On October 2, 1950, the Peanuts comic strip first appeared in the newspaper.  Mind you, it was only seven newspapers, but it wasn't long before it was everywhere.  Peanuts was more than a comic strip.  It became a franchise.  It is estimated that Charles Shultz earned over a billion dollars from his creation.   At Peanuts’ peak, Shultz was earning 40 to 50 million dollars a year from the neurotic Charley Brown, his smart-ass dog, and all those other kids who really weren’t very nice... hardly ever. 

There were a total of 17,897 cartoon strips over the 50 year run.  That’s a lot of ink.  There are at least 26 hardcover volumes of Peanuts cartoons and more than 50 animated specials, all of which are, at best, OK.  But we watched them all because we were kids and they were cartoons.  In reality, there are probably way more than that.  You can always tell something was huge when you can’t count all of its parts.  There was a Saturday morning cartoon show that aired from 1983 to 1985 – The Charley Brown and Snoopy Show.  There were the full-length movies.  And, of course, all the merchandise – the T-shirts and lunch boxes and Valentines and hemorrhoid creams and... well, you get the idea.

The final Peanuts strip was on February 13, 2000. The following night Charles Schultz died of a heart attack.  And so it goes.  No new strips will ever be drawn, but there will be more TV specials based on older stuff.  Charley Brown will live for ever.  His depression will never end.

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