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We have to write an essay?
Five hundred words about who we are?
I have no idea who I am. How am I gonna come up with 500 words?
That will take forever.
Due in one week? Good grief.
I couldn't be stuck with a worse subject: me.
You worry too much, Charlie Brown.
Good ol' Charlie Brown,
the lovable loser who never seems to catch a break.
You've probably heard of him. You've definitely seen him.
He's been everywhere.
In newspapers and books, movies and TV.
He's been all over the world and up in the air.
-He's even been to the moon. -Good grief, Charlie Brown.
It sort of feels like Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy,
and the rest of the Peanuts Gang have pretty much always been around.
Linus, I always had a special feeling for.
-My favorite character is Linus. -I'm a Woodstock fan.
It was amazing how much Franklin meant to me.
My favorite Peanuts character is Peppermint Patty.
-Yeah, and Snoopy. -Of course, I like Snoopy the best.
For 70 years, Peanuts has been part of our lives.
Like, Peanuts is just its own planet.
The audience is the world.
It appeals to everyone, and that's why it became this huge phenomenon.
Peanuts may be a global icon,
but at the center of it all is still good ol' Charlie Brown.
I love Peanuts, and I love Charlie Brown.
I love Charlie Brown.
I related to Charlie Brown so much.
But who is Charlie Brown really?
And where did he come from?
Why would anybody care about who I am? I'm nobody special.
"Who Are You, Charlie Brown?"
Long before there was a boy named Charlie Brown,
there was a man named Charles Schulz who had dreamed of being a cartoonist.
I always dreamed I'd have a comic strip.
I think I've been dreaming about this thing since I was about six years old.
Almost from the moment he was born,
it seemed like Charles Schulz was destined to be in the comics.
When he was a baby,
one of his uncles called him Spark Plug,
which came from Spark Plug the horse, a comic strip character.
So, everybody called him Sparky.
He was an only child,
and he was the little kid that no one really talked to.
He was so painfully shy
that when he and his mother would walk down the street in Saint Paul,
he'd walk with his head down.
Shy little Sparky did so well in school
that he skipped a grade.
But that really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
He was the youngest person in the room by a year,
which when you're a kid is a big deal.
And it was hard to keep up with the older kids. He was miserable.
He just felt as if he didn't mean anything to the rest of the kids in school.
After school, Sparky liked to hang out in his father's barbershop.
"When I'm real lonesome, I like to go to my dad's barbershop.
They always ask if I've come in for a shave."
But even that had its downside.
When I used to go into the shop, and he'd be working on me,
the embarrassing thing about that was maybe he'd be halfway through my haircut,
and a real good customer would come in.
And he would say, "Why don't you just sit over there
and wait for a little bit because I have to wait on this man."
It was so embarrassing to sit on the bench with just a half a haircut.
By the time he was in middle school,
even Sparky's good grades were starting to slip,
and he felt like a total failure.
I think it was in the eighth grade when the roof fell in.
I failed everything there was possible to fail.
One place where Sparky found happiness
was in his sketchbook.
He drew all the time, and he dreamed that someday he would draw comics
like the ones he read in the newspaper.
We subscribed to two papers in Saint Paul, and on Saturday night,
my dad would drive up to the local drugstore
and buy the two Minneapolis papers so we could get four comic sections to read.
And that was what life was about to me.
Five hundred words about who I am. Who am I, Snoopy?
I'm the son of a barber.
I like baseball. I go to school. I just try to make it through the day.
This assignment is impossible.
You wouldn't understand, Snoopy. You never have to do anything difficult.
Sit, stay, roll over.
A dog's life is so simple.
"Sparky Goes to War!"
In 1942, Sparky was drafted into the army.
"What happens when you get drafted?"
"They send you someplace."
"That's what I was afraid of."
Leaving home was heartbreaking for Sparky.
He was very close to his mother, and she had been sick for a long time.
Sparky was never told how ill his mother was.
And that she probably wasn't going to make it.
And he felt very left out and isolated because of that.
The night that I had to report back to Fort Snelling
in Minnesota, she said, "I think we should say goodbye
because we will probably never see each other again."
And off I went.
He would get very depressed, visibly shaken,
when he talked about the death of his mother.
Really did reduce him to tears.
It left him, probably, with something that he thought about all his life.
"It's all very strange.
You can be walking along, not thinking of anything in particular.
Suddenly, you're reminded of a lost love..."
Ten-hut!
I don't know how I ever survived those days though.
It's a long time ago,
but those are some things that you just never forget.
Young Sparky had never spent a single night away from home.
But during the war,
he traveled all the way to France and Germany.
Throughout his time in the service, Sparky was often homesick and lonely,
so he drew pictures, just as he had when he was a kid.
He brought his sketchbook everywhere he went.
And when the war was over, he came home more determined than ever
to make it as a cartoonist.
Big brother, I need help with my math homework.
Can't you see I'm busy writing my essay?
What's it about?
It's about who I am.
Who you are? I'll tell you who you are.
You're my big brother.
And you're a lousy big brother
if you don't help me with my math homework.
Here, take a look at this.
Good grief.
Okay. If you have two apples, and I give you three more,
how many apples do you have?
Who cares?
I've never eaten more than one apple at a time.
And who's handing out all these apples anyway?
I guess my essay will have to wait until later.
Sparky wanted to be a cartoonist more than anything.
Just like Charlie Brown, he kept on trying.
And just like Charlie Brown, he kept on failing.
I would send in ten cartoons to The Saturday Evening Post.
While they were out, I'd be working on my comic strip.
And when I mailed in the comic strip, I'd be working on something else.
Sparky was able to get a few of his cartoons published,
but they didn't have Charlie Brown or Snoopy in them yet.
Now, you always think that the first sale you make
is gonna open up everything to you, but it doesn't work that way.
I sold two or three and then, suddenly, I couldn't sell any for months.
For five years, Sparky tried and failed.
And then he started to realize something.
He drew this comic strip called Li'l Folks,
which featured a character called Charlie Brown
and featured a dog that didn't quite look like Snoopy but was close enough.
I discovered, little by little, that when I drew little kids,
these seemed to be the type of cartoons that editors liked the best.
His work was finally starting to catch on.
And one day in 1950,
Sparky published his first Peanuts comic strip.
The first strip that ever appeared showed three characters.
One of them was a little girl named Patty, and another was a little boy named Shermy.
And Charlie Brown was in the strip, and he came walking by in front of them.
There he is. There goes Charlie Brown. "Good ol' Charlie Brown."
Then as soon as he's gone, he's like, "Boy, how I hate him."
Like, it's so--
That's harsh, right?
But that's childhood.
Kids are rough. It's like the way kids treat each other
is what sort of helps inform you to build up your armor.
And then you have to spend the rest of your life
remembering to take off the armor.
Before long, people all over America
were falling in love with good ol' Charlie Brown.
Here's a character I can relate to
who's clearly as nerdy or just as not accepted as I am,
or as I feel. That was a huge thing.
We would see Charlie Brown being bullied.
You'd root for Charlie Brown because he was so painfully human.
He keeps going even when it gets tough.
He gets right back up and tries again. So that's, like, really cool to me.
Sparky's dream was finally coming true,
and he did it by just being himself.
This whole business about Charlie Brown.
These are memories of my own miserable days.
I think Charlie Brown is just a little bit of what all of us have inside of us.
Mainly me. Mainly, I'm Charlie Brown.
Linus,
how am I supposed to come up with 500 words about myself?
There's nothing about me that's worth writing down.
This assignment is actually a great opportunity for you,
Charlie Brown.
An opportunity for what?
It's a chance to ask yourself some of life's most essential questions.
Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in the world?
Good grief. How am I supposed to figure out all of that?
Well, Charlie Brown, when I'm faced with difficult questions,
I look to the great minds of history.
The Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes once wrote,
"Tell me what company you keep, and I'll tell you what you are."
What company I keep? What does that mean?
It means you should look to your friends, Charlie Brown.
The people you spend your time with. Maybe they can help.
I don't know, Linus. It seems impossible.
Cheer up, Charlie Brown.
You have a whole week to find the answers to life's most fundamental questions.
Sparky always said he was a lot like Charlie Brown,
but there's actually a bit of Sparky in almost all the Peanuts characters.
He was exactly the person
you would hope the creator of Peanuts would be.
He is sort of all his characters in one person.
Linus is the philosophical part of Mr. Schulz.
You know, has the philosophy, has something to say.
He's quietly philosophical. That's kinda what Sparky was like.
Linus is always asking these bigger questions about
the meaning of life and our place in the universe and how it all fits together.
"Life is difficult, isn't it, Charlie Brown?"
I think I related to Linus because of-- Well, I had a security blanket.
I used to, like, also carry around a blue blanket,
so I just really relate to him.
I, too, had a blankie.
And I used to stand in front of the washer-dryer
at the Laundromat my mom went to,
crying on the wash cycle, and then crying on the dryer cycle.
And so everybody called me Linus.
Linus can be very smart. He can be dumb.
He can be innocent. He can be all-knowing.
The nature of his personality lends himself to all sorts of ideas.
Linus and Charlie Brown showed the sweet side of Sparky's personality.
Linus's big sister, Lucy, on the other hand...
Lucy's really mean.
"You're a very boring person, Charlie Brown."
And loud and kind of scary.
Lucy is funny, but she's really mean.
Most of us don't like Lucy 'cause she's so mean.
But at the same time,
she's so over-the-top mean that it's kinda funny.
Everybody knows what Lucy with the football means.
Charlie Brown's, like, running, and Lucy pulls away the football,
and he screams and he falls on his back.
Classic.
Which of the characters do I feel in closest sympathy with?
I like them all because each one is probably a little bit of myself.
The sarcastic part of me belongs to Lucy.
The wishy-washy part of me belongs to Charlie Brown.
And the dreamer belongs, of course, to Snoopy.
Snoopy.
While Charlie Brown and the other kids were a bit like Sparky himself,
the sky was the limit with Snoopy.
Snoopy was a dog who refused to be a dog,
and he was very aspirational, right?
Oh, my God. I love Snoopy. He's so cute and so funny.
Everyone loves Snoopy because he represented
what I think we all wanted to be.
You go, "Okay, today, I'm pretending I'm a World War flying ace.
Tomorrow, I'm pretending I'm a movie star." Whatever it is.
Snoopy kinda lives his own life and has all these fantasies.
But even Snoopy came from someplace in Sparky's life that was real.
Snoopy really is based upon a dog that I had
when I was about 13 years old.
There's a reason Snoopy played hockey and ice-skated, 'cause Schulz did as well.
So, like all the best creators,
there's a lot of himself in the work,
that you can kind of see in what the characters speak about
and the things they're also fans of.
I've gotta get a good grade on this essay.
Maybe I should talk to a professional.
Hi, Charlie Brown. What seems to be the problem today?
I'm having trouble writing my essay for class, Lucy.
Can you help?
Absolutely. I've actually thought a lot about you and your imperfections.
My imperfections? I'm not sure that is going to help with my--
Listen, Charlie Brown.
There's no better way to learn who you are
than to have your many faults pointed out by a professional.
My many faults?
Exactly.
And I've created a proprietary system that I think you'll find very enlightening.
Make yourself comfortable, Charlie Brown.
I've prepared a few hundred slides to illustrate your many flaws and foibles.
Lights, please.
Let's start with your early years.
As you can see, from the very beginning,
you were not well-liked.
Popularity eluded you.
You never really measured up to your peers.
See?
Now, pay attention.
If we dig deeper, we'll see that a pattern emerges,
a pattern of repeated failure.
Under your management,
your baseball team has lost every game you've ever played.
Well, we've won a few times.
Yes, but that was only when you broke your arm.
Continuing with the sports theme,
you've never managed to kick a football, ever.
See?
Even when you're not playing a team sport, you still fail.
You fail alone and with others.
Now, let's take a look at Valentine's Day.
Enough! I can't take it anymore.
I hope I helped with your essay! Expect an itemized bill in a few days!
Failure, failure, failure.
Sparky got most of his ideas for Charlie Brown from his own childhood.
But once he had kids of his own,
their childhoods started to make their way into Peanuts.
I think I probably get more ideas from watching my own kids
than I probably really would like to admit.
Just watching the little arguments that they go through and this sort of thing
has given me quite a few ideas.
The only stuff that really resonates in entertainment, I feel,
is when it's coming from a very singular point of view.
And the only point of view any creator has is his or her own point of view.
Even as a kid, I was, like, cognizant of the fact that
there is a man somewhere in America
who sits at a large slanted desk, and he's got a wife and kids.
And he gets up, he draws Snoopy, and then he goes ice-skating.
One of the boys was making model airplanes,
and he was showing me the latest model.
And all of a sudden, it occurred to me, why not put Snoopy on the doghouse
and let him pretend he's a World War I flying ace?
He was listening to Craig, his other son, one day,
and a young man walked by, and Craig said,
"That guy acts like Joe Cool."
Joe Cool started.
Everything in the comic strip had something personal to Sparky.
If he wrote about a symphony that Schroeder was playing,
that was a symphony that he loved.
He took a lot from his life.
You always wondered what he was observing if you were ever around him.
I remember I called him my sweet babboo. Pretty soon it was in the comic strip...
"And this is a very special one for my 'sweet babboo.'"
...and became something that Sally tormented Linus with.
"I'm not your sweet babboo."
"Pigpen." What does that phrase mean to you?
"Pigpen" came from a friend of mine who used to call his children by funny names.
And I can remember, his little boy was running around the living room,
and he says, "Go to bed, Pigpen."
And I thought that would make a good title for a comic character.
Here's this character who seems like he should be a laughingstock.
And occasionally other characters,
they come over to Pigpen and they say, "You should be ashamed of yourself."
"You know what he looks like?" "What?"
"A human soil bank."
And he'll have none of it. There's this dignity to Pigpen.
As a young transgendered kid,
I think maybe that's a thing that I was drawn to.
Lucy sure wasn't very helpful.
I think I need a second opinion.
Ninety-seven, 98, 99, 100.
My turn.
Pigpen!
You're making a mess.
Hi, Charlie Brown. Do you wanna help me make mud pies?
I don't think I can, Pigpen. I have to work on a school project.
Hey! Come jump rope with us!
Oh, no. That little red-haired girl is coming.
What's the matter, Charlie Brown?
-I can't let her see me. -Why not?
What if she doesn't like what she sees?
I think what's more important is how you see yourself.
I like myself no matter what people think.
Really? Even if they think you're... filthy?
Well, I don't see myself as filthy. I see myself as a part of history,
covered with the dust and dirt of countless ages.
Guess I just don't have your confidence, Pigpen.
I better go before the little red-haired girl sees me.
Poor Charlie Brown.
Just like Charlie Brown,
in real life, Sparky had his own little red-haired girl.
As a young man, Sparky met Donna Wold, the little red-headed girl,
and fell head over heels in love with her.
And Donna was engaged to marry a fireman,
and she wasn't sure about this fireman.
And she broke up with him, and she went out with Sparky.
I had the high hopes that she would marry me.
But she didn't.
I think that he thought, "Well, if I work hard enough,
if I'm this and I'm that and--
She'll forget the fireman and stick with me."
But, nope, she made up her mind and she married the fireman.
I gave her my complete devotion, my heart, and she walked away.
I didn't deal with it very well. I dreamed about it for years.
That was the woman he wanted to marry.
This story is so Charlie Brown.
Charlie Brown wasn't the only one in the Peanuts Gang
who was unlucky in love.
Peanuts, it's a world of unrequited love.
Lucy pines for Schroeder.
That always cracked me up, 'cause he was always like, "No."
Sally wants Linus.
At one point, Peppermint Patty actually sort of wants Charlie Brown.
So it's like this unbroken chain of these children
whose hearts are full of love, and the love is... almost never returned.
His constant quest for the little red-haired girl
was just such a-- so relatable to me,
because I always had some monster crush
on some girl in the school who I never had the nerve to even go near.
And there's a lot of like, "Today's gonna be the day when I'm gonna get in there
and I'm gonna finally talk to that little red-haired girl."
"Today's gonna be the day." And then it never ever comes.
You're so talented, Schroeder.
Do you think your music is the reason people like you?
That may be true, Charlie Brown, but it's sort of ironic,
since one of the things I like most about playing music is the solitude.
It's like your music represents who you are.
I wonder what music would represent who I am.
How's your essay coming along, Charlie Brown? Did my slideshow help?
Hi, Schroeder. Did you miss me?
Over the years, Peanuts grew and changed just like Sparky did.
And it wasn't always just about being funny.
My own children grew up, the strip became really less kid-oriented.
The strip has become more abstract,
and the kids are really just caricatures of what adults are
and the problems that adults have and the things that adults really say.
It's a cute little cartoon, funny characters, funny moments.
But it also is kind of deeper.
The characters are so complex, and they're talking about human feelings
and emotions, you know, the human condition.
I think he was one of the best when it came to capturing the mood.
He captured the mood of the country.
I feel like he always was searching for the truth and telling the truth.
Sparky wanted the world to be equal for everyone, and that's what his truth is.
In the late 1960s, Sparky created Peppermint Patty,
an independent girl living with a single parent,
who broke her school dress code by wearing sandals and shorts.
She was so different.
She was not the stereotypical female character
you would see on the comics page.
She's totally her own person.
She's just, like, so unique, and she's comfortable being unique
and in her own skin.
Peppermint Patty gets terrible grades.
She's always falling asleep in class.
But she's a great pitcher.
And she beats Chuck's baseball team every time.
Sometimes by, like, you know, 100-1.
Sports-loving Peppermint Patty
was partially inspired by Sparky's friend, Billie Jean King,
one of the greatest tennis players of all time.
You saw the women, the girls in sports,
which of course, as a girl, I'm like, "That's great."
Sparky was really a feminist.
In the world of Peanuts,
Sparky always made sure that the girls were just as strong,
and often even stronger than the boys.
The comic strips really have mirrored our culture.
And it just may be that Peppermint Patty does represent a new trend among kids
to be more independent and to speak out.
"Here I come, fella! Stop me if you can!"
Yeah!
Yes!
Good game, Chuck.
But you looked a little distracted up here.
I'm surprised your team's manager didn't pull you off the mound.
He is their manager, sir.
Are you okay, Charlie Brown?
It's this homework assignment.
I have to figure out the meaning of my life.
Boy, Chuck, that is a tall order.
I sure am glad our teacher didn't give us any homework.
We've had homework every day this week, sir.
The meaning of life is something people have always wondered about,
Charlie Brown.
My grandfather always said that our main purpose in life
is to give and receive love.
He also used to sigh a lot.
I don't know if anyone could ever love me.
I asked Lucy for help, but all she did was tell me what's wrong with me.
Is there anything right with me?
Absolutely, Chuck. You've got plenty of good qualities.
I do? Like what, for example?
Well, you're very kind.
And you're generous.
And don't forget helpful. You're super helpful, Chuck.
Wow. Kind, generous and helpful. Thanks, guys!
Hey, Lucy. Guess what?
You were wrong. I'm kind, generous and helpful.
Of course they would say that, Charlie Brown.
You're kind because your pitches were so easy to hit.
You were generous to give them so many runs.
And you helped them win the game.
You sound just like my grandfather, Charlie Brown.
Franklin Armstrong was one of the last major characters
to join the Peanuts Gang.
And when he arrived, he changed the comics forever.
I was in eighth grade when Franklin made an appearance in Peanuts.
And I remember thinking, "Wow." Here was a Black character.
Here was a Black kid.
Here I am reading this comic strip, and all of a sudden there's a kid in there
that looks like me.
It may not seem like a big deal today, but in 1968,
Black and white kids playing together in a comic strip was a huge deal.
When he brought Franklin into the strip, it was 1968,
and the cities were burning because of Dr. King being assassinated.
Dr. Martin Luther King,
the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement,
has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
And a woman contacted Sparky. Her name was Harriet Glickman.
She said, "It's time for you, with this platform you have, Mr. Schulz,
to do something."
She said, "I think you should add a Black child in Peanuts."
He's like, "I can't. I don't know what it's like to be a young Black child."
So Harriet Glickman asked her friends Kenneth Kelly and Monica Gunning,
who were Black, and also parents, to write to Schulz as well.
Back then, there were almost no people of color in the comics,
and Sparky realized what it might mean to all kids
if he could help change that.
He wanted to do something that had meaning,
that actually said something.
You got the sense from him he was a very fair-minded person.
And, I mean, racial inequality is not fairness.
I held off on Franklin for a long time
because I simply felt I wasn't capable of doing him properly.
And I didn't want to appear to be patronizing.
I tried to do it without fanfare.
The little incident when he did appear was two little boys meeting on a beach.
And they discovered they both liked to make sandcastles.
It doesn't matter that one is Black and one is white.
"Now, there you are, Charlie Brown.
There's a real sandcastle!"
You know, papers threatened to drop the strip.
And he was like, "Fine, drop it." And then they didn't.
And then they were like, "Well, just don't show them in school together."
And of course, then it's exactly what he did.
The interesting thing about Franklin was,
you don't remember his personality per se, as much as he seemed pretty serious.
He was a serious kid that you almost got the feeling, again,
looking back at it now as an adult,
you know, the burden, almost, of being this Black kid in a white world,
even though it was a comic strip world,
was weighing on him.
He knew that everybody was kind of looking at him.
Maybe that's my purpose in life: feeding a dog.
I guess I can't put it off any longer.
I better start writing.
Who am I? Who am I?
This is hopeless.
Maybe I should get some fresh air.
One of the biggest things to ever happen
to Charlie Brown and his friends was when they were first brought to life on TV
with A Charlie Brown Christmas.
My mother timed the purchase of our first color TV
so that I could watch the Christmas special in color.
That was a huge moment for me.
Every Christmas, we just all watch it together and drink hot cocoa,
and it's just really fun.
I personally don't celebrate Christmas. I'm a Jew. I hate Christmas.
It means nothing to me. Christmas means nothing to me.
But the Charlie Brown Christmas special... I mean, does it get better than that?
A Charlie Brown Christmas was a huge hit,
and soon there was a Peanuts special for almost every holiday.
I didn't have traditional holidays when I was a kid.
Like, I was probably traveling for work.
And so to me,
those specials were like the marker I didn't have in a traditional home of,
"It's this holiday. It's this time of year."
I remember the Halloween special ran,
the Great Pumpkin special,
and the ongoing joke, "What did you get?"
"I got an apple." "I got a candy bar." Charlie Brown...
I got a rock.
All right. Let's take it from the top again.
Five, four, three, two... All engines running.
The holiday specials helped make Peanuts so popular
that NASA named the Apollo 10 modules after Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
We are very flattered to be part of your whole program,
and extremely grateful.
I had no idea that all of these strange things were going to happen,
like Snoopy going to the moon.
Roger. We notice the resemblance there too.
Certainly one of the most moving experiences of my entire life.
You have to be such an iconic part of the culture
for them to name a lunar lander after you.
Do you know what I mean? Like, can you imagine being that famous?
Like, can you imagine? Like, that's crazy.
But while Charlie Brown and Snoopy were going to outer space,
Sparky was living a quiet life.
He built a world around himself
that was filled with the things he had loved since he was a kid,
like a skating rink,
and a baseball field.
He didn't work in a studio. It was a campus. It was Disneyesque.
This building was a café, this building had hockey.
I love my daily routine of getting up and going down to the ice arena
and having breakfast and going to the studio in the morning.
When it comes right down to it,
I'd rather sit and draw a funny picture than do anything else.
He'd get up in the morning, drive down the hill,
would park his car in the same place across the street.
He had breakfast at the ice arena.
An English muffin with grape jelly.
And then he went into his office, sat at his desk and worked.
He would literally go in his office and wait for the inspiration to hit.
I never saw him not working, really.
Whenever we visited, he was always in his studio.
That's what he did. He loved it.
That solitary part of his studio where he would sit and create.
It takes a certain solitary type of personality
that can handle hours alone in the room, hours alone in your head.
Even as successful as he was, I don't know that he got
the full depth of the love and devotion
people had to him and those characters.
Doesn't looking at all these stars make you feel sort of insignificant,
Charlie Brown?
I always feel insignificant, Linus.
How are you doing with the assignment?
I haven't written a single word.
Maybe I'm just a nobody.
I don't think you're a nobody, Charlie Brown.
Thanks, Linus.
But what am I supposed to do? My essay is due tomorrow.
Well, when I'm feeling overwhelmed,
sometimes I find the answers by staring at the sky.
It's not working, Linus.
What do you see?
A bunch of stars, I guess.
But what does that have to do with my assignment?
Well, in some ways, the stars are a lot like you.
If you look closely, you'll see that every star is different.
They each vary in color, size and how brightly they shine.
But it's those differences that create something beautiful.
Just like us, Charlie Brown.
Each of us is unique,
but we're part of something much greater than ourselves.
We each have a purpose,
even if it's hard to know for sure what it is.
And there's joy to be found in the journey of figuring it out each day.
Maybe for now, your purpose is just to be Charlie Brown.
Maybe you're right, Linus. Well, I better get to work.
I guess if there's hope for Charlie Brown, there's hope for all of us.
By 1980,
Sparky had been drawing Peanuts practically every day for 30 years.
That's over 10,000 strips.
And in all that time,
he never took a vacation or missed a single deadline.
You're like a squirrel running in a cage day in and day out.
No vacations.
A comic strip is a completely unique form of entertainment.
It lives with you day after day after day.
You gotta be a machine that way to write the same thing every day
without repeating yourself.
A lot of cartoonists would pencil the strip
and then have someone else ink it.
But he always insisted on inking it himself.
He had this matter of pride that no one ever touched the strip but him.
He did all the work himself.
In July of 1981, Sparky started having chest pains.
He was rushed to the hospital for surgery on his heart.
He was in the hospital.
He asked for a sheet of paper just to see if he could draw a character.
He wanted to do that immediately to make sure that he could still draw.
And he could, but it had changed.
His hand got shaky, and his lines got shaky.
And you can see in the later strips,
the edges of the lines are quite wiggly.
He would say, "Sometimes my hand shakes so much
that I have to hold it up to draw."
I remember watching him drawing, say, Charlie Brown,
which is a fairly large circle, the head.
And his hands would shake, and he'd get so angry.
But yet he said, "I can do rain." Like, little slashes and lines,
like rain or grass.
He just said, "This is what it looks like now. This is still authentically my work."
The shaky line becomes his signature move.
Like, that is amazing. That is amazing. It would've harmed a lot of careers.
But it took Peanuts to another level,
and actually made us feel more empathy for both him and his characters.
It tells you that he's willing to put himself out there.
He didn't stop. His ego didn't say,
"If I can't draw perfectly, I'm not doing that." No.
This was his being. This is how he communicated.
This is how he lived.
I like to think that I bring up some solutions now and then.
I suppose one of the solutions is, as Charlie Brown, just to keep on trying.
He never gives up. And if anybody should give up, he should.
Good morning, Charlie Brown. How did your essay writing go?
I was up all night, but I finished it.
-Maybe I'll even get an A. -That would be nice.
But life's rewards often manifest themselves
in unconventional ways.
I'm not sure what that means, Linus.
But if I get an A, that would certainly be unconventional.
Our essays have been graded. I wonder if I finally got an A.
I can't take the suspense.
C minus? Good grief.
I got an A.
The teacher complimented my penmanship and perfect margins.
I can't believe it, Linus. All that work for a C minus.
Cheer up, Charlie Brown. Grades aren't a measure of one's value.
Anyway, a true work of art can only be judged over time.
Well, I guess that's something to look forward to.
"Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, 'Why me?'
Then a voice answers, 'Nothing personal, your name just happened to come up.'"
Just a few weeks ago, Charles Schulz announced his retirement from drawing
the Peanuts comic strip in order to concentrate on treatment for colon cancer.
He was weak from chemo, and he decided he was going to retire.
I remember very clearly when he said, "I can't draw the strip anymore."
He came in one day, and we were talking about doing the last strip.
And he was sitting a few feet away from me,
and he just looked at me and he sort of laughed, and he said,
"I really drew some funny things."
And you could just feel how sad he was
that he knew he wasn't gonna be able to draw it anymore.
The last daily strip is going to be January 3rd,
the day this story is airing.
Has it completely sunk in that you're not gonna be doing this anymore?
It didn't really sink in until
I was writing a little kind of a "So long, friends" sort of thing.
And then right at the end, I wrote his name, my name.
And then it said--
And I'll probably start crying.
It said, well,
that was Charlie Brown, Linus and so-and-so.
And all of a sudden, I thought...
"You know, that poor, poor kid. He never even got to kick the football."
Sparky died on February 12th of the year 2000.
That very same day,
his final Peanuts comic strip was published.
The day he died
was the day the last strip ran.
I think it says something about how deeply connected his soul was
to the soul of these amazing characters that he came up with.
I mean, he was those characters.
It's amazing. He dies doing the thing he loves.
He was one person telling this really personal story every day.
And I think the fans, they got that. They felt that.
These funny, memorable, wondrous comic strips.
And that you can really just love and cherish
and take a lot of good life lessons from as well.
It's about humanity at its most tender.
It's about humanity and its silliness.
It's about humanity without cruelty.
And I think we need that in our world today.
We may not agree with each other.
We may be a fussbudget like Lucy.
We may be insecure like Charlie Brown.
We may think our philosophy's the most important, like Linus.
But the reality is, we're all in it together.
And the conversations those young children have
resonate with all of us to our soul.
Twenty years after Charles Schulz drew
his last Peanuts strip,
his work and the characters he created
are still being celebrated around the world.
Like Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn,
Peanuts is woven deep into the fabric of American pop culture.
What resonates still is the human emotion of it.
That's never gonna change.
It's iconic and it's timeless,
and that everybody around the world can identify with and love and cherish.
You know, my grandkids are gonna read Peanuts.
It's Charlie Brown.
Is there anything you'd like to say to the folks who have read Peanuts
for the last almost 50 years?
It is... amazing that they think that what I do was good.
I just did the best I could.
Where have you been, Chuck? Grab your skates.
Nice to see you, Charlie Brown.
Hurry up, Charlie Brown. Grab on.
There's nothing quite like the first snowfall of the year.