My Life with Charlie Brown

What Do You Do with a Dog That Doesn’t Talk?

171 What Do You Do with a Dog That Doesn’t Talk? C omic-strip characters, I have noticed after 30 years of drawing Peanuts, come and go quickly. Some work better than others. Some don’t work at all. Some, like Snoopy, are so strong that they tend, if you let them, to take over the strip. Others, like Frieda, with the naturally curly hair, drop by the wayside, either because they do not inspire enough things that are funny, or because the artist has outgrown them. But the turnover is still nowhere near as great, I’m happy to be able to say, as it is with the characters in your average television series. Television is a tyrannical kind of medium. Even when you are making an animated cartoon out of my characters, as Bill Melendez and I have been doing for more than 15 years now. You don’t have a captive audience the way you do in a movie or play. In TV, you’re at the mercy of some guy in a chair. You can’t try the show out in New Haven, then write a new second act. If the viewer doesn’t instantly like what he sees, it’s zap! off with your head while he tunes in something else. There’s no way you can say to him, “Hey, 172 My arT wait, there’s this great number coming up in a minute.” You have to grab ’em right now. This is difficult because the grabbiest characters I have are not necessarily the ones that work best on television. Snoopy doesn’t even talk. In the strip he communicates by means of thought balloons . Woodstock merely peeps. One has to imagine what he is actually saying. As much as I love pantomime, it severely limits what you can do in film with two of the characters who are mainstays of the strip. All that poetry, Snoopy philosophizing on top of the doghouse, Woodstock dreaming impossible dreams, etc., doesn’t sustain itself in film, even if you could figure out how to do it. In its place we all too often substitute action: a boat race, a figure-skating competition , a spelling bee, complete with conventional bad guys. That’s fine except the story tends to fall into cliché. But it gives new impetus to the characters who can talk. And it makes a star all over again out of Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is indeed one of the good guys, which for a comic strip is just right. Some comic-strip heroes survive simply by being what they are. That’s Charlie Brown. Others by being quotable . Thurber characters do that. People remember things said in Thurber cartoons from 25 years ago. Can anybody remember anything Mickey Mouse ever said? Mickey and Charlie Brown survived by merely being there. This is largely true of all comic-strip heroes. Invariably they are small and put-upon, and they never get to say the funny things themselves. Pogo was a likable little possum. Mickey was a kind of elder-statesman Mouse. Charlie Brown, for all his nagging insecurities , was and is the voice of reason, really very low-key in relation to the others. Yet he holds the whole thing together. Another thing I find bothersome about television is that it dictates what you can and can’t do. A novel allows time to dig beneath the surface and develop character. A comic strip, strangely enough, affords a similar luxury: even though it takes only 16 seconds a day to read, cumulatively it goes on forever. Big changes naturally evolve 173 What Do You Do With a Dog That Doesn't Talk? over the years. Snoopy, for example, was just a cuddly puppy of the most conventional sort when Peanuts began. When he got up on the doghouse and began to fantasize, he became something very different . In television it is difficult even to carry on a conversation, let alone philosophize. Not that it can’t be challenging. Really nice moments happen. I remember how I agonized over the spelling-bee show. In the end Charlie Brown loses and is so depressed that he goes to bed, swearing that he will never get up and play baseball again. A flat ending. I needed something. I thought about it a long time. Then it hit me. Linus opens the door and asks to...