Word: schulz
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...nation teetered, Schulz soared to previously unknown heights of popular culture. One snowy night that December, when Schulz was 47 years old, some 55 million viewers, more than half the nation's television audience, tuned in to the fourth airing of the Emmy award-winning animated television special, "A Charlie Brown Christmas," the popularity of which confounded network executives who had predicted that its cartoon format, melancholy jazz score by Vincent Guaraldi and simple retelling of the Nativity story from the Gospel of Luke would alienate the public. That same night, a musical, "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown...
...UNTIL 1965, SCHULZ PROVIDED unconventional commentary in the national margins. He set out consciously never to settle issues raised by the strip and never to bring in issues from outside. He never made overt political statements through "Peanuts." He remained apart from specific social and political causes, never joining the battle of ideas. Having established an idiom and a mode that commented on modern ills such as commercialization, real estate development, generational distrust, Schulz extended the area of doubt in modern life only insofar as he made it funny to doubt. But, as the '60s intensified, as the Vietnam...
...From 1965 onward, the strip skyrocketed. When Schulz's "bunch of funny-looking kids" appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in April, "Peanuts" was embraced as the embodiment of the fundamental wisdom of the day. The strip and its characters had gone from being a campus phenomenon in the late 1950s to a mainstream cultural powerhouse. Throughout the '60s and early '70s, the visual and verbal vocabulary of the strip was one of the only languages that kept both the younger and older generation fluent with each other. Schulz's phrase "security blanket," and his ideas about that most...
...Schulz's achievement was singular and planetary. An artist, a storyteller, he was now a worldwide industry, too. This had never happened to a newspaper cartoonist before. The new markets that "Peanuts" was dominating in stage, television, film, book, record and subsidiary forms, simply hadn't been open to newspaper comic strip artists in 1950, when United Features Syndicate had given Schulz the chance to dream his dream. On that one night in 1969, he reached a larger, more diverse audience than any other single popular artist in American history. What was more, "Peanuts" was single-handedly expanding an industry...
...condolences that flooded Schulz's office after news of his retirement from "Peanuts" and then crested over into his household after his death are dominated by a single refrain: The handwritten response I received from Charles Schulz at a critical moment in my development changed forever the course of my life. He influenced two generations of comic strip artists, standup comedians and readers everywhere. But unlike other seminal figures of American mass culture in the 1960s and '70s - Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Andy Warhol - Schulz had no itch to be a teacher, a guru, a manufacturer of lesser artists...