At home with Charlie Brown and the 'Peanuts' gang (photos)
Road Trip at Home: For the 60th anniversary of the famous comic, CNET's Daniel Terdiman visits the Charles M. Schulz Museum.
Skating Snoopy
SANTA ROSA, Calif.--It's hard to believe, but Saturday is the 60th anniversary of "Peanuts," Charles M. Schulz's wonderful comic strip. That means characters like Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the gang are now entering their seventh decade.
To celebrate, and as part of his ongoing Road Trip at Home series, CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman took a visit to this wine country city to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, the official home to much of the archive and artifacts that make up the "Peanuts" universe.
The museum features a series of rotating exhibits, including those that celebrate some of the experiments that Schulz tried--and rejected--in his strips, as well as a group of terrific sculptures, and other memorabilia.
This is "Mr. Joe Debonair" by artists Gail Robertson and Barbara Rossini, installed next door to the museum at "Snoopy's Home Ice," the Redwood Empire Ice Arena, which was built by Schulz in 1969 and is still owned and operated by his family.
Schulz himself died in February 2000, just months before groundbreaking took place for the museum. The museum officially opened its doors in 2002.
Entryway
Lucy and Charlie Brown
Close-up
Morphing Snoopy
Schulz's office
This way to kite-eating tree
The kite-eating tree
Charlie Brown and the EPA
The EPA letter
Peanuts in animation
The Great Pumpkin
Cel
According to the museum, "roughly 10,000 drawings are needed to produce a half hour of animation, yet acetate cels from some of the earlier animated specials are quite rare. Some of the artwork was lost because cels were actually 'washed' or erased and used again and again. Cels are also, by virtue of their chemical compositions, difficult to preserve.
"After searching for cels from the classic 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' in 2005, museum staff believed that only one or two cels had survived the intervening 40 years. Then in the summer of 2008, a friend of [Charles M.] Schulz's son, Craig, made a generous donation to the museum of several animation cels from 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' and 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.' As a young teenager, this generous donor was in the right place at the right time and saved the animation cels from oblivion. Schulz, cleaning up after a fire in his studio, was ready to toss them in the trash until the teenager...stepped forward to save them."
Hollywood star
World War I Flying Ace
Mona Lucy
Adults
A new exhibit that will be installed in the museum through February 21, 2011, is called "Searching out new territory: Experiments in Peanuts." According to the museum, "Experimentation is a part of any artist's work, and Charles Schulz was no exception. He experimented in areas as diverse as lettering and backgrounds, but the area of greatest exploration was with the development of his characters."
In this Sunday strip, we see something that was almost never seen in "Peanuts," actual adults. Though we only see their legs, it is almost jarring to see them at all, given how the only characters included in nearly all of the 17,897 strips in the series are children and animals.
Schulz tried out the experiment over four Sundays in May 1954 and later decided it was a mistake.