'Which of the original "Peanuts" characters do you miss the most

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I never saw those early strips until years later. They don’t really resonate with me the same way.
 
GEddie said:
Snoopy, of course!
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Ah, but Snoopy was one of the original characters but who remained with the strip throughout, though I can see how my poll question may be misunderstood. The five names mentioned are first generation characters who were written out.

Snoopy was one of Schulz’s earliest Peanuts characters, appearing for the first time on October 4, 1950, two days after the comic strip’s debut. Schulz loosely based Snoopy on a black-and-white dog named Spike he had as a teenager.

😄
 
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BartholomewB said:
They don’t really resonate with me the same way.
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Quite understandable. I’m just the opposite. I loved the strip’s earlier years and lost interest after Snoopy and that bird became the spotlight. By around the mid 70’s I had stopped reading it altogether.
 
BartholomewB said:
This is my unforgettable Lucy. Very true to life!
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Awwww! I once helped my grandfather solve his crossword thanks to this comic. I still have never seen Citizen Kane but my elementary school library had several volumes of Peanuts anthologies I would take out. I don’t think he had seen the movie either because he was stuck on a 7 letter word for “Kane sled”.
 
I realize a couple of my responses may be confusing, as it occurred to me while eating chicken fingers just now. Lucy was an original character but who was never written out of the strip. The five names in the poll were all first generation Peanuts but who all vanished eventually. My apologies. I blame an irritating and distracting cat. And possibly being 63.
 
Hi again, I amended my response to you, but in case you’ve already read it I’d like to say…

I realize a couple of my responses may be confusing, as it occurred to me while eating chicken fingers just now. Snoopy was an original character but who was never written out of the strip. The five names in the poll were all first generation Peanuts but who all vanished eventually. My apologies. I blame an irritating and distracting cat. And possibly being 63. lol
 
I didn’t pay attention to comics until about the late 1960s when I was 5 or 6, and I have to admit I could never understand all the fuss about “Peanuts”, especially since my experience of it was pretty much the era with the huge focus on very fluffy strips with Snoopy and Woodstock. Sometimes the Peanuts TV specials were funny (my favorite is where they go to the department store at Halloween and are bombarded with Christmas decorations already) but mostly I just didn’t get the hype. It was only as an adult that I learned that Peanuts had started out as a much more interesting and darker strip in the 1950s and early 1960s and was more along the lines of something like Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell” rather than some foofy strip that was mostly about a dog with a fantasy life.

I also remember a book called “The Parables of Peanuts” that was big in the 1970s. It was apparently Scripture lessons illustrated with Peanuts characters. Did anyone ever read it and if so, what did you think?
 
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I was already in college when I first became aware of the Peanuts strips. Their appeal to me was the crossover between children’s activities and the adult world – adult reactions and adult conflicts translated into situations like a game of marbles. We see this particular conflict played out every day in the comments threads here at CAF, not to mention on Capitol Hill, or in the Middle East, or wherever you care to look:

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@BartholomewB, why did you delete that?! It’s hilariously true!
 
I had a book called The Gospel According to Peanuts. Most of it was over my head at the time. 😂
 
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Laughingly typical behavior for we humans. I recall doing something similar when I was that age. It involved the outrage of being 8 years old, getting a bad call at home plate, and storming off with the only ball, which happened to belong to me. LOL
 
I remember many, many lessons from my mother as a child on how to be a good loser and not be a “sore loser”. Starting with when I was 5 years old and cried and had a tantrum because my dad won the game of “Pin the Tail on the Donkey” at a family party.
 
My vote would have to go to Linus because we thumb suckers have to stick together! I also had a security blanket until my mother kept snipping it smaller and smaller. I was very introspective as a child so can relate to his behavior. Observe your world to make sense of it. Perhaps two plus years in and out of hospitals as an infant and toddler shaped me that way. Since Linus wasn’t on the list I selected ‘someone I’ve forgotten to include’. Maybe he wasn’t an original character?
 
This thread inspired me to go watch the original “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” documentary from 1963, which was meant to be aired on TV but was never shown because, believe it or not, the maker couldn’t find sponsorship. I find that hard to believe given that the strip was not only very popular in 1963, but also the later Charlie Brown TV specials were so very popular. The 1963 documentary contains the first video animations of bits that were later used in the specials, and the first appearance of the voice actor who voiced Charlie Brown in ensuing shows for decades. It also contains footage of Charles Schulz working in his then-office and driving his kids and the neighbor kids to school, piled in a big ol’ station wagon, with kids hopping over the seats to sit in the cargo area and nary a seat belt or booster seat in sight. (I loved riding around in the cargo area of other people’s station wagons - those were the days!)
 
RN69 said:
Since Linus wasn’t on the list I selected ‘someone I’ve forgotten to include’. Maybe he wasn’t an original character?
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He was a very early character, but what I had intended with the poll was to highlight the five first generation kids who were written out of the script and replaced. I would consider Linus an original fixture since he was “born” within the first year of Schultz’s production.
 
I saw an interview with the folks who produced most of the Charlie Brown tv specials in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The biggest challenge for them, of course (and I had never considered this at the time) was the kids they used for voices kept growing and changing so were constantly being replaced. Makes sense now, of course, but as a kid I wondered why some voices sounded different after a few of the specials. DUH. LOL
 
I’m surprised they used actual kids. Most cartoon shows seem to use adults doing kid voices, presumably for the reason you mentioned. Would be a shame when the boy voicing the 8-year-old character suddenly hits puberty…
 
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