FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
‘You’re short, bald and ugly, Charlie Brown’: Marvelously crude and nasty Peanuts remix
07.29.2016
11:48 am
Topics:
Tags:


 
We’ve all seen “Nietzsche Family Circus” and “Garfield Minus Garfield”—personally, I find “Shut Up, Garfield!” a more elegant and incisive take on the sad dementia of Jon Arbuckle. Not long ago we also had Danziggy.

Such rude interventions into the iconography of comics are nothing new; Robert Armstrong was messing around with “Mickey Rat” (a scurrilous take on Disney’s Mickey Mouse, natch) in 1971, and Mad Magazine’s Mickey Rodent popped up way back in 1955. Still, the joys of stumbling upon a new variation of Archie and Jughead as gay lovers or Nazi sympathizers (depending on one’s mood) never gets old.

I recently learned of a version of the culture-jamming approach used on Peanuts, the nearly universally beloved strip by Charles Schulz, with an unusually high pedigree. In 1993 a self-published mini-comic with a small run of 300 started making the rounds, with the title “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” in the familiar bubble letters similar to the ones Schulz used in many Sunday strips. The small volume was credited to “Dr. Casey ‘Sparky’ Finnegan,” which apparently is a reference to a Canadian children’s television series called Mr. Dressup (“Sparky” was the real life nickname of Charles Schulz). The volume was billed as a “A Roasted Peanuts Book.” At first glance, it was easy to take the strange strips inside for actual Peanuts strips, until one looked closer….. the dialogue didn’t match, indeed it was very rude in places.

“You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” has three sections, each the work of an individual detournist using a similar technique of replacing Schulz’s original dialogue. The first section simply places R-rated dialogue into the bubbles of Linus, Sally, Lucy, and the like, while the third section has Linus crushing hard on the kid with the big round head. The middle section, titled “Billiards,” takes a more original approach, turning a bunch of Charlie Brown/Linus panels into a kind of telenovela, perhaps, or a workaday translation of a finely wrought Argentinian novel, as in: “Juan, is your mother still playing herself silly with the billiards table that is in your family’s home?”

As Shaenon Garrity has pointed out, it’s the “Billiards” section that makes “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” worth the trouble.

More crudely modified ‘Peanuts’ after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
07.29.2016
11:48 am
|