Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the gang kicked off a new series of short animated adventures this week as Charles Schulz’s Peanuts became the first fully animated series to join Warner Premiere’s Motion Comics digital content brand. For a limited time, fans can download the first two episodes for free on the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com). In these shorts, Linus runs for class president with Charlie Brown as his running mate. Despite being far ahead in the polls, Linus and Charlie eventually ruin their chances of winning by referencing The Great Pumpkin during a final speech.
The initial episodes of the Peanuts Motion Comics are based on comic strips drawn by Schulz in 1964. Three to four minutes in length, they each offer all-new flash animation created by Studio B in Canada and jazz tracks by Randall Crissman.
‘Our Motion Comics lineup continues to expand with the addition of the highly entertaining Peanuts series to our slate,’ says Diane Nelson, president of Warner Premiere. ‘We’re proud to be the Studio selected by the Schulz family to take these classic strips and create all-new content for the next generation of Peanuts fans.’
During a recent interview with NPR, Craig Schulz, son of Charles Schulz, had this to say about the decision to go back to the ’60s for the new series of Peanuts shorts: ‘We picked the year ’64 because we thought it was a strong year. The characters were different then, they were a little edgier. It was a different time in the world, basically, so my dad had kind of an edgier strip then. Lucy was much edgier back then. If you go really back to the late ’50s/early ’60s, she was much more aggressive and had a tendency toward violence’punched a lot of people. They would shoot each other with cap guns all the time’they all carried guns [and] there was a reference to nuclear war at one point.’ Listen to the full interview here: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96536461
