Charlie Brown
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Charles "Charlie" Brown is the principal character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.
Character
Charlie Brown was inspired by Schulz’s own life. A third-grade student, Charlie Brown is a lovable loser, possessed of endless determination and stubbornness, but who is ultimately dominated by his anxieties and shortcomings, and is often dominated and taken advantage of by his peers. The best-known example of this is his Little League baseball team: Charlie Brown is the manager of the team and its pitcher, but the team consistently loses (their all-time record is 2–930). Charlie Brown is a terrible pitcher, often giving up tremendous hits which either knock him off the mound or leave him with only his shorts on. The team itself is poor, with only Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy being particularly competent; however, most of the occasions when his team has won games have been when Charlie Brown is not playing. Charlie Brown did once win a motorcross race, but the prize was a free hair-cut, which he obviously didn't need.Charlie Brown is also an avid kite-flyer, but his kites keep landing in a "Kite-Eating Tree" or suffering even worse fates. Once in 1958, he finally got the kite to fly before it spontaneously combusted in the air. Every autumn his friend Lucy van Pelt promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick, and every year she pulls it away as he follows through, causing him to fly in the air and land painfully on his back. He was never shown as succeeding to kick the football in the comic strip.When Charlie Brown was ill in the hospital in a 1979 sequence, Lucy promised she would never pull the football away again. She did not pull the football away when Charlie Brown tried to kick it after he got well, but he missed the football and kicked her hand. He was depicted as kicking it in a 1981 TV special, It's Magic, Charlie Brown, in which he was invisible. In 1999, Lucy delegated the task of holding the ball to her brother Rerun, but he did not reveal whether he pulled the ball away or not.
Despite all this, and despite the abuse he often received, Charlie Brown has many friends, the best being Lucy's brother Linus, who may occasionally admonish Charlie Brown, but stands by him. Charlie Brown is also in love with an unseen character known simply as "the Little Red-Haired Girl", though he rarely has the courage to talk to her, and when he does (encounters which always occur off-panel) it always goes badly. Rerun also seems to look up to and admire Charlie Brown; in one comic strip, he wanted to watch him pitch in a baseball game, thinking that he was a master at it.
Charlie Brown is almost always addressed by his full name by other characters in the strip. Two of the exceptions to this are Peppermint Patty, who calls him "Chuck", and her friend Marcie, who calls him "Charles". Some readers interpret this as an indication of the portrayed crushes that both girls have on him, which they both admit to each other in a comic from 1979. Because of Charlie Brown's preoccupation with the Little Red-Haired Girl, he remains oblivious to their occasional attentions. In particular, he has a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, to both of them; Peppermint Patty when she seeks reassurance over her "big nose" and her femininity, and Marcie when she tries to show that she cares about him (once, when asking if Charlie Brown missed her while she was away, got the reply "my cereal's going soggy"). His sister Sally usually calls him "Big Brother", probably because it would be awkward for a member of his own family to use their surname when addressing him. The only other two exceptions are Eudora, who also calls him "Charles", and a minor character named Peggy Jean in the early 1990s who called him "Brownie Charles", because Charlie Brown, in his typical nervous and awkward fashion, flubbed his own name when he introduced himself, and couldn't bring himself to correct the mistake. It was eventually revealed that the first person to have called him "Charlie Brown" was Poochie, a blonde little girl who played with Snoopy as a pup, and who first appeared in the strip on January 7, 1973.
Like all adults in the strip, Charlie Brown's parents are never seen, but sometimes referenced. His father is a barber. His mother is a housewife.
Charlie Brown is drawn with only a small curl of hair at the front of his head, and a little in the back. Though this is often interpreted as him being bald, Charles Schulz explained that he saw Charlie Brown as having hair that was so light that it wasn't seen very well. Snoopy thinks of his owner as "that round-headed kid". He almost always wears black shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, usually yellow, with a black zig-zag stripe around the middle.
Charlie Brown often utters the catch-phrase "Good grief!" when astonished or dismayed. In moments of extreme disappointment or despair he sometimes simply cries out, "Rats!"
Peanuts Sunday strips were often (unofficially) titled Peanuts featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown. Schulz later stated that he had wanted to name the strip Good Ol' Charlie Brown but that the name Peanuts was chosen by the cartoon syndicate instead; as a result, some people inferred that Charlie Brown's name was "Peanuts". Schulz suggested the Sunday title as a clarification device.
History
Charlie Brown was one of the original cast members of Peanuts when it debuted in 1950, and the butt of the first joke in the strip. Aside from some stylistic differences in Schulz’s art style at the time, Charlie Brown looked much the same. He did, however, wear an unadorned T-shirt; the stripe was added within the first year of strips, in order to add more color to the strip.
Initially, Charlie Brown was more assertive and playful than his character would later become: He would play tricks on other cast members, and some strips had romantic overtones between Charlie Brown and Patty and Violet. He would cause headaches for adults (knocking all the comic books off their stand at a newsstand, for instance), though he was from the start not especially competent at any skill. (The early side of Charlie Brown popped up in another form in the 1959 hit "Charlie Brown" by the rock band The Coasters. The titular Charlie Brown of the song gets into mischief by doing typical things such as writing on the walls and shooting off spitballs at school. Like the Peanuts character, this Charlie Brown wonders: "Why is everybody always pickin' on me?")
Charlie Brown soon evolved into the sad sack character he's best known as: Feeling enslaved to the care of Snoopy, beset by comments from everyone around him. Common approaches to the strip's storylines included Charlie Brown stubbornly refusing to give in even when all is lost from the outset (e.g., standing on the pitcher's mound alone on the ballfield, refusing to let a torrential downpour interrupt his beloved game), or suddenly displaying a skill and rising within a field, only to suffer a humiliating loss just when he's about to win it all (most famously, Charlie Brown's efforts to win the statewide spelling bee in the feature-length film A Boy Named Charlie Brown). Charlie Brown never receives Valentines or Christmas cards and only gets rocks when he goes trick or treating on Halloween but never loses hope that he will. His misfortunes garnered so much sympathy from the audience that many young viewers in North America of the Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown TV specials have sent Valentine cards and halloween candy respectively to the broadcasting television network in an effort to show Charlie Brown they cared for him.
Linus initially appeared as an infant, but as he aged (and Charlie Brown did not) he became a profound philosopher and Charlie Brown's best friend, often supporting each other in small ways when the other's foibles had been painfully exposed (Schroeder and Lucy Van Pelt were also significantly younger than Charlie Brown when they first appeared, but they too aged where he did not, to the point where they became his peers.). Linus was himself a sort of loser like Charlie Brown, because of his inability to let go of his superstitions (his security blanket, belief in the Great Pumpkin, paralyzing stage fright, etc.), so the two had much in common.
In 1959, Charlie Brown's parents produced a girl, Sally, who resembled Charlie Brown in some ways, but with a shock of blonde hair; like Linus, Lucy, and Schroeder, Sally began as an infant but soon became "mature" enough to interact with the other characters on a more-or-less equal basis. Initially Charlie Brown doted on her, though she too became a thorn in his side as she would pester him for help with her homework, and berate him for misunderstanding certain concepts (despite herself being the one in the wrong). Charlie Brown would stoically and guiltily bear this, although sometimes he was able to let Sally dig her own holes without pulling him in with her while very occasionally firmly putting his foot down on truly unacceptable behaviour.
Charlie Brown maintained this demeanor until the strip ended its run in 2000, and classic strips run in many newspapers today. He did have occasional victories, though, such as hitting a game-winning home run off a pitch by Roy Hobbs' great-granddaughter on March 30, 1993 and soundly defeating "Joe Agate" in a game of marbles on April 11, 1995. Usually, Charlie Brown was a representative for everyone going through a time when they feel like nothing ever goes right for them; however, Charlie Brown refuses to give up.
Charlie Brown has a pen-pal, but because he uses a fountain pen (rather than ballpoint) and because he has less skill than others at keeping the ink flow under control, he resorts to graphite and starts off the letters, "Dear Pencil Pal". These correspondences, which began in the August 25, 1958 strip, are usually one-way; but on April 14, 1960, Charlie Brown read Lucy a letter he'd received from his Pen Pal. In the letter, the Pen Pal revealed that he or she had read Charlie Brown's latest letter to his/her class, and that they all agreed he must be a nice person and someone who is pleasant to know. In response to which, Charlie Brown uttered a vigorous "Ha!" to Lucy.
Other Media
- Apollo 10's command module was named "Charlie Brown," while its lunar module was named "Snoopy."
- 1960's child actor Peter Robbins first played Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. His last performance as Charlie Brown was in 1969. Since then various actors including Chad Allen played Charlie Brown. Erin Chase was the first girl to play Charlie Brown. She played him for the "This Is America, Charlie Brown" series.
- Animator Jim Reardon, who would later become a director of The Simpsons, made a short cartoon in 1986 while attending CalArts entitled Bring Me The Head of Charlie Brown, a violent parody of Peanuts merged with Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with a finale out of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver.
- A parody exists of the Peanuts gang called Weapon Brown, which features adult characters designed to resemble the Peanuts characters, set in a post apocalyptic world.
- Near the end of the Fairly OddParents episode "Foul Balled", when Chester McBadbat is playing baseball badly again, his clothes get knocked off after pitching similar to Charlie Brown's.
- In 2004, Charlie Brown made a brief cameo appearance on Comedy Central's Drawn Together in the episode- Requiem for a Reality Show.
- At the end of the My Life as a Teenage Robot Christmas special, a kid who looks exactly like Charlie Brown is shown receiving hair tonic.
- A character in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 has the same properties as him: round head, yellow kimono, and similar black pattern on it.
External links
| Peanuts | |
|---|---|
| Characters | |
| 5 | Charlotte Braun | Charlie Brown | Sally Brown | Eudora | Franklin | Frieda | The Great Pumpkin | Kite-Eating Tree | Lila | Little Red-Haired Girl | Marcie | Miss Othmar | Patty | Peggy Jean | Peppermint Patty | José Peterson | Pig-Pen | Poochie | Roy | Schroeder | Shermy | Joe Shlabotnik | Snoopy | Snoopy's siblings | Thibault | Linus van Pelt | Lucy van Pelt | Rerun van Pelt | Violet | Woodstock | |
| Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!) > A Boy Named Charlie Brown (feature film) | Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown | Snoopy, Come Home | |
| Other Media | |
| A Charlie Brown Christmas (soundtrack album) | The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show | Linus and Lucy | Snoopy | Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular | This is America, Charlie Brown | You're a Good Man… |
| People | |
| Vince Guaraldi > Donna Johnson | Bill Melendez | Charles M. Schulz |