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Around the holidays, that bongo-infused remix of a Hawaii 5-0 song that preceded a CBS Special Presentation was one of the most anticipated things on television for me as a kid. It (probably) meant that some cartoon was about to be shown, and CBS had the broadcast rights to all the Peanuts films.

But now that I go back and look at them as an adult, they're damn depressing. Charlie Brown is a manic depressive. His sister is a homicidal maniac in the making. Lucy is a sociopath. Linus is mentally defective. All of the characters have some sort of strange mental malaise that prevents them from being likeable. Even the situations are depressing, everyone is a loser that apparently has no parental guidance in their lives, they're just mini-me adults going through a parody of life itself. Even the dog is crazy, somehow imagining itself to be a WWI pilot.

I guess it's the different between being wide-eyed and suddenly figuring out how the world works.

Around the holidays, that bongo-infused remix of a Hawaii 5-0 song that preceded a CBS Special Presentation was one of the most anticipated things on television for me as a kid. It (probably) meant that some cartoon was about to be shown, and CBS had the broadcast rights to all the Peanuts films. But now that I go back and look at them as an adult, they're damn depressing. Charlie Brown is a manic depressive. His sister is a homicidal maniac in the making. Lucy is a sociopath. Linus is mentally defective. All of the characters have some sort of strange mental malaise that prevents them from being likeable. Even the situations are depressing, everyone is a loser that apparently has no parental guidance in their lives, they're just mini-me adults going through a parody of life itself. Even the dog is crazy, somehow imagining itself to be a WWI pilot. I guess it's the different between being wide-eyed and suddenly figuring out how the world works.

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[–] • 9 pts (edited )

Peanuts' appeal was exactly for the reasons you give; ultimately all the messages are hopeful. It was the wacky characters and situations that gave the strip its charm. These were things that all kids could relate to. This was nothing new, of course, and has been done a million times since but Shultz managed to walk the line between overwhelming insanity and saccharine sweetness perfectly. And it appealed to kids exactly because it operated at their level. Sure adults also read the strip but in a detached way.

No one ever walked away after reading Peanuts feeling the weight of the world. The unyielding hopefulness and determination that you mention was always there, despite the unending machinations of Lucy, deranged antics of Snoopy, and all the rest. OP's take on the strip forgets what it's like to be a kid, surrounded by forces you don't fully comprehend and definitely are not in control of. The difference from the real world being, of course, that sometimes the real world is also very scary and dangerous.

[–] • 0 pt

I really appreciate well thought out and written comments like these. Kudos to both of you.