Citizen Sparky: American Masters’ Good Ol’ Charles Schulz

Citizen Sparky: American Masters’ Good Ol’ Charles Schulz

By Keith Uhlich on October 29, 2007 in Television Jump to Comments (0)

One of the most famous Peanuts comic strips finds crabby fussbudget Lucy ruining her kid brother Linus's first viewing of Citizen Kane by telling him, "Rosebud was his sled." Linus's response: "Auughh!" American Masters' new biography of Charles Schulz, the creator of the seminal comic strip, may inspire similar reactions among fans. Titled "Good Ol' Charles Schulz," the program doesn't completely "explain" its subject, just as Kane director Orson Welles didn't entirely explain his protagonist by revealing, in a climactic shot of belongings being tossed into an incinerator, that Rosebud was the name of Charles Foster Kane's boyhood plaything. But it does illuminate the cartoonist's psyche in ways that may make it impossible to revisit the adventures of good old Charlie Brown without flashing back to this documentary.

To read the Time Out New York review, click here.

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[Editor's Note: This is the original comments section for this entry, which did not transfer in the Blogger to WordPress import.] Craig said... So much to say--both good and ill--about Schulz and his creation, but I'm refraining from both that and the documentary until finished with Michaelis's new biography (about a quarter of the way through right now). 10/29/2007 9:09 AM Matt Zoller Seitz said... I'm reading the bio myself. Jesus, it's long! Good, though. If I finish it this week I'll post some comments here, or maybe in a self-contained piece. I'd love to hear your thoughts. 10/29/2007 5:59 PM Bruce Reid said... I can't decide if I'm disappointed with the American Masters installment or not, because I thought some very telling points were made, but mostly inadvertently. Such as the really embarrassing exclusion of cartooning as an art form. OK, Feiffer was brought on to make some brief pronouncements on Schulz's skill, and that pan down a busy crime-soaked comics page to find Linus contemplating a falling leaf was lovely, but there was virtually no examination of Schulz as a cartoonist, someone prodded or inspired or even pissed-off by the men before him who'd drawn lines on a page for daily gags; no portrait of the artist as a young man made anxious by Herriman's ebullient, inimitable scritches or determined to put Bushmiller's blankly cheerful Nancy in her place. (Just guessing on the examples.) Not even a mention of DeBeck's Barney Google which, you know, gave Schulz his nickname. It's as if everything under the sun influenced Schulz--Beethoven, marital strife, Citizen Kane--except other cartoonists. But in fairness, I think this neglect of cartooning is not only pretty standard, but was probably internalized by Schulz. All the descriptions of his dismissal of praise balanced by a fanatic need for approval strike me as the mark of someone who's certain he's at the top of his game, but isn't convinced it's one worth playing for a grown man. And really, for all the advance tumult raised by Schulz's offspring, what did we really get? A withdrawn but tender man who didn't care to be disturbed at his workbench, whose first marriage drifted apart and whose second, entered in his late middle age, found him unwilling to change his habits for the new bride? A cagey businessman who hated meeting with the suits? Christ, he could have done a lot worse. Are these details being highlighted because an unvarnished portrait is necessary, or because none of us likes to think so seemingly average and unassuming a man as Schulz could be a great artist? Michaelis's biography might do a splendid job stitching together these contradictions, but it'll have to wait. My can't-really-afford-it book purchases have mostly been devoted of late to Fantagraphics's Peanuts collection. (And, yes, Kirby's Fourth World, a glorious bullettrain of operatic, adolescent social commentary to balance out Schulz's delicate, meditative-beyond-their-years koans.) 10/30/2007 4:40 AM John w said... The "tears of a clown" approach felt easy and predictable, akin to a Barbara Walter's profile. I wish it had focused more on the work itself--would someone realize just how funny it was after seeing this? The film-makers seemed ill-equipped to deal with the specifics of his comedic voice. When American Masters looked at Bob Newhart, there wasn't any faux-intimacy, but you came away with a deeper appreciation of his work. Citzen Sparky failed in this regard.It seemed like an endless rewording of "Schulz was intimately familiar with sadness",which is self-evident in the strips. It did make me appreciate, however, that there was something about the integrity of his work that keeps the anti-commercial message of the Christmas Special from seeming hypocritical, despite it being a sponsored commercial property. 10/30/2007 5:13 AM
Posted by Keith Uhlich on 2010-06-06 01:31:56

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