A Charlie Brown Christmas
premiered in 1965, when I was only about two and a half years old, well before
I could even formulate any firm memories. Before I could read any comics I
would scan the paperback collections, trying to glean their meanings by the
actions and obvious emotions delineated by Charles Schulz’s pen. I knew from
the specials that came every year that this was something I wanted to be a part
of. I wished that the paper we took featured Peanuts, but it didn’t. We had
some Peanuts toys, but they looked like this:
or this:Their playability was
not high, but we did the best we could with what we had.
“I think it would be
difficult to explain to the present generation just how popular Peanuts was.
Schulz and the strip have been gone for years now, except for re-runs run in
newspapers and the yearly TV specials, media which nowhere have the same impact
they once did. But at the time I began reading Peanuts it was
at its greatest popularity. My brothers and I pored over volumes of
collected Peanuts long before we could read and wondered what
they said, often making up stories of what we thought was going on. It was a
great impetus to us to apply ourselves in school, to learn to read so we could
read Peanuts.” – Power of Babel.
Memory Lane began producing accurately
sculpted action figures for Peanuts in 2004, specifically focusing on A
Charlie Brown Christmas ‘singing’ group.
My purchases petered out after the
2009 – 2010 Halloween season when they made figures dressed as monsters and
ghosts, iterations that Schulz himself had never designed. I used to buy my
figures when I ducked into CVS on my way to work at Whataburger. For all I
know, Memory Lane might still be putting out Peanuts toys.
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