Old ‘Nuts In The Naked Bathroom
Posted on | April 10, 2008 at 9:48 pm | 5 Comments
There’s one thing that’s always bothered me about the Peanuts comic strip, as exemplified by this one from yesterday (click to enlarge):
The only times you ever see Schroeder in the strip, he’s either 1) playing his piano or 2) the catcher on Charlie Brown’s baseball team. Which of these is not like the other? Music geeks are not sports fanatics. Or at least, if they are, they’re fans and statisticians, not necessarily players. (I’m looking at you, baseball/music nerds, many of whom seem to be blogging friends of mine.) And, as this strip shows, he’s pretty knowledgeable about the game. He seems to know more than the manager/pitcher of the team. At least he knows how to read the batters. This dichotomy blows my mind – it’s like he’s two different characters. I want to see some scenes linking these two sides of the dude. At least show him away from his piano sometime, maybe watching TV and eating a sandwich. Or taking Lucy out for a night on the town to the local Classical Music Club.
I kid, but these reprints of classic Peanuts strips remind me of how funny and how revolutionary the strip used to be. The really good strips were from even before my time. I remember going over to my grandparents’ house for holidays and other visits during the late 60s and early 70s. They had two bathrooms. Well, one bathroom and one additional toilet/shower. The extra toilet and freestanding shower were in the largely unfinished basement of the house, which I remember as being huge and which was mostly taken up by the laundry area and my grandfather’s humongous workbench. He was a very crafty, handy guy like my dad and unlike me. But near the bottom of the stairs and around the corner was that toilet, sitting on the bare concrete floor. There was no door or anything. Basically, this was where you went if the upstairs bathroom was being used and you really had to go and you didn’t much care about privacy. But the cool thing about that toilet was that my grandfather always had a stack of paperbacks of old Peanuts strips sitting on the back of it. I used to go down there and use that toilet even when I didn’t have to, just so I could sit there in the dim light and the cold dankness and read those paperbacks. I almost couldn’t believe it was the same strip I had been reading in the paper.
Once the focus shifted to Snoopy, I think it lost a lot of its charm and humor. And don’t even get me started on Woodstock. Or on the waning years of the strip, when it had just become weird and non sequitur and pretty much lost all humor. I hope the syndicate continues to reprint the older strips and forgets about the more contemporary ones. Or maybe I should just start buying The Complete Peanuts.
I’m still waiting for “No matter how hard you try, you just can’t throw a potato chip”. The first time I read that one, I laughed so hard I almost plotzed. Oh wait… I did plotz.
Latre.
Comments
5 Responses to “Old ‘Nuts In The Naked Bathroom”
April 11th, 2008 @ 6:02 am
> I almost couldn’t believe it was the
> same strip I had been reading in the paper.
> Once the focus shifted to Snoopy, I
> think it lost a lot of its charm and humor.
Yeah, I also have trouble wrapping my mind around the idea of something that starts out good and then goes downhill over the next few decades…
As for Schroder, we don’t know if he’s a big fan of either music OR baseball – at about that age, I was being forced into both by well-meaning parental guidance… and today I have essentially no time for either.
April 11th, 2008 @ 11:49 am
As for Schroder, we don’t know if he’s a big fan of either music OR baseball – at about that age, I was being forced into both by well-meaning parental guidance… and today I have essentially no time for either.
Well, seeing as how Schroeder’s whole (non-baseball) shtick is that he sits at the piano all day playing Beethoven and telling Lucy how great Beethoven is, I’d say he’s a big fan of music and is not being forced to take piano lessons by his parents. Get with the program, InfK.
April 11th, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
Same for me, when I was a little kid, my parents bought some Peanuts books (and I mean like I was just learning how to read). I don’t remember how old we were, but my sister and I did a lip sync version of the “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown” record my parents bought for us and we weren’t embarrassed to do it in front of people (that’s how young we were). (BTW, I still have that LP, of course in really bad shape, of the off-Broadway musical whose entire musical accompaniment was a piano and starred the guy who played Radar in MASH as Charlie Brown). And I’m about 10 years older than Flashe.
I do remember just how bizarre those early strips were, like Lucy’s Psychiatry stand and her treatment to cure your cold by making you lie on the pavement and cough while she stamped out the germs you coughed out. Weird stuff for little kids. Schultz at one time must have been a pretty odd fellow.
April 12th, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
I’d just worry about Schroeder’s fingers getting mashed by a flaming fastball.
Oh wait – he’s catching for Charlie Brown. No worry.
April 13th, 2008 @ 6:35 pm
There are always exceptions. I, like Schroeder, am a classical pianist but in my youth I was also quite good at figure skating.
And I agree that Schroeder was not forced into music by an adult. Only those who are not wired to be musicians have to be forced into it, and they tend to be able to play the notes but not really make music.