Is it plausible that neither Hammie nor Mama Blues knows who the Great Pumpkin is?
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She doesn’t need to be ignorant of The Great Pumpkin for the strip to make sense. She’s just minding her own business when her husband runs in and yells that the kids don’t know about the great pumpkin. “The what?” makes sense as either “I’m not sure I heard you properly” or “I’m going to need context, because you aren’t making sense.” (Or maybe he’s so frantic that he’s not speaking clearly and she honestly didn’t hear him.)
Okay, Christine, I can see that.
Actually possible. I figure post-Schulz kids are broadly aware of “Peanuts”, but not of such details. It’s distressing when our touchstones are just rocks to younger folk, but it happens.
The CGI “Peanuts” movie appeared to be predicated on the idea the characters needed to be re-introduced to most viewers. The makers “explained” Snoopy’s WWI fantasy as a novel he was writing. For decades we geezers understood that Snoopy would simply decide to live some fancy (Joe Cool, a Beagle Scout, commander of a Foreign Legion troop, “The World Famous” anything, and even other animals) with varying degrees of comprehension and/or patience from his human friends. The movie even messed with Charlie Brown’s character, making him merely well-intentioned and unlucky.
Over at Greenbriar Picture Shows there was some discussion of how the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, idolized by 60s and 70s youth, are no longer universally familiar. Some years ago I had an under-30 coworker who had no idea who W.C. Fields was. Granted, he was emigrated to America as a kid, but he already had a staggering mental library of American baseball past and present.
Yes, I remember when everybody liked W.C. Fields — but I did not! I thought all his characters were sort of vile, and his famous delivery was just creepy.
A nerdy intense guy in his late 30s or early 40s married to a practical and prosaic woman in her late 20s to early 30s. It could happen but is pretty unlikely.
Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields movies were often seen on TV in the 1960’s, and that’s how we geezers know about them. And of course the Three Stooges. Less so the Ritz Brothers and even less so Wheeler and Woolsey, so they are obscure. Now with everything available on demand, I don’t know what makes old movie actors known to people.
And another step down beyond Wheeler and Woolsey would be Stoopnagle and Budd. (I don’t think they ever made any movies, though, and only a few of their radio appearances apparently are extant, but I just like writing “Stoopnagle and Budd.”)
And I picked up a dvd of a Wheeler and Woolsey movie earlier this month at a library sale. Don’t know if I’ll ever get around to watching it, though, since I’ve got a few hundred unwatched dvds and several thousand unread books clamoring ahead of it.
WW, I actually have NO idea what I was saying there. Maybe that I knew what the Great Pumpkin was but didn’t know what the joke was supposed to be?
I don’t think they’ve shown It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on TV for ages, so Hammy not getting it is totally believable. Not sure how old the parents are supposed to be, but it’s possible for them to be young enough never to have seen it, too, given their oldest is still in Kindergarten, IIRC. (Been a long time since I’ve read Baby Blues with any regularity.)
Obviously, the dad did see it, of course, but perhaps by parents/older siblings showing him it on tape/DVD (is it available on DVD?), as part of making sure to expose him to Culture!…or because they want to keep him quiet.
The Great Pumpkin special is on every year here in the NY area (it was just on tonight!).
Most of the seminal animated Christmas specials are on DVD; I would guess many are streaming as well. At one time there were a couple of sets that, between them, encompassed nearly all the Rankin-Bass product AND Magoo’s Christmas Carol AND the original Grinch. The Peanuts specials were released with one or two on a disc, and later in sets covering specific decades. Lately I’ve seen various specials reissued individually.
Many are still broadcast, but it’s no longer the big deal it was. What with modern commercials and editing for length (or adding “bonus feature” stuff to allow an hour’s worth of commercial sales), I’d suspect most fans would opt for disc or stream.
For real vintage holiday viewing:
ONE HOUR IN WONDERLAND — A 1950 TV special included as an extra on several disc releases of the animated “Alice in Wonderland”. Uncle Walt and Edgar Bergen host a studio party for young folk and conjure assorted animated items, including a goodly chunk of “Song of the South”. Firehouse Five Plus Two do a number. The film portions are B&W; the animated portions are full color. Very much a template for Disney’s weekly show.
RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA — The live 50s version starring Julie Andrews. Technically a little primitive, but wittier and more charming that either of the remakes. Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley are the stepsisters.
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG — Big overstuffed holiday movie from when everybody was trying to top “Mary Poppins” and “Sound of Music”. Surprisingly entertaining.
BABES IN TOYLAND — The Disney version. Not really a good movie, but absolutely screams vintage Disney-ness in its music, set design, gags, and casting. Makes a nice video background for addressing cards or whatever.
The character changes that MinorAnnoyance mentioned bothered me, too, but the main thing that I didn’t like about the 3D “Peanuts Movie” was the way they homogenized all the kids into a single school, all in the same class. It’s understandable that they couldn’t portray 50 years of comic strip development in a 90- minute movie, but the streamlined structure was too simplistic for my taste. That said, my kids quite enjoyed it (not having had the chance to read decades of archived strips).
The character changes in The Peanuts Movie weren’t all that different from changes made in all of the animated Peanuts specials. Methinks Schulz (and Mendelson and Melendez) realized that the kind of pathos that plays fine in a daily comic is too depressing in a longer narrative. Those require a clearer, more hopeful resolution than even the extended story arcs in the comic strip received. And that means Charlie Brown is more of a protagonist and hero in the specials and films.
And that goes right back to the first special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Now, that said, I also thought it was lame that they put all the kids in the same grade and school. It shook me out of the narrative.
Bill: You explain in the comments of that old post that you knew who the Great Pumpkin was, and weren’t quite sure even then how you ended up posting it. I meant that whoever sent that comic in was presumably unfamiliar with the Great Pumpkin.
I’d sent it in as an (unbelievable, to me) GEEZER ALERT . . . questioning the validity of same.
Andréa: I was referring to the CIDU post that I linked to earlier in this thread. I assume you didn’t send that one in, since it’s from 2007.
Got it . . . it gets confusing in here . . .
Yes, but I still have no idea what I was talking about.
Actually watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and “You’re (not) elected, Charlie Brown” last night on ABC. I forgot how much implied “I’m gonna clobber you” type of bullying was part of the humor from the 60’s. Linus’ infatuation with the Great Pumpkin got him ridiculed in both shows, almost a metaphor for sharing alternate personal religious beliefs.
The peanuts strip consolidated the characters to a single classroom. Charlie Brown was classmates at times with Violet and other times Lucy and at other times with Linus and Linus was at times classmates with Sally. However Franklin, Marcy and Peppermint Patty always went to a school in another district.
Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd were in the movie “International House”, as were also W.C. Fields, Burns and Allen, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway (doing “Reefer Man”, the most famous clip from the movie), Baby Rose Marie, and others.
Thanks for the Stoopnagle and Budd tip to Mark in Boston. I think I actually saw INTERNATIONAL HOUSE once, but it would have been forty or fifty years ago, so I guess that factoid went down the memory hole.
Woozy: I don’t recall ever seeing Lucy and Charlie Brown in the same class. Nor Linus and Sally. Schulz did eventually put Linus and Charlie Brown in the same classroom, which clearly wasn’t the case during the time Linus was infatuated with Miss Othmar, so there’s that, I guess.
Honestly, though, I might have been okay with just about any combination of kids that didn’t show either the Browns or Van Pelts in the same class.
I’m fairly sure Linus and Sally were in the same class (at least some of the time). Sally would talk to the teacher about her “sweet baboo” and Linus’s voice would come from the back saying, “I’m not her sweet baboo”.
Arthur, yes, I did transitivity.
Any way, Charlie Brown and Schroeder are frequently in the same class although Schroeder was a baby when introduced, Lucy was distinctly younger than Charlie Brown at first and Linus is her baby brother. So we have at least *5* distinct generations:Charlie Brown and Violet and Shermie and that ilk, then Lucy and Schroeder; then Linus; then Sally; and finally Rerun and co. Now Rerun never joined ages but Shroeder, Lucy, Linus, and Sally certainly did. Violets been in classes with Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown with Schroeder and Lucy and Linus (I’m not sure I could name a strip with Charlie Brown and Lucy but I’m certain I’m not imagining it) and Linus has been in the same classroom with Sally.
With all that laxity, I was always surprised that Peppermint Patty in another school district was always consistent.
In the TV specials they were always in the same classroom.
Schroeder could play the (toy) piano before he could talk. Charlie Brown tried sitting him on the bench of a real piano but he just cried, so Charlie Brown put him back at the toy piano and he was happy again.
Those are pretty much definitive, at least between 1964 and 1983. There a a bunch more with Linus and Charlie Brown in the same class (and see below), and of course tons with Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Franklin et al (Roy); there are a few solos of Lucy, and tons of Sally solos.
Here are some that show that Linus and Sally are NOT in the same class, nor are Charlie Brown and Linus…
He was always good about keeping Peppermint Patty’s school separate, though there were at least two legitimate cross-overs:
First, Lucy and Charlie Brown, finally:
Then, after I said he was good about keeping the two schools separate, eg:
…He goes and screws it up putting Eudora being a year behind Peppermint Patty (she flunked),
…even though Eudora was introduced as being in Sally’s class:
So with that link, you can now transitively associate everyone into the same class…
(Well, not really, since Peppermint Patty is back a year with Eudora, so you can’t really hook Marcie et al in, but they are now in the same school at least…)
I’ve worked my way up to the end of the 4 panel dailies in 1988; I guess I should also work back from 1964 — it seems to me he didn’t start playing loose with their ages until the late 60’s / early 70s, before that he seemed to be more conscious of the age differences — but I should see if that’s true…
Maybe the parents of some of these kids keep moving around town and wind up in different school districts long enough for a joke or two, then decide they don’t like the new house and district and move back to the old one? Or the school board is in political turmoil, and every time a new bunch gets in, they redraw the school district lines? (This would also explain why Shermy and the original Patty and Frieda some minor characters like Charlene Brown seemed to drop out of sight after a while.)
There actually was a sequence where the Van Pelts moved to a different town, but the parents changed their minds and moved back after a few weeks. And of course the family of the Little Red-Haired Girl moved far away. So clearly there was some tradition of mobility, right?
I hope the ghost of Mr. Schultz appreciates the pretzels I’m turning myself into here trying to come up with a cover story for him. . .
@ Shrug – The ghost of Mr. Schulz is too busy defending his name from interpolated T’s to be worried about moot points of retroactive continuity. ;-)
@Kilby: Pointt ttaken.
Might as well post the earlier ones I found for completeness sake — there really weren’t many school sequences pre ’65…
In strip two, is that an early version of Violet?
I wonder… did boys REALLY dunk girls’ pigtails in inkwells, or was that just a cliche that happened maybe one or twice in history?
And it seems to me they’d have to have been damn long pigtails, unless first the boy used the pigtail to yank the girl’s head back enough to cause serious whiplash>
It seems to be Violet’s early design, but Violet had settled into her final design with the high bun instead of the low pigtails, before this (she actually appears with it in the strip 2 before that).
Along with Walter Morris – Great Pumpkin is on NY every year and was recently on.
Marx Brothers, WC, and even the Ritz Brothers are on Turner movies so they are available to see. Robert’s niece’s (age 16) favorite to watch is anything with Lucille Ball in it – she loved “I Love Lucy” and then we bought her DVDs of some of the movies.
I love “International House”.. It amazed me that Rose Marie used to be Baby Rose Marie when I was a kid and saw it.
As I understand it Charlie is suppose to be in a grade a year higher than he should be as Charles Schultz was.
Bill – I don’t know how common it was, but as for the pigtail length, if you never cut your hair (which was the case for girls back when that was (allegedly) a thing, by the time you’re in school (and they would have been starting school at 6 or 7 back then) they can easily be waist-length. When you think about the desk/chair combinations being placed such that the desk (with the inkwell at the top corner) is right against the chair back in front of it, it wouldn’t be that hard to make them reach.
Mine would’ve been long enough, but we had ballpoint pens by then, thankfully.
There was a boy in my second grade class who sat behind me – he had been left back so he was not that smart, but larger than the rest of us. Back then I did not wear jeans (ever – they did not make them for fat little girls) and wore dresses to school which had sashes around the waist. He would untie the sash and retie around my seat without my (or the teacher) noticing. I would go to stand up and the chair would start to come along and I would fall back into the seat. But no inkwells for my long braids or pony tail depending on the time it took to wake me enough to get me dressed and out the door – cold Pop Tart in my hand for breakfast. (I did not like them heated.)
Comics I Don't Understand 
She doesn’t need to be ignorant of The Great Pumpkin for the strip to make sense. She’s just minding her own business when her husband runs in and yells that the kids don’t know about the great pumpkin. “The what?” makes sense as either “I’m not sure I heard you properly” or “I’m going to need context, because you aren’t making sense.” (Or maybe he’s so frantic that he’s not speaking clearly and she honestly didn’t hear him.)
Okay, Christine, I can see that.
Actually possible. I figure post-Schulz kids are broadly aware of “Peanuts”, but not of such details. It’s distressing when our touchstones are just rocks to younger folk, but it happens.
The CGI “Peanuts” movie appeared to be predicated on the idea the characters needed to be re-introduced to most viewers. The makers “explained” Snoopy’s WWI fantasy as a novel he was writing. For decades we geezers understood that Snoopy would simply decide to live some fancy (Joe Cool, a Beagle Scout, commander of a Foreign Legion troop, “The World Famous” anything, and even other animals) with varying degrees of comprehension and/or patience from his human friends. The movie even messed with Charlie Brown’s character, making him merely well-intentioned and unlucky.
Over at Greenbriar Picture Shows there was some discussion of how the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, idolized by 60s and 70s youth, are no longer universally familiar. Some years ago I had an under-30 coworker who had no idea who W.C. Fields was. Granted, he was emigrated to America as a kid, but he already had a staggering mental library of American baseball past and present.
Yes, I remember when everybody liked W.C. Fields — but I did not! I thought all his characters were sort of vile, and his famous delivery was just creepy.
I sent this – http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/181026.html – to a friend in England, who is over 60 years old, thinking she’d find it amusing. She’d NO IDEA that he’d written books!
I doubt that my kids know who the Great Pumpkin is.
At least one CIDU contributor presumably didn’t know either: https://cidutest.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/pearls-before-pumpkins/#comments
A nerdy intense guy in his late 30s or early 40s married to a practical and prosaic woman in her late 20s to early 30s. It could happen but is pretty unlikely.
Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields movies were often seen on TV in the 1960’s, and that’s how we geezers know about them. And of course the Three Stooges. Less so the Ritz Brothers and even less so Wheeler and Woolsey, so they are obscure. Now with everything available on demand, I don’t know what makes old movie actors known to people.
And another step down beyond Wheeler and Woolsey would be Stoopnagle and Budd. (I don’t think they ever made any movies, though, and only a few of their radio appearances apparently are extant, but I just like writing “Stoopnagle and Budd.”)
And I picked up a dvd of a Wheeler and Woolsey movie earlier this month at a library sale. Don’t know if I’ll ever get around to watching it, though, since I’ve got a few hundred unwatched dvds and several thousand unread books clamoring ahead of it.
WW, I actually have NO idea what I was saying there. Maybe that I knew what the Great Pumpkin was but didn’t know what the joke was supposed to be?
I don’t think they’ve shown It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on TV for ages, so Hammy not getting it is totally believable. Not sure how old the parents are supposed to be, but it’s possible for them to be young enough never to have seen it, too, given their oldest is still in Kindergarten, IIRC. (Been a long time since I’ve read Baby Blues with any regularity.)
Obviously, the dad did see it, of course, but perhaps by parents/older siblings showing him it on tape/DVD (is it available on DVD?), as part of making sure to expose him to Culture!…or because they want to keep him quiet.
The Great Pumpkin special is on every year here in the NY area (it was just on tonight!).
Most of the seminal animated Christmas specials are on DVD; I would guess many are streaming as well. At one time there were a couple of sets that, between them, encompassed nearly all the Rankin-Bass product AND Magoo’s Christmas Carol AND the original Grinch. The Peanuts specials were released with one or two on a disc, and later in sets covering specific decades. Lately I’ve seen various specials reissued individually.
Many are still broadcast, but it’s no longer the big deal it was. What with modern commercials and editing for length (or adding “bonus feature” stuff to allow an hour’s worth of commercial sales), I’d suspect most fans would opt for disc or stream.
For real vintage holiday viewing:
ONE HOUR IN WONDERLAND — A 1950 TV special included as an extra on several disc releases of the animated “Alice in Wonderland”. Uncle Walt and Edgar Bergen host a studio party for young folk and conjure assorted animated items, including a goodly chunk of “Song of the South”. Firehouse Five Plus Two do a number. The film portions are B&W; the animated portions are full color. Very much a template for Disney’s weekly show.
RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CINDERELLA — The live 50s version starring Julie Andrews. Technically a little primitive, but wittier and more charming that either of the remakes. Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostley are the stepsisters.
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG — Big overstuffed holiday movie from when everybody was trying to top “Mary Poppins” and “Sound of Music”. Surprisingly entertaining.
BABES IN TOYLAND — The Disney version. Not really a good movie, but absolutely screams vintage Disney-ness in its music, set design, gags, and casting. Makes a nice video background for addressing cards or whatever.
The character changes that MinorAnnoyance mentioned bothered me, too, but the main thing that I didn’t like about the 3D “Peanuts Movie” was the way they homogenized all the kids into a single school, all in the same class. It’s understandable that they couldn’t portray 50 years of comic strip development in a 90- minute movie, but the streamlined structure was too simplistic for my taste. That said, my kids quite enjoyed it (not having had the chance to read decades of archived strips).
The character changes in The Peanuts Movie weren’t all that different from changes made in all of the animated Peanuts specials. Methinks Schulz (and Mendelson and Melendez) realized that the kind of pathos that plays fine in a daily comic is too depressing in a longer narrative. Those require a clearer, more hopeful resolution than even the extended story arcs in the comic strip received. And that means Charlie Brown is more of a protagonist and hero in the specials and films.
And that goes right back to the first special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Now, that said, I also thought it was lame that they put all the kids in the same grade and school. It shook me out of the narrative.
Bill: You explain in the comments of that old post that you knew who the Great Pumpkin was, and weren’t quite sure even then how you ended up posting it. I meant that whoever sent that comic in was presumably unfamiliar with the Great Pumpkin.
I’d sent it in as an (unbelievable, to me) GEEZER ALERT . . . questioning the validity of same.
Andréa: I was referring to the CIDU post that I linked to earlier in this thread. I assume you didn’t send that one in, since it’s from 2007.
Got it . . . it gets confusing in here . . .
Yes, but I still have no idea what I was talking about.
Actually watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and “You’re (not) elected, Charlie Brown” last night on ABC. I forgot how much implied “I’m gonna clobber you” type of bullying was part of the humor from the 60’s. Linus’ infatuation with the Great Pumpkin got him ridiculed in both shows, almost a metaphor for sharing alternate personal religious beliefs.
The peanuts strip consolidated the characters to a single classroom. Charlie Brown was classmates at times with Violet and other times Lucy and at other times with Linus and Linus was at times classmates with Sally. However Franklin, Marcy and Peppermint Patty always went to a school in another district.
Colonel Stoopnagle and Budd were in the movie “International House”, as were also W.C. Fields, Burns and Allen, Rudy Vallee, Cab Calloway (doing “Reefer Man”, the most famous clip from the movie), Baby Rose Marie, and others.
Thanks for the Stoopnagle and Budd tip to Mark in Boston. I think I actually saw INTERNATIONAL HOUSE once, but it would have been forty or fifty years ago, so I guess that factoid went down the memory hole.
Woozy: I don’t recall ever seeing Lucy and Charlie Brown in the same class. Nor Linus and Sally. Schulz did eventually put Linus and Charlie Brown in the same classroom, which clearly wasn’t the case during the time Linus was infatuated with Miss Othmar, so there’s that, I guess.
Honestly, though, I might have been okay with just about any combination of kids that didn’t show either the Browns or Van Pelts in the same class.
And then there’s the Greyt Pumpkin (not an original funny comment, but I had to pass it along) . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2018/10/28
I’m fairly sure Linus and Sally were in the same class (at least some of the time). Sally would talk to the teacher about her “sweet baboo” and Linus’s voice would come from the back saying, “I’m not her sweet baboo”.
Arthur, yes, I did transitivity.
Any way, Charlie Brown and Schroeder are frequently in the same class although Schroeder was a baby when introduced, Lucy was distinctly younger than Charlie Brown at first and Linus is her baby brother. So we have at least *5* distinct generations:Charlie Brown and Violet and Shermie and that ilk, then Lucy and Schroeder; then Linus; then Sally; and finally Rerun and co. Now Rerun never joined ages but Shroeder, Lucy, Linus, and Sally certainly did. Violets been in classes with Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown with Schroeder and Lucy and Linus (I’m not sure I could name a strip with Charlie Brown and Lucy but I’m certain I’m not imagining it) and Linus has been in the same classroom with Sally.
With all that laxity, I was always surprised that Peppermint Patty in another school district was always consistent.
In the TV specials they were always in the same classroom.
Schroeder could play the (toy) piano before he could talk. Charlie Brown tried sitting him on the bench of a real piano but he just cried, so Charlie Brown put him back at the toy piano and he was happy again.
Well, SOMEone believes that EVERYone knows the Peanuts characters . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2018/10/29
larK, good detective work.
Those are pretty much definitive, at least between 1964 and 1983. There a a bunch more with Linus and Charlie Brown in the same class (and see below), and of course tons with Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Franklin et al (Roy); there are a few solos of Lucy, and tons of Sally solos.
Here are some that show that Linus and Sally are NOT in the same class, nor are Charlie Brown and Linus…
He was always good about keeping Peppermint Patty’s school separate, though there were at least two legitimate cross-overs:
First, Lucy and Charlie Brown, finally:
Then, after I said he was good about keeping the two schools separate, eg:
…He goes and screws it up putting Eudora being a year behind Peppermint Patty (she flunked),
…even though Eudora was introduced as being in Sally’s class:
So with that link, you can now transitively associate everyone into the same class…
(Well, not really, since Peppermint Patty is back a year with Eudora, so you can’t really hook Marcie et al in, but they are now in the same school at least…)
I’ve worked my way up to the end of the 4 panel dailies in 1988; I guess I should also work back from 1964 — it seems to me he didn’t start playing loose with their ages until the late 60’s / early 70s, before that he seemed to be more conscious of the age differences — but I should see if that’s true…
Another take . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/theargylesweater/2018/10/30
Maybe the parents of some of these kids keep moving around town and wind up in different school districts long enough for a joke or two, then decide they don’t like the new house and district and move back to the old one? Or the school board is in political turmoil, and every time a new bunch gets in, they redraw the school district lines? (This would also explain why Shermy and the original Patty and Frieda some minor characters like Charlene Brown seemed to drop out of sight after a while.)
There actually was a sequence where the Van Pelts moved to a different town, but the parents changed their minds and moved back after a few weeks. And of course the family of the Little Red-Haired Girl moved far away. So clearly there was some tradition of mobility, right?
I hope the ghost of Mr. Schultz appreciates the pretzels I’m turning myself into here trying to come up with a cover story for him. . .
@ Shrug – The ghost of Mr. Schulz is too busy defending his name from interpolated T’s to be worried about moot points of retroactive continuity. ;-)
@Kilby: Pointt ttaken.
Might as well post the earlier ones I found for completeness sake — there really weren’t many school sequences pre ’65…
In strip two, is that an early version of Violet?
I wonder… did boys REALLY dunk girls’ pigtails in inkwells, or was that just a cliche that happened maybe one or twice in history?
And it seems to me they’d have to have been damn long pigtails, unless first the boy used the pigtail to yank the girl’s head back enough to cause serious whiplash>
It seems to be Violet’s early design, but Violet had settled into her final design with the high bun instead of the low pigtails, before this (she actually appears with it in the strip 2 before that).
Along with Walter Morris – Great Pumpkin is on NY every year and was recently on.
Marx Brothers, WC, and even the Ritz Brothers are on Turner movies so they are available to see. Robert’s niece’s (age 16) favorite to watch is anything with Lucille Ball in it – she loved “I Love Lucy” and then we bought her DVDs of some of the movies.
I love “International House”.. It amazed me that Rose Marie used to be Baby Rose Marie when I was a kid and saw it.
As I understand it Charlie is suppose to be in a grade a year higher than he should be as Charles Schultz was.
Bill – I don’t know how common it was, but as for the pigtail length, if you never cut your hair (which was the case for girls back when that was (allegedly) a thing, by the time you’re in school (and they would have been starting school at 6 or 7 back then) they can easily be waist-length. When you think about the desk/chair combinations being placed such that the desk (with the inkwell at the top corner) is right against the chair back in front of it, it wouldn’t be that hard to make them reach.
Mine would’ve been long enough, but we had ballpoint pens by then, thankfully.
https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/mothergooseandgrimm/s-2139479
There was a boy in my second grade class who sat behind me – he had been left back so he was not that smart, but larger than the rest of us. Back then I did not wear jeans (ever – they did not make them for fat little girls) and wore dresses to school which had sashes around the waist. He would untie the sash and retie around my seat without my (or the teacher) noticing. I would go to stand up and the chair would start to come along and I would fall back into the seat. But no inkwells for my long braids or pony tail depending on the time it took to wake me enough to get me dressed and out the door – cold Pop Tart in my hand for breakfast. (I did not like them heated.)