The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
THE BEAGLE HAS LANDED
How Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang fnally made it to Hollywood
The movie keeps the characters in their oddly timeless, American suburban world. Its innocence survives. Any modernity is kept at bay
Among institutions that retain an unshakable hold on America’s collective afections, Charles M Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts takes pride of place. It remains a genuine pop-culture phenomenon: it frst appeared in 1950, in seven newspapers, but its popularity grew rapidly. By the time Schulz called it a day 50 years later, it was syndicated on the comic pages of an astounding 2,600 papers around the world. The strip would be published in 25 diferent languages; by 1989 Peanuts-related merchandise was topping $1 billion a year.
The strip has an appeal that captivates people aged from eight to 80. It has two natural co-stars. The fretful Charlie Brown, a decent, well-meaning boy, is often thwarted by life (he can’t fy a kite; he’s hopeless at baseball), but never gives up trying to get things right. His daydreaming dog Snoopy, a beagle with a vivid fantasy life, composes stories about himself (most famously as a First World War fghter ace) on a typewriter atop his kennel. Both are iconic characters. Their gang of friends includes Charlie’s scourge Lucy van Pelt, bossy, opinionated, but nicer than she seems; her brother Linus, the dreamy, intellectual philosopher who sucks his thumb and hugs his comfort blanket; Schroeder, the Beethoven-loving piano virtuoso; the noble Pigpen, perpetually covered in mud or dirt; and Woodstock, a little yellow bird.
Schulz’s characters had already triumphed in animation. The Peanuts gang featured in dozens of successful half-hour ‘Charlie Brown specials’ on television; in America the two best-known, A Charlie
Brown Christmas (1965) and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), have been broadcast on network TV every year since they were frst shown. Between 1969 and 1980, four Peanuts feature flms made it into cinemas, but these were modestly budgeted, low-key eforts, with scripts by Schulz himself.
During his lifetime, Schulz voiced strong opinions about how he wanted his characters portrayed in animation: true in spirit and execution to the strip. The late John Hughes ( Ferris Bueller’s Day Of) was hired to write a Peanuts movie but, Schulz’s son Craig tells me, ‘It never worked. And a lot of people got gun-shy about the idea of a movie.’ After Charles’s death (in 2000, the day before his fnal strip appeared), ‘The family would never [consider doing] a movie. We thought the risk of doing one badly was not worth the reward.’
Still, things can change – and, it would seem, spectacularly so. Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts
Movie, with an estimated $100 million budget, opened in America and 10 other countries in early November; in the US, it enjoyed a healthy opening weekend gross of $44 million and positive reviews.
The new flm has Hollywood written all over it: 20th Century Fox is distributing, and the animation company Blue Sky Studios produced it, having made the four wildly successful Ice Age movies for Fox. This is a thoroughly modern Peanuts, in 3D, with plenty of computer-generated imagery.
It may sound like a radical departure for the Peanuts gang; yet a glance at the flm’s credits suggests a diferent story. Craig Schulz, 62, is listed as both a writer and producer, as is his screenwriter son Bryan Schulz, along with Bryan’s writing partner Cornelius Uliano. Charles M Schulz himself is credited posthumously as the creator of the strip. In creative terms, the Schulzes hold the whip hand.
But they aren’t blasé about it. ‘The main aim was to make sure we didn’t screw this movie up,’ Bryan says. ‘It would have been so easy to do. Every choice we made had to pass our “Peanuts flter”: was it right for the story? Did it ft within the universe Grandpa created? If not, it wasn’t used, no matter how funny or perfect it may have seemed. Making sure this movie was true to the Peanuts strips was paramount to us.’
Craig echoes his son’s sentiments. ‘We wanted to honour his work and respect his legacy, not just knock out something that’s going to be forgotten in a year. We want this movie to have 20 years of life. That’s one of the main reasons we did it ourselves. A lot of [studios] wanted to push a movie on us, but the property was doing well as it was. We didn’t need a movie to propel the strip any further. We all wanted to preserve my dad’s legacy.’ As he tells it, the stars aligned during a period when he found himself working on two Charlie Brown TV specials, while Bryan graduated from flm school and, with Uliano, started successfully pitching script ideas to Hollywood.
After 50 years of the strip being syndicated by United Feature Syndicate, ownership rights of Peanuts passed to Iconix, a New York brand-management company. Craig, who had assumed the mantle of looking after the Schulz estate’s broader interests, felt this was the time to act: he sent the flm script that had been jointly written by himself, Bryan and Uliano to family members. ‘I said: in all likelihood, at some point someone’s going to make a movie of Peanuts and do whatever they want. We’ll have no say in it. So why don’t we do one movie, and do it the right way before anyone else gets hold of it and does something we wouldn’t approve of ?’ He won the argument, and the family fell in behind the new flm.
The flm-makers’ insistence on keeping longstanding Peanuts fans happy never wavered. ‘ They ’re the best in the world,’ notes Bryan, ‘extremely knowledgeable and loyal, but factoriented. If we do anything wrong, no matter how small, we’ll hear about it – guaranteed.’
In fact, the movie probably won’t rufe too many feathers. Charlie Brown and Snoopy’s friends are back, and the story doesn’t venture far from what Peanuts fans already know: it tracks Charlie Brown through a school year, and the progress of his crush
‘Every choice we made had to pass our “Peanuts flter”. Did it ft within the
universe Grandpa created?’
on the elusive Little Red-Haired Girl. His attempts to impress her – at a school dance, during assembly – always fall fat. Snoopy, meanwhile, is typing up a First World War novel in which he saves a French poodle pilot from the dastardly Red Baron.
Crucially, the movie keeps the characters in their oddly timeless, American suburban world. Its innocence survives: the edgiest it gets is Charlie’s use of the mild oath ‘good grief !’ Any modernity is kept at bay. Craig recalls, ‘The conversation on day one was no cell phones, fart jokes or computer stuf.’
Imeet Craig on my visit to the grandly named Charles M Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, a peaceful city of some 170,000 people, in wine country 50 miles north of San Francisco. To say Schulz was a big man in this town is to understate: even the local airport bears his name.
The museum itself (which opened in 2002) is both eccentric and extraordinary, a study in contrasts. It’s as playful as you’d expect of any place honouring child-friendly cartoon characters. It isn’t shy of merchandising: its sizable gift shop contains more plush Snoopy than you’ll ever see in one place. And it may be the only museum anywhere with a frst-rate ice rink: the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Schulz was passionate about ice hockey – a subject, his widow Jeannie tells me, that has appeared in 60 Peanuts strips over the years. Next to the rink is the 1970sstyle Warm Puppy Cafe, named after Schulz’s bestselling book of ‘Happiness Is…’ strips, Happiness Is A
Warm Puppy. He breakfasted there each day. Yet the museum exists primarily to underline the eminence of Charles M Schulz as an artist; its research centre has a library of 4,000 books about him and the Peanuts phenomenon. Its guides and employees speak reverently about the purity of his ‘pen line’. An earnest young archivist named Cesar dons white gloves as he opens a narrow box containing unfnished early Peanuts strips, handling them as if they were holy relics.
Schulz’s work studio has been lovingly recreated, including his actual drawing board. It’s intriguing how many artists and designers have been drawn to the world of Peanuts. Versace, Karl Lagerfeld, Rodarte and Vivienne Westwood are among the fashion icons who have designed outfts for Snoopy (displayed at the museum). The environmental artist Christo, famed for wrapping huge public monuments such as Berlin’s Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris, has also ‘wrapped’ Snoopy’s kennel.
The museum’s hall is dominated by two monumental works by the artist Yoshiteru Otani. One is a 22ft-high mural comprising 3,500 ceramic tiles, each depicting a Peanuts strip. Put together, they form a huge image of Lucy holding a football on the ground for Charlie Brown to run up and kick (the running joke is that she always snatches it away at the last moment). Otani also designed a massive three-ton wooden sculpture depicting Snoopy’s evolution over the years, going back to when he was based on Schulz’s own dog Spike.
Schulz remains a beloved fgure in Santa Rosa, where he and Jeannie lived together for the last 27 years of his life. There he is still remembered as a cheerful member of the community, the sort of man who on his morning walk would throw local dogs the biscuits he kept in his pockets for just those occasions. He is still widely referred to as Sparky, a nickname from infancy about his alleged resemblance to the rickety racehorse Spark Plug in the old Barney Google comic strip.
Yet he was a contradictory fgure. As a younger man, he was shy, withdrawn and not given to selfdisclosure. The son of a German-born barber (who denied his nationality until late in his life) and a mother from a rural Norwegian family, he grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the Midwest. Schulz was an awkward young man who hated his looks, was clumsy around girls and sufered from low self-esteem.
He was aware of his talent, though, and claimed he knew he would draw a daily comic strip from the time he was six years old. He was fanatical (his word) in pursuing that ambition. Over half a century he would draw all 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, without assistance. He always insisted all anyone needed to know about him was in the strip.
Schulz was an awkward young man who hated his looks and sufered
from low self-esteem
Famously, Schulz hated the title ‘Peanuts’, which was foisted on him from the outset by United Features. ‘Isn’t that an awful name for a strip?’ he grumbled to associates. ‘It’s a degrading title.’
After that early setback, the content of Peanuts was something he guarded jealously. Similarly, he always denied that his own children had remotely inspired any of the characters; they were his alone. Yet he was at a loss to explain his gift for creating those child characters. In 1992, as a guest on Whoopi Goldberg’s television talk show, he made a startling admission: ‘I don’t know much about children. I’m not even sure I like kids.’
Almost a continent away from Santa Rosa, in a modern, impersonal building on a leafy street in Connecticut, director Steve Martino and his team are putting the fnal touches to Snoopy and
Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie. The project is still at a hush-hush stage, so the animators’ creative work is going on behind closed doors. But Martino seems as relaxed as anyone could be at this crucial period of production. ‘We create computer animation, so it’s not lost on me that I’m looking at [Schulz’s] drawings and seeing these wonderful pen strokes,’ he says. ‘That’s what led me to our mantra: “How do you fnd his pen line in everything we create?”’
Bryan had taken the script to several studios, and had efectively auditioned them to see who might be suitable. He and his father eventually settled on Blue Sky: it helped that Martino had directed the animated flm of the Dr Seuss story Horton Hears a Who!. ‘So he had respect for a legacy property,’ says Craig. ‘In our flm, each character has their traits directly based on the comic strip. Blue Sky took the trouble to get [Charles’s] pen strokes on every frame of the movie. Not just characters, but trees, pencils, phones.’
The characters’ voices, too, were hugely important. ‘[Casting director] Christian Kaplan listened to thousands of audition tapes,’ says Martino. ‘My directive was, “I want to fnd the timbre and voice quality from the original specials.” I didn’t want the kids to sound like trained actors. I wanted them natural.’ The voice of legendary animator Bill Meléndez (who died in 2008) can be heard posthumously as Snoopy and Woodstock. ‘There was no way to recreate anything as charming,’ notes Martino.
But since Schulz’s original comic strips came to an end, is there still the same level of awareness of the Peanuts world? ‘Kids may know of it today through a Snoopy plush toy or a T-shirt,’ concedes Martino. ‘Things that are there in the culture, rather than stories in the comic strip. So, in the movie, we’ve needed to introduce the characters a little.
‘You look at the character of Charlie Brown and say, let’s just take who he is, and that’ll be one of the anchors of the story. He’s a guy who never gives up, he tries, he fails. But he has these qualities we’ve seen over 50 years; let’s celebrate who he’s been.’
‘I can’t help but believe my father would love the look and feel of this flm,’ says Craig. ‘I just wanted to live up to what my dad had created, not let someone else come in and ruin what he had done. No one’s going to touch his world.’ Snoopy and Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie is in UK cinemas on December 21