life harder. The more you do this, the harder it is. Again, in this world, as it presently stands.

You know what's right though when you are this way. You're unlikely to have much if any hope, or to have it beaten out of you, but knowing what's right, knowing it as much as you can know anything, also involves faith, paradoxically.

This isn't some chat over tic-tac-toe. It's a serious talk. Charlie Brown merits that seriousness. Their friendship merits it.

Linus will be beset by his own problems based on who he is. Imagine Linus in 2026? That wouldn't be good for him. These characters stand outside of time, but we can apply them to time, if you will. To a given time. Because they offer insight--truths--for all times.

Truth is never general. It's timelessly specific. Pointed. Dead on. It isn't wishy-washy, it doesn't come and go. It isn't some stock that rises and falls. It isn't in style and then out of fashion.

Truth is a constant. Its performance never dips--we do, in our ability to recognize truth, deal with truth, bear up under truth, soar on account of truth, connect through truth, process truth, not fall to bits at the prospect of truth, or lash out, shun, fear those who deal in truth.

These are the talks we must have. With others. And with ourselves. And with certain works of art, which also have them with us.