Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - Celebrating "A Charlie Brown's Christmas"

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

To celebrate the 55th anniversary of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," Gilbert and Frank welcome writer-producer Craig Schulz ("The Peanuts Movie") and archivist and author Chip Kidd ("Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz") for a look back at one of the most beloved and innovative television specials ever produced and the enduring genius of the man behind it. Also, Snoopy crushes on Peggy Fleming, Linus makes prime time history, Barney Google inspires a lifelong nickname and Craig introduces his father's work to a new generation. PLUS: Joe Shlabotnik! "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"! The brilliance of Vince Guaraldi! The artistry of Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson! And the panelists reveal their favorite "Peanuts" strips of all time! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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TD Insurance advisor to learn more. Hi, this is Gilbert Gottfried, and this is Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. And I'm here with my co-host, Frank Santopadre. And 70 years ago, a shy cartoonist from Minnesota began publishing a daily comic strip featuring characters named Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, and Schroeder, among others, which he would go on to write and draw for 50 years, publishing over 17,000 daily strips

and making it arguably the longest story ever told by one human being. And 55 years ago this week, a primetime TV special based on those characters premiered on CBS, a show that's aired every year since and been seen by hundreds and millions of viewers all over the world. That TV special was a Charlie Brown Christmas, and we're here to pay tribute to it, as well as the beloved strip and its legendary creator with our two experts. Craig Schultz is the son of Peanuts creator, Charles Schultz, as well as president of Creative Associates,

the company that oversees all Peanuts content. He's also the co-producer and co-writer, along with his son, Brian, of 2015's critically acclaimed The Peanuts Movie, as well as the screenwriter for Peanuts shows that will air in 2021 on Apple TV+. Chip Kidd is an award-winning designer, editor, pop culture historian, and self-described Peanuts nerd, as well as the author of numerous essential books, Peanuts, The Art of Charles M. Schultz,

Only What's Necessary, Charles Schultz and the Art of Peanuts, and the newly released book, The Peanuts Poster Collection. Frank and I are excited to welcome to the show for our second holiday episode of 2020, Craig Schultz and Chip Kidd. Gentlemen, welcome. Hi there. Hi there. Gentlemen, welcome. Hi there. Hi there. Chip, welcome back. Craig, welcome for the first time.

Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Well, I think that totally sums it up. What else is there to say? He's glad to be here. He came bearing a gag. How long have you been hanging on to that one, Greg? A couple years. That's so funny

how peanuts those cartoons have influenced us that you just have to make that sound effect and everybody knows. Yeah, worldwide. Every kid knows that when they listen to their school teacher since since you did that craig when was that decision ultimately made was that dad's decision no that was done in melendez he was done basically in 1967 at a show called

you're in love charlie brown where uh the kids had to talk and listen to the teacher. And they had Vince Giraldi, who was, you know, doing all the scores for those shows, and he broke his trombone out and just started going wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, and literally created the language. You know, and in the movie, we ended up getting Trombone Shorty out of Louisiana to come out. And we practiced with him for about a couple of days to get him done, to be able to convey language through the trombone, which was really interesting prospect. And he was super excited to do that.

And it came out really well. Yeah. It was fun to see that again in the Peanuts movie. I had forgotten it. And tell us about the music and the music everybody remembers. Well, the music's classic. I mean, sadly, you know, from the, you know, we'll stick the music's classic i mean sadly you know from the you know we'll stick with charlie brown christmas for now you know it it was done with vince gerald and uh this is the story goes that you know lee mendelsohn was listening to uh vince

gerald in the monterey concert and he was playing cast your fate to the wind which is similar to uh the song that became linus and lucy and as soon as he heard that he called my dad up he said i got the soundtrack for the charlie brown christmas and no one even considered doing jazz at that point you know the studio didn't they never did like it but you know lee heard that soundtrack and just immediately connected it with the peanuts characters and the feeling for the show. And they got Vince on board and, you know, sadly Vince died in 76 at a concert. Yeah, young man. Story goes that Vince was playing a concert, went back to the hotel room

to take a break, and he just dropped dead in the hotel room. Never got to go back and do the second set. Wow. A great talent. Chip, you know, we'll talk about the genesis of the show, and we'll talk more about Vince Giraldi. Chip, do you have a vivid memory of seeing a Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time? I know you're a guy with a good memory. Oh, I mean— Good recollection of your childhood. You know, absolutely.

Just in retrospect, just the whole story of how it got made and just like what Craig just said, like, that's amazing. I never knew that wah, wah, wah, wah, wah was Vince Giraldi on a trombone. That's fantastic. That's so cool. I remember, like, the silence at the end was just so unlike anything that I had experienced, like, with Bugs Bunny. And certainly, or certainly, like, Batman. Like, the use of silence in that show was really remarkable. And the fact that there wasn't a laugh track was so important. And these are things that I recognize in retrospect. You know, I think as a four or five-year-old, you're just sort of mesmerized by the story and what you're seeing, but there's just so many aspects of that show that were just so groundbreaking, and all sorts of things that we kind of take for granted now.

But these were all the things that scared CBS to death, I think. Yeah. Well, Craig, the laugh track was never really on the table. I mean, I assume it was summarily dismissed. Well, yeah, my dad laid down the ground rules for the movies, and he wasn't going to give up on it. But I guess, I mean, I think the one piece of trivia I bet none of you know, that this show would have never happened had it not been for an automobile. Do any of you realize that? The Ford Falcon. That's it.

The Ford Falcon. That's it. This show never would have occurred. And the story goes, obviously, that CBS executives saw the Ford Falcon commercial and went to Lee and said, hey, is there any thought of you guys ever making a Christmas special? And Lee said, well, certainly. So then Lee calls my dad up the next day and says uh guess what I did

I just sold to Charlie Brown Christmas and my dad goes what's that yeah he goes that's the show you're gonna write this weekend and uh they pounded the show out in no time you know and got it made and six months yeah six, six months. Unheard of. It's amazing. And what does the title Peanuts mean? Oh, that's a sensitive area. Yeah. A title he hated.

That might be another show. That's a whole other show there. My dad hated that name. And again, that got ran by the executives in New York. When he sold the strip after, you know, running around the country for years, he sold it to the United future syndicate.

And, and they didn't like little folks because little folks was what he wanted to name it. And that was used by another cartoonist. So they ran it by a room full of people in their, in their offices. And somebody came up with the idea of peanuts and they loved it and ran it by my dad.

And my dad hated it ever since. And the thing you'll notice when you read the comic strip, you go back through enough of it, it starts off with Peanuts. And midway through the early years, it says Peanuts featuring good old Charlie Brown. Well, my dad always wanted to name the strip after a little act called Good Old Charlie Brown. So he kind of thought if he put it in there long enough, they could concede and sort of flip it over and rename the strip Good Old Charlie Brown. But, you know, obviously that never happened. It never worked. So Pete, the Peanuts title was like an albatross around his neck for 50 years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is he never, ever owned those characters. You know,

a lot of people would assume because these days everybody owns their artwork, you know, for as long as he did the comic strip, he never, ever owned the rights to those characters. Oh, and tell us how your father got the title, or the name, rather, of Charlie Brown. Well, Charlie Brown was a friend of his that he had met, and he had used the name Charlie Brown in earlier comic strips he had done. And then when he finally got Peanuts and sold Peanuts,

you know, he went to him and probably said, hey, would you mind if I use your name in this new comic strip I'm doing? And Charlie Brown agreed to it. And, you know, he had to live with a legacy of being Charlie, the real Charlie Brown for the rest of his life. But my dad, most of the characters in the comic strip are named after friends of my dad from the early years. A lot of them were from the art instruction school he worked at. And a lot of them I've known through the years. So, you know, it was interesting how he'd find somebody and either like their name or put them in the comic strip because they were friends of his. You know, I did a lot of reading up, Craig, as I do, and saw an interview with you.

And you said that all of the characters in the strip represented a side of him in some way, which I found fascinating. No, I think absolutely. And I, you know, now that I look back after he's gone and I revisit him and so forth, I think, you know, he really had two families. He had his original family with me, my brother, my sisters, and so forth. And he had the family of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and all those other characters. And looking back, and I realized, you know, what could be a better job for 50 years

than get to go to a studio and play with this cast of characters that you love, and you actually love them probably more than your real family. And every day you get to go play with these cast of characters, and you see how they interact with each other, you know, the relationships, the love,

the disappointment, and so forth. But that's what drove him back to the con to the table every day was it was a joy of being able to play with this cast of characters you know how many of us are that lucky to be able to do something like that very few and and your father's once said in an interview happiness is not funny yeah yeah and probably you gilbert more than anyone knows it in every cart every uh stand-up comic comedian i know really has to have some kind of a dark side in their life one way or another there's very few stand-up comics i mean it comes out of a of a joyful everything rosy kind of world you know you need something to trigger you and for my dad it was really,

you know, his childhood growing up, you know, they made him skip a grade in school and he became the youngest kid in his class and got bullied and picked on. And then in his teenage years, you know, he was heading off to World War II and his mom died. And his mom said, you know, the day before he left, I guess we'll never see each other again. And he got on the train and went off to World War II. And that event stuck with him emotionally for the rest of his life, dealing with the loss of his mother. And I think those losses are really what triggered the emotions and peanuts throughout the 50-year run. And then, like, Charlie Brown was kind of always a loser and depressed character,

he seemed like. Yeah, we always say that really i mean actually all the characters were a piece of my dad but for most part charlie brown was probably 90 of my dad yeah and 10 was snoopy the fantasies and the joy and be able to go in all these different places that he never really got to do but uh that's what he really was hoping to be. He hoped to be Snoopy, but unfortunately he was stuck being Charlie Brown. And why did Snoopy sleep on the roof of his doghouse? Kind of an impossibility when you think about that. That little angle is pretty sharp up there. I think he started off drawing him as a normal dog,

and then Snoopy kind of, once Snoopy stood up on his hind legs pretty sharp up there. I think he, you know, he started off drawing him as a normal dog. And then Snoopy kind of, once Snoopy stood up on his hind legs and evolved that, you know, the whole world just opened up to my dad. And he saw that happen right in front of his eyes. Cause in the beginning, he was just a basically little dog, like every other little dog. And then he stood up and then he started having the thought balloons. And then, you know, in the early sixties, all of a sudden, you know, my dad got the idea of him taking on the Red Baron and become a pilot. And from there, it was just endless. The world opened up, and his creativity just flowed.

Chip, talk about something and how you're affected by it as a self-described Peanuts nerd, something Craig just talked about or that Gilbert alluded to. Some people say that the strip was a study in disappointment. The great pumpkin never comes. Every baseball game is a loss. All the love affairs or the would-be love affairs are unrequited in the strip. Charlie never gets to kick the football. It seems like that's part of its success.

That's part of the beauty of it. It seems like that's part of its success. That's part of the beauty of it. Well, absolutely. Because we can, no matter who we are, we can all relate to that. There was always somebody in your life that you loved that didn't love you back. There was always that thing you were trying to do that you, I mean, that you just couldn't do, but you really wanted to. And, but I remember as a kid, like I just, I hated being in the little league. Just, it was just awful, but I had to do it because my brother did it and my best friend was doing it. And I remember stepping up there.

It was literally like, you know, uh, the ninth inning and the bases were loaded. And then I, at age eight, was like stepped up to the plate to try and like hit everybody home. And I struck out. And with that is Charlie Brown. That is what we all relate to. But he has such a great heart. And that's what makes it work. Like, it's he's a good person. And that just, that saves it.

And most of the other kids are too. Lucy, she sort of like comes and goes in that department. But at their core, they're good people. But at their core, they're good people. And so, but they go through all of this stuff that we all go through in our lives. And that's what helped make it so endearing and work. And that's just the content. But the form of it is so great. The way it looks and the way he distills human emotion in such a simple, simple way. And yet, and yet those emotions are so direct, whether they're like joyful or, or sad or disappointed or,

you know, courageous. I'm going off on a tangent here, yes, you're not going to have a story if everything is perfect it's like what Craig just said about stand-up comedians they're not going to have a career unless there's a problem we know the best humor and the best comedy comes from adversity or pain Well, yeah, so we know the best humor and the best comedy comes from adversity. Yeah. Or pain. And Charles Schultz said that he's very weary about being happy or saying that he's happy in some interview.

Saying that if he says I'm happy, then that means something bad will happen. So, fair to say he had a complicated relationship with happiness, Greg? Yes. I would think so. But don't we all? Don't we all? Don't we all?

It's like, I'm afraid to say things are going well because I'll jinx it. Yeah. He was never one to kind of, you know, roll with his celebrity and never felt like he was celebrity. You know, it was really, really interesting to see because he would go to the ice room every day, sit down, have the same breakfast every day and so forth. And people would come up and talk to him. And invariably, whether it was, you know, whoever's being interviewed by, he would spend more time

interviewing the interviewer than it would be the other way around because he was always fascinated about people's lives. And it was very genuine. It wasn't like just kind of a phony, oh, what do you do? I work for CBS, whatever sort of thing. I mean, he genuinely wanted to know. He wanted to delve into people. He was what I call a true humanist. He wanted to know what was behind the background of all these people.

And that's what I think he was. He studied human nature continuously, whether it was through religion or just people's basic jobs and ethos. It was, it was very interesting. Yeah. And a very learned guy. I mean, a guy who, who, who read quite a lot and put that into the strips. I found it interesting doing, doing the research that when he would draw, uh, when he would draw the, the would draw the Beethoven notes, that he made certain that everything was accurate. Yeah, absolutely. Which is fascinating.

He made certain that he was never going to offend any other profession. So he typically, he would be reading four books at one time all the time. at one time all the time. But when it came to doing something on the comic strip, whether it was something with ophthalmology or science, he would dig the books out and dig them incessantly to make sure that the words were correct, the fitting was correct, the use was correct. And again, the music notes is a classic example

that all that music could be played by a pianist. We did that at the museum one time. We had someone come in and we had a classic piano and then they actually played the panels out of the comic strip. Oh, that's cool. And it was all by hand. Yeah. All done by hand.

Yeah, and never with any help. No. Just him. Just him. Yeah, he wanted to be a Disney animator. Didn't last very long, yeah. He actually applied at Disney. They turned him down, which was sort of interesting.

Best thing that ever happened to him. Yeah. Gilbert, you relate to this thing that we're talking about a few minutes ago, this sort of not trusting prosperity and not trusting happiness. I mean, that's something that drives you and drives your humor as well. I've known you a very long time. So, you know, I think this is something you connect to emotionally. Yeah. It's, it's just like, I feel like when I'm having, if I ever am walking down the street and saying, oh, gee, I'm starting to feel good. Then I'll go, uh-oh, I'll remember everything bad

that's happening in my life. I think that's one of the great things about the strip is that it recognized that neurotic nature in all of us. You know, that he put that on the page. Actually, I remember the first time as a child I ever encountered the word neurotic was Lucy. She was listening to, I think, Georgie Porgie Puddin' and Pie Kiss the Girls and Made Them Cry. And the punchline in the last panel was, wow, what a neurotic he must have been. And I would have been like in second grade. And I remember I took the book to my mom and I said, what does neurotic mean? And she's like, I don't know. Why don't you look it up? That's great. I learned so much from the strip too. I think that was a sample of his attention to detail because one of his close attorney's friends who just passed on last week used to give a talk.

And I always use the example of Charlie Brown was doing something, and I think the punchline was something like, yeah, he really had to suffer. And he always went in and says, you know, you could use any other word and it wouldn't be the same thing as using the word suffer. You know, that word is so powerful. And, you know, my dad would take the time to finish those strips off. And when he would do strips, it wasn't like he was doing them linearly where he'd sit down and draw a strip from beginning to end. He would start on a strip and he might get halfway through it, stick it aside for a while until the word came. And when the right word came or the right language came, then he would go back to that strip.

So he always had numerous strips going at any given time. It just says he read books, the same thing. It wasn't just linear, crank them out one, you know, like you would think like a production run, like, you know, Lucy on the conveyor belt with chocolates. It's not quite that easy. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast after this. Baseball is finally back.

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Your father, they used to call him Sparky. Yeah, named after Sparkplug. He was named very early from an uncle after the horse Sparkplug in the early comic strips. Meant to be a cartoonist in the way. Yeah, Barney Google. Barney Google, yeah. Seems like fate.

Before I forget, now that makes me remember, Barney Google, the comic strip, they made a song out of it. And it was, Barney Google with the googly eyes. Barney Google had a wife three times his size. Barney Google's stuff. His wife sued him for divorce. Now he's living with his horse. Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes.

Somebody watched too much television. Yes. WPIX in New York growing up. You know, I'm watching the Christmas special talking about neuroses, Craig and Chip, and, you know, and the examined life. Clearly he was a man interested in psychiatry, psychology. I'm watching the Charlie Brown special and, you know, I've seen it so many times, it's hard to see it with fresh eyes. But you realize five minutes into this thing that she's in the psychiatric booth, and she's running down a list of his potential phobias. I mean, this is like no other children's Christmas special you can imagine. In 1964. I mean, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think that's what he did his genius was really looking at something that you and i would look at straight on and he would go around the corner take a view of the same thing and be able to twist it into something very interesting you know that whole psychiatric booth playing you know played off the obviously the children's lemonade stands and he thought wouldn't be funny rather than a lemonade stand that this little kid does a psychiatric booth and the same thing that happened with um pumpkin you know good um your great pumpkin charlie brown you know he kept thinking wouldn't it be funny if a kid got the holidays confused and thought that halloween was the same as christmas that someone's going to bring all the presents to us on halloween it was a simple idea like that a lot of people have taken, you know, the Halloween special and turned it into some kind of analogy about the return of Jesus and these religious overtones to it.

But most of the ideas were kind of a very simple twist on what one person would look at and he would look at it from a different angle. And I think it's funny getting back to happiness and something bad. I think in one comic strip, he said, Charlie Brown says something that he's feeling happy today and then he falls off his chair. I was reading an interview. I watched that wonderful Dick Cavett interview. I sent it to you, Chip. Yes.

Too. And it was fascinating that these characters, the daily grind of that strip, where Cavett said, how often are you thinking about these things? How much time do you spend thinking about these things? He didn't really have the luxury of not thinking about those characters. Yeah. He said, they're in my mind 24-7 because the immense pressure, I don't think any of us can imagine it, of having to produce something original every day, five days a week.

For 50 years. For 50 years. Non-stop. And as I started to say before, without help, without input, Craig, he wasn't one to take ideas, was he? Suggestions. You know, when you look back on that, again, 50 years of nonstop comic strips, again, people don't realize, too, is that every time you take a vacation, every time you go to see a Giants game, every time you do something, you're going backwards.

You know, he would typically stay about four or five weeks out with the dailies and maybe a month or so out, you know, with a Sunday strip. But again, you go on a two-week vacation and now you're behind the thing. And he considered himself, you know, the utmost professional. He was never going to be late to deliver a strip to the syndicate. So, you know, you hear the term, you know, writer's block and so forth. He never believed in writer's block, but the advantage for him was that he had a full keyboard. You know, it's like 88 keys on there. He could pick from any number of characters to create stories.

And again, most of his life, he spent observing people. So he always had a notepad in the car. He always had a notepad by his bed. And whenever he would see somebody do something stupid or whatever, invariably it would create a strip. You know, if he went to see a tennis player or whatever, you know, any kind of sporting event, ideas would pop up. He just had a way of doing that. What a fascinating way to go through life. Early on, when he was like a struggling artist, he would go to a bunch of places each day.

He would set out to show his work and he was getting constant rejection. But he said that he just never let it get him down. Yeah, I think he had great faith in his ability. And he knew eventually he would sell that comic strip. But he struggled. People don't realize how much he did struggle in the early years. Gilbert, you know, he went out there, he sold single panels to the Post, and he would send these things in to all the magazines.

And he was typically sending out three or four things every single day. He would just produce, produce, produce, send them out, send them out, send them out. And then he, to me, I can't even fathom him getting on a train because after knowing him, getting on a train in Minnesota, ride the train to New York or Chicago, go up to his offices to try to sell the comic strip. You know, in the end, he was so much of a homebody, didn't like to travel and so forth. And it's, I just, it's incomprehensible to me that he would actually, I've seen him trying to do that. I can't, I can't imagine him doing that because it was such a struggle. And then when he did sell the strip, you know, it only went in seven newspapers.

It took five or six years to even take off. So he was lucky. It could have failed. Chip, in your books, you know, you're not only tracking the development of the strip, but you're tracking the development of the man, but you're, you're tracking the, the, the development of the man and, and, and, and his, his psychology and his, you can see his confidence growing as an artist through, through the course of, in both books, in both of your art of, of Charles M. Schultz books, you really get a sense that, of a guy coming into his own over time.

Uh, absolutely. I think, um, developing as an illustrator, too. Developing his hand. In both books, I was granted access. And by the way, thank you, Craig, and thanks to all of you at Peanuts for letting me see and chronicle all this stuff. But in both books, see and chronicle all this stuff. But in both books, I was granted access to sketchbooks that he kept when he was in the Army and in World War II. And there were two main ones. So in the one book, I focused on the one Army sketchbook, which he titled

As We Were, or As We Were. And then there was another one. As We Were was really about his boot camp experience. And then the other one was You're In Germany.

And they're very good and they're very interesting, but they're not, he, he, some, when he left the army and went into art instruction ink, then he turned a corner artistically and that were sort of behaving like adults. And he loved to play bridge. So these little kids were playing bridge in Lil Folks. And it's just so kind of remarkable, you know, what five-year-old plays bridge. But there they are. And so he turned a corner from the army sketchbooks to little folks,

and then from little folks then to Peanuts. And then it really grows throughout the 50s. I mean, he was quoted as saying, like, I think, and Craig, you can correct me, but like the 50s for him was a real sort of period of experimentation. And I think he would have rather that people sort of ignored that once he got into the 1960s. And the strip really, really then came into its own and really changed. And Snoopy wasn't just a little puppy anymore. He was walking upright and had thoughts and all this. But it's just so fascinating to see it. It is.

To see the whole thing evolve and to see him evolve. And you see those strips in the early 60s. You really see him coming into his own. You really see the comedic voice start to develop. And as I said, the confidence of the artist, everything kind of coalesces. Yeah, and things go from a three-quarter perspective then to strictly two-dimensional, which was so powerful and so simple. But yeah, there's all different kinds of ways of looking at it.

And Frank and I have discussed on the show a couple of times the death of movie theaters. That seems like a thing of the past, the movie theater. And are comic strips gone? Are they dead now? Well, we're certainly endangered. You mean in a newspaper? Yeah.

Yeah, I think he means, yeah, daily strips. Yeah, I think the industry has changed tremendously. You know what? It's hard to believe, but in the early 1920s, one of the famous cartoonists, he was making like a million dollars a year doing the cartoons. So when my dad started,

the newspapers had four or five people running around the country all the time selling news, telling his comic strip to each of these newspapers. He was, the comic strip sold the newspapers. It was a very, very big thing. You know, and now obviously you can get them online and so forth,

but they sort of disappeared because it's almost like, you almost like kids don't read anymore. And that was one of the things that drove us to create the Peanuts movie was trying to have something that would drive kids back to the comic strip. And we considered the movie basically the rock in the pond. And the ripple effect was going to be that would drive people back to read those comic strips and stuff. One kind of funny story I'd like to bring up is, you know, when you're talking about a classic Charlie Brown moment, my dad used to drive a lot of the neighborhood kids

to our local school. And this was in the early 60s. So one day, one of his friends, who was one of the teachers at school, said, you know, Sparky, why don't you come in and like give a talk to the kids at the school? So he'd been as generous with his time as he was. He goes to school and gets up on the chalkboard

and does his whole talk on peanuts and draws some characters. And at the end of it, he asks, does anyone have any questions? And one little girl raises her hand and says, can you draw Mickey Mouse? Did he oblige her? Yeah, he actually could drum and it's funny because it's funny thinking back on that was yeah i mean obviously i watched him draw the comics of my whole life but he was on a we were on a raft trip one time he's going down the colorado river doing research for one of the tv specials and in the evening he would sit down he would sketch the area he was at

and i remember he brought the he'd draw the pictures back they did sketch and i look at him and i was like i mean i was like blown away going, wow, you can actually draw. I mean, it was, my daughter's a fine artist. I was, I mean, just literally I was blown away thinking he can actually draw. Uh, cause he used to see in the characters. And now as I get older, I can appreciate, and I, and I studied the line work more than I ever did in the past. You know, now I, I see these, he's come up and I just, I literally look at the lines and study them and see how he drew these things and what an immense talent he was just in the art of drawing them. You know, I mean, the strip itself was unique in the fact that between the drawings and the text and the context and the emotion, but the artwork

is an example that should be studied in any college art class because it truly is a study in abstract art. Chip's books open up a good window into that. You really do see some of his illustrations, his non-Peanuts illustrations. Yeah. Serious illustrations. I mean, portraits too. Yes. And when he would occasionally go on like a vacation to Europe and, you know, try to draw a landscape in the south of France or what have you. And yeah, he was great. He was really good at it. Let's circle back to the Christmas special since it is Christmas.

Gilbert, I know you're interested in this. And we talked about this on the phone. Gilbert, I know you're interested in this, and we talked about this on the phone, and that was the groundbreaking decision to have Linus read a biblical passage. Yes. Which, among other things, about that special, is so innovative, is so, for the time, bold. I think it would be bold now. Yes think it would be bold now. Yes, it would be bold now. 55 years later.

Well, yeah, there are many things that are bold in that show. Obviously, the soundtrack, the lack of laugh track, and then the quoting from the Bible at the end. Or the decision to have children perform the voices. Yeah. Which was not being done at the time. That was unheard of at the time. It was interesting,

just they had to do it so quickly. I remember Bill Melendez telling me these stories because Bill was somebody, if you ever never met Bill, he was one of those few people that you would never ever forget. I mean, I was a kid. I was 13 years old.

But I've never forgot my early days with Bill. He was tremendous. But he tells a story about, you know, they finish the animation up, they did the run through of the show, and Bill leans over to his staff and says, we've killed peanuts. And one of the animators in the background was leaning back after drinking a couple drinks and he yells out, this show will play for

50 years. So they, so they, they run it by the Coca-Cola executives and the executive looks at the thing. It was a week before airtime. They already had the, they already had the time slot booked. He says, you know,

the snow is too slow. I don't like the music. I like this, but you know, we're locked in. We're going to have to, we're going to have to show this thing, even though I hate it,

we're going to have to show it. So they'd run the show on the air because the 48 share back when they only had three channels, but basically half the country was watching Charlie Brown Christmas. The exec calls Lee up. He says, I want you to know my wife hated it too. Chip, talk about how also how controversial it was. and again, I'll use the word bold, to even make a kids special about the commercialism of Christmas. It's amazing. There's just so many things that are so amazing. We take it for granted now. We take it for granted now. Nobody had really articulated that in pop culture before. No, no.

culture before. And of course, it's the fact that Snoopy's completely sold out to win the decoration contest, and Charlie Brown's heart is in the right place. But I remember watching Charlie Brown going in to get the Christmas tree, and there's all these aluminum trees, and he bangs on them, and they make metal noise. And I'm like, what is that? Like, I didn't even know what that was as a kid. Like, that's so strange. I had an aluminum Christmas tree, so I related to that. We had a silver aluminum Christmas tree basically made out of the stuff that tinsel is made out of and a color wheel, a plastic color wheel with a bulb behind it. Classic. So when I remember seeing that scene

as a kid and it resonating. And I remember like when I was a kid, there was that cartoon or called Davy and Goliath. Oh my God, yes. Oh yeah. Now Davey and Goliath would have him lost in a park or whatever, and then they'd always get to that part, well, you know, God always knows where you are, Davey. And that part would always make me really uncomfortable. Yes. And yet, in the Charlie Brown Christmas special, it works. Oh, it's done.

It's done so artfully. Yeah. Because it's so, it's so different. It's, it's, it's, it's like poetry as a, as opposed to, you know, be careful because God's watching all the time. It's like, no. And, and low unto the shepherds. And it's just, it's so, it's so under the time. It's like, no. And lo unto the shepherds. And it's just...

It's so underplayed so beautifully as opposed to sermonizing. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, Craig, as the story goes, Melendez, possibly Lee Mendelson as well, who we should mention, pushed back a little bit on the idea.

And the legend of it is, and I hope it's true, that your father said what? He says, well, if we don't do it, who will? And that dealt with the line from the Bible. Yeah. So, yeah, he was doing that. And I remember, I think Lee was the one that pushed back on it. My dad had the idea of putting rocks in the bag during the pumpkin show.

He said, let's put a rock in the bag. And Bill goes, well, maybe we'll put one in there. My dad's, no, no, let's put one. Every time he gets something, we'll put a rock in the bag. Brilliant. Yeah, so they had, in 50 years of putting shows on, really, Lee and my dad had almost zero fights. Oh, it's a nice story, too.

The story of the collaboration of these three men over time. Amazing. Well, that goes back to showing the loyalty my dad had almost zero fights. Oh, it's a nice story, too. The story of the collaboration of these three men over time. Amazing. Well, that goes back to showing the loyalty my dad has. I mean, he's stuck with the same people for years and years and years, as long as he could. He wasn't one to experiment and change talent unless he absolutely had to. I mean, for example, after the loss of Giraldi, then he had to bring in new people to the scores.

But, you know, there are some trivia points to the Christmas special that I'm sure Chip probably knows about, but I don't know if you guys do. In the original Christmas special, when you see Linus slide across the ice in the opening sequence and slams into the snow, something is now cut out of that show. Do you have any idea what that is? Oh, it's a Coca-Cola thing. Coca-Cola was at the end of the show. In the ending credits, too, there was Coca-Cola mentioned at the end of it. Our local Coca-Cola was at the end of the show. In the ending credits, too, there was Coca-Cola mentioned at the end of it. And our local Coca-Cola bottler was such a fan of the show and of the family that they offered my mom a lifetime supply of Coca-Cola,

which she quickly turned down to my disappointment. Wow. That's fun trivia. And also, because they use children as the voices, they had that problem because kids would hit a certain age and their voices would change. They'd age out. Yeah. Yeah, they would age out. The funny thing that happened in Christmas was they started off and they were having, Bill was coaching the kids.

The kids were so young that they didn't know how to read, so you couldn't give them a script to read, so they had to feed them lines. Well, Bill was from deep in Mexico, so he started reading the lines. The kids were reading them back, trying to copy Bill. Finally, he walks in and says, Bill, you got all these kids speaking like Mexicans. Mexicans. Craig, when you cast the Peanuts movie, I noticed that there was a concerted effort made to find actors who had similar voices. Were you using the Halloween special and the Christmas special primarily as your basis? Absolutely.

Because the Charlie Brown character sounded a little bit like Peter Robbins, and the Linus character sounded a little bit like Chris Shea. I think you guys nailed it. Yeah, well, thank you, because that was one of my first things, was we had to nail the voices. We actually interviewed over 1,000 kids from all across the country to come out with those voices. Wow. And, yeah, I remember being in the casting room where the girl was sitting there, and she had high hopes of being Lucy. And I didn't want to break the news to her that we'd already cast Lucy. But we had a great cast for that show.

The kids were phenomenal, and we were very lucky. But I always, even to this day, I don't want them to send me auditions. I want them to send me them just talking. Because when I hear them just talking in normal voices, that's what you want. These days, there's so many kids, kids, kid actors, professional actors, they get on the thing and they overact everything, and it just isn't the same thing as having a kid just talk. Aside from the two actors, Robbins and Shea, doing Linus and Charlie Brown

in the Charlie Brown Christmas, were the rest of the kid actors amateurs? Well, yeah. Actually, Lee would go into a classroom and have kids talk and literally pick kids out of a classroom and bring them to the mic and have them record. And one of my pet peeves throughout the years was, and I asked Lee this later on, he used his kids in quite a few shows. If you look at the credits, you'll see quite a few Mendelssohn kids in there. One of them actually played the voice of Reverend Patty and some of the girls.

We tease them about that today, but I asked Lee years later, I said, Lee, how come you never asked, you know, for any of Sparky's kids to be in these specials? And Lee comes back, because none of you guys could act. And the funny thing is, it's like they use children,

and yet the children in those cartoons sound like depressed adults. I mean, Peter Robbins, just so captured. I don't know how much direction Melendez and Lee gave him, but it's the closest thing to me. Do you agree with this, Chip, as a lifelong reader of the strip, to what Charlie Brown should sound like? Although, Craig, I heard you say that when you first heard them, you thought, I have different voices in my head. These don't sound like the characters that I've been envisioning. I would be willing to bet that almost everybody did that because, you know, whenever we read something in a book or whatever, we typically kind of sub-vocalize in our minds what they should sound like. So I'd been reading that comic strip for years and years, and all of a sudden you hear the voices. You go, well, that sure doesn't sound like Charlie Brown. He's been in my head for 10 years now or five years, whatever it was.

And now it's ingrained, obviously. So they're the gold standard right now. Of course. Peter Robbins was the gold standard. You know, it's funny. Like, whenever I read a book, and, like, later on the book, they'll say something like, he pushed back his red hair. And I'll think, no, no, no.

I was fantasizing. I was seeing this character as having black hair. You know, it's like when you read something, you picture the character in your mind. Exactly. Chip, talk about the storytelling in Charlie Brown's Christmas. You know, watching it from the perspective of a writer, you know, there's a lot it from the perspective of a writer, uh, you know, there's

a lot said about the economy of, of storytelling and Schultz's strips. Yeah. Watching the, watching the Christmas special, uh, and Craig, this is fascinating. You get, you get so much story, you get so much story in the first four or five minutes. So much is established. You get Linus's blanket and Lucy's judgment about it, that Charlie Brown is depressed, that he's disillusioned about Christmas. He doesn't get any Christmas cards in his box. You set up the psychiatric booth. Everything is

right there at the outset. What I always loved is the utter absurdity of Lucy directing, quote, the Christmas play. And the Christmas play is a bunch of kids dancing to jazz. Yeah, that's the Christmas play. And she's like, isn't this a great play? And Charlie Brown's like, no, this says nothing about Christmas whatsoever. She's like, no, it's great. And then you're watching. And of course, that's the thing that animation can do that a comic strip can't. It introduces movement and time and sound. But just, it's so absurd. It's so ridiculous. And then you have the one kid whose head just flops from side to side, which is such a brilliant little gesture.

And then people throw their arms up. It's like, yay, Christmas. No, that has nothing to do with Christmas. It's just hilarious. That's so funny. I remember that now so well. Or some of them would be just kicking their leg up in the air. It's all very spastic moves.

Totally. The storytelling is very artful, though, and very, very economical. And you get Sally is writing the letter to Santa, and she's trying to shake him down for cash. Please send tens and twenties. Tens and twenties. You know, again, it's so innovative and it's so gutsy for a kid's show to be dealing with these themes. I even remember as a kid, you know, as a child thinking, I've never seen anything quite like

this. Yeah. Yeah. I think you have to recognize, too, the interesting thing is that my dad was by no means a screenwriter. And I actually saw the original, I think I had a copy of the original script for Charlie Brown Christmas in my house before it burned down. And it was literally three pages on a yellow notepad thing telling the story of a Charlie Brown Christmas. It's the same thing for Pumpkin. They were very, very simple stories that he had created. And to collaborate with Lee and Bill on these things and create a show that these days would be done

obviously much more different and professional screenwriting software is amazing in itself. So he was multi-talented between the comic strips and his vision to try to do other things. And he continually did other things. You say he wasn't a writer, and yet I wonder if he knew instinctively. Watching the Linus passage, it's essentially the climax of the piece.

If you don't have that, because it's Charlie Brown moving through this world looking for the meaning of Christmas, and Linus just says effortlessly, well, if that's all you want to know, I'll tell you the meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown. Lights, please. Lights, please. And it's so beautifully done. And as you said before, Chip, it's so understated. But if you don't have that in there, Craig, and maybe your dad knew it instinctively, you don't really have anything.

You don't have a payoff. You don't have an emotional payoff. No, but there wasn't the point of where he would have thought or, you know, if it had been a normal show like today. you don't really have anything. You don't have a payoff. You don't have an emotional payoff. No, but there wasn't the point of where he would have thought, or if it had been a normal show like today, you would have all these executives coming to you and saying, well, how about the people that don't know who these characters are? You're going to have to create the exposition and define who they are.

He assumed that everybody knew what the characters were. Then they would start saying, well, where's the inciting incident? You have to have an inciting incident. What's the arc from this character and that character? You start to develop it all along those lines of creating a movie. It becomes a different story. In those days, he had a vision. He knew what he wanted to create, and he did it his way. You know, and he did that through most of the shows.

He was really, really, really hands-on on really what I call the big three, you know, Christmas, pumpkin, and Thanksgiving. All the big three, you know, Christmas, pumpkin and Thanksgiving. And after he makes that whole speech, then all the kids dress up that like weak, rotten tree. And it's like beautiful because they show before like they try to put the star on top and it makes the whole tree fall over. And but it's that's really a touching moment that the kids dress up that tree it's very sweet no it is and i asked i asked lee years later if you actually if you watch the special closely you'll see is the whole green tree is sitting there and they keep coming by and charlie brown goes by it starts growing branches you know and i asked lee years later i said, were you guys doing that purposely?

So when Charlie Brown touched the tree, it was kind of having a relationship with Charlie Brown. He goes, no, that just happened with the animators. They just kind of stuck that thing in there. And the tree just kind of changes on its own. You know, Chip, I get emotional when I'm watching A Miracle on 34th Street, and the last shot, they see Santa's cane leaning against the fireplace. 4th Street and the last shot, they see the Santa's cane leaning against the fireplace. I get emotional in the last moments of It's a Wonderful Life when Harry proposes the toast and says to my big brother George, the richest man in town.

And I get similarly choked up, and I watched it again last night, when Linus makes that speech. And especially when he says, on earth, peace and goodwill to men. And, and, and I, I, I, all these years later, I've been watching it for 50 years, Craig, I I'm still emotional. Well, and so is powerful. And so is everybody else. I mean, look at this whole punch, you know, reaction to, to, to what just happened. And people want to see this on television. And they want to see it, you know, like it's broadcast all over again. It means something to them.

And it's a ratings winner every year. Like, yeah, they could watch it on DVD, but they don't want to do that. They want to see it on real TV. They want to see it on real TV. To me, the kicker was always when Charlie Brown hangs the red bulb on the little tree and it falls over. Yes. And he says, oh, I killed it. Everything I touch gets ruined and then he slinks off and it's just like, oh, wow. It's almost like saying I've killed the tree is almost like Melinda saying we killed peanuts.

Yeah. You know, it's so iconic that invariably somewhere across the country, someone will take a tree out and put it by the side of a street with one red bulb on it. And it'll sit there. And then day by day, invariably that tree will be decorated and become Charlie Brown's Christmas tree. And it happens every year someplace. It's the most amazing thing. And it just shows the legacy of this, the powerfulness of this movie, that people are willing to go out and bring these ornaments out to some stray, lone, poor tree that needs to be decorated. It's taken on its own life.

And I got a flashback now. This is going to the Charlie Brown Halloween of the running gag of them, like, looking at through their Halloween bags going, I got some chocolate. I have some cookies. I got a rock. The things that stay with us. Craig, how pleased was he with the final result? And did the show become a staple in the Schultz household at Christmas? You know, it's funny as I look back, I literally have zero recollection of watching that show as a child.

I mean, I was 13 when it came out. But, you know, I think back, you know, when we released the penis movie as a big Hollywood event, we had blimps flying overhead with ais movie and thousands of people down there. I think the expectations from the executives at CBS probably downplayed it in his mind. But I don't recall at all any kind of a viewing party for that to come out. We did watch it every year. I think his favorite and my favorite, and I think most people agree that their favorite show was the Halloween special because of the vibrant colors. Yeah, the background

of it. And then obviously Snoopy taken to the air was so spectacular there that that kind of links in everybody's mind. It's kind of the best one ever made, I think. Yeah. I give you credit too, seeing the movie. I mean, you know, you said it was a risky venture

from the beginning. And, you know, kudos to you because you had it was a risky venture from the beginning. Kudos to you because you had to tell a new story, but you also had to include plenty of nostalgic moments. You have the ice skating scene that it opens with. There's a lot of Snoopy and Red Baron stuff. That must have been a difficult compromise. I have a new story to tell. I have new generations of fans to introduce to this. And yet I have to give a nod to the people of my generation who remember

this that way. Yeah, without a doubt. That show actually from the beginning, the original concept of it to the end probably took me 10 years to get that done. And when you say, you know, was it risky for me? It was terrifying for me on numerous levels. Number one, the family had always said that we would never do a movie. We didn't ever want to take the risk of doing a bad movie. So in creating this thing, I had to, you know, had the scornful look of my brothers and sisters and family members and Jeannie's family and everybody else beyond the fact of the people at Fox and Blue Sky and everybody else. So it was very, very risky to do.

And we spent a lot of time, a lot of heart trying to get what we need to. And then again, you're dealing with the classic things everybody wants to hear. They want to hear the Giraldi music. They want to see Snoopy fly. Yeah, that's what I mean. It was really a tough balance to get all that in there and still tell a new story. Well, you did a beautiful job. Yeah, it's beautiful and beautiful to look at.

And I told you those, we talked on the phone. I told you those flying scenes, the flying ace scenes are absolutely breathtaking. It's like an amusement park ride. It takes you somewhere. Well, it does. And for me, you know, the beginning sequence that we came up with where you literally go into the comic strip, you live in the comic strip for the hour and 20 minutes. And every time I remember the first couple of times I screened it in my home theater,

when they go from animation to my dad's hand drawing thing of the kids, and then the script Schultz comes across the screen, I would just be bawling in tears. It was so emotional. I can imagine. I can imagine. I want to ask, too, about the lifelong collaboration, not lifelong, but many years that Mendelsohn and Bill Melendez and your dad stayed together. Your dad couldn't imagine working with other people and doing it differently. No.

Like I said, I was telling about Bill, how unforgettable Bill was unforgettable Bill was. Bill was someone you never forget. And my dad loved going down and hanging out with Bill in LA and we would go out and shoot guns. And it's, and it's interesting because I remember when I went down there, I was, I don't know, 13, 14 years old. And Bill said, Craig, today we go shoot. And he took me out. And Bill had a collection. He had a collection of like over a thousand guns. He had guns from the Revolutionary War, Civil War. Wow.

So we go out, we were shooting shotguns at clay pigeons and stuff. And Bill was a tremendous shot. I think he shot like 24 out of 25. And then he took me and says, Craig, now we will go have root beer freezes. I have never, never forgotten that day going to get in a root beer freeze with Bill. And to this day, I still order root beer freeze. And every time I order one, I think of Bill. He's just something that somebody just stuck with me for a lifetime.

I miss him tremendously. Are you in that documentary that your dad made with Mendelsohn in 63? Yeah, I'm sitting there in the back of the station wagon with all the other kids. Okay. Yeah, it's the other interesting thing that I kind of hold, not only did I not get to be the voice

in any of the shows, but of all the kids in the family and all the friends, I'm the only kid that never got his name in the comic strip. I don't know why. It wasn't like I'm the only kid that never got his name in the comic strip. I don't know why. It wasn't like I'm that bad. What's that about?

I never got my name in there. And your father said that he thought James Thurber was a great artist. Mm-hmm. Because he said, like, you know, it's different that there are some cartoonists who are not great artists but it just uh comes across the feeling of it yeah i think cartooning changed i

mean you know he grew up in the era of the big elaborate cartoon strips where you know it was they're drawing every panel was a huge work of art terry and the pirates and yeah george harriman and then yeah and then when he came around and he did his you know super simplistic strips and like i said we got in the 60s like chip said all of a sudden he became the minimalist and everything disappeared and the perspectives changed and so forth and from that day day on, literally every cartoonist, you know, will say they owe a bid of congrats to my dad because he influenced their comic strips and the comic strips have changed ever since.

And again, there's some people, I knew, you know, Stefan Passes, for example, co-wrote a peanut special with me. And he admits that he literally can't draw, you know, in Pearls Before Swine, he goes, I can't draw, but he has great little stories to tell. So I think the cartoon decision has changed quite a bit. And I remember there was

a comic strip that was a total satire on Dick Tracy and I think it was called Fearless Fosdick. Yes! Oh, very good, guys. And that was Al Cap and Little Abner. and I think was called Fearless Fosdick. Yes. Very good.

Very good. And that was Al Cap and Little Abner. Very, very good. Our friend Mark Evanier said, I was watching a documentary, he said, Craig, he would have loved to have seen the looks on the faces of those CBS executives. Yeah. Such a great story. We will return to Gilbert Gottfried's amazing colossal podcast.

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Neutral. Refreshingly simple. simple. Chip, in getting into this, in getting access to the families, to the library and the archives back in 2000, and doing these two wonderful books, and there's another

new book coming out. Tell us about that. Well, I mean, the new book is really just, it's an offshoot of the second book, Only What's Necessary. It was proposed to my friend Charlie Kochman at Abrams. We love Charlie. Love him. And it was, let's, you know, let's do a book of Peanuts posters. And so we then got permission to do it in the style of the only

what's necessary book so i mean you have lots of classic stuff in there but then they let us do a poster based on the viewmaster reels wow uh which i have to say like craig your movie reminded me of the viewmaster reels which is like to me the highest compliment what a nice thing yeah chip you should speak i think chip should speak to the fact of the of the strips he tracked down because you think okay 50 50 years of comic strips chip he got them all in all the books yeah they were not easy to find you end up having to find some really rare lost comedy i still know how you how you even did it, but can you speak to that? Yeah, a big part of that was my dear friend Chris Ware, cartoonist Chris Ware, and he managed to buy on eBay in the, what, in the late 1990s, when that was, you know, still a new thing.

when that was, you know, still a new thing, somebody had collected the strip physically from the very beginning for about four or five years. And Chris bought this thing. And then when I told him I was working on this book, he lent it to me. And so all the, like the tape marks and all that stuff that there was this person collected all of them from the beginning and where you would see like one of Charlie Brown's eyes would be missing because the printer thought that it was like a blot on the printing plate. So they erased it. Uh, yeah. Yeah, just really, really fascinating. What were the biggest surprises, Chip? I mean, what was the biggest discovery? Well, he...

For you. Schultz, I mean, there's so many. But for like two Sundays in the mid-1950s, I'd have to look up the year. He experimented with Charlie Brown and Lucy going to a golf tournament. And Charlie Brown was going to be Lucy's caddy. And she was the one that was going to be the golfer competing. And it's the only strips where you actually see adults, but you only see them from like the chest down. And I mean, it's fascinating just because it's so

outside of the Peanuts canon. And he obviously, he tried it and just decided, no, this doesn't work. he tried it and just decided, no, this doesn't work. This doesn't work. The kids have to stay in their own world and we're, we're not going to see the adults. And there's certainly the, and it's, it is kind of like, I don't want to say off putting, it's just so odd to see them. There's like this forest of adults around them on this golf course.

And they're, you know, sort of like, you know, totally intimidated and out of their element with them. But there were so many things. Yeah, there were numerous things that kind of came and went and didn't work. He would experiment with things. And again, in those days, as Chip knows, the 1950s, he was experimenting. He really didn't think this trip was going to last necessarily because in the meantime, he had associates that lived on the property with us and he was creating other comic strips at the same time. He had a teenage comic strip going and he was doing comic books and he had other people working with him, not on Peanuts, but with the possibility of Peanuts

doesn't go, I got something else I can submit. I think probably one of the most shocking things that I ever heard, and I think this happened after my dad passed on, as we were talking. And I think it was probably around the time that United Features sold the strip to another company. And around 1972 or so, it was the renegotiation of my dad's contract. And that was a time when he could, he was trying to get the rights to the characters. So he's fighting the United States, United Features Syndicate. And he's, and he literally threatened, he said, well, what if I just quit drawing the comic strip? And they're, and they're like, well, I don't know. And he kind of threw that a couple of times. Well, years, years later,

and I don't think my dad ever knew this. They had actually hired someone to draw peanuts. And this guy had drawn like 80 comic strips. And they were ready to go to the press with him if my dad had threatened to quit, you know, during the negotiation period. Wow. And they showed up. And I remember they showed up and I read about, you know, I read quite a few of them actually. And they were what you would expect, you know. I mean, the drawings were simplistic, obviously, but when you looked at the content of it and the sophistication of the artwork, it was terrible.

It had been a disaster. But they kept that from him. They never told him that they had subvertly gone behind his back and hired a cartoonist to draw his comic ship. That would have thrown him over the top. Yeah. Wow. You know, another thing Peanuts introduced me to, Chip, and you mentioned before, you mentioned absurdity.

They introduced me to absurdity and surrealism. Sure, yeah. And in going through the strips in your book, I found one that I had not thought of in a million years, and it's Linus becoming aware of his tongue. Oh, my God. One of my absolute favorite Charlie Brown strips. It's such an amazing concept.

And, of course, then you read that, and then for the next two days, you're trying to wash it out of your head because then you become aware of your tongue. It's just so great. Or the fact that Snoopy had a fine art collection. Right. My Van Gogh. My Van Gogh. The doghouse, right, his Van Gogh. Or the strip where they're looking at the cloud formations.

Oh, yeah. It's another wonderful strip. I look back at it going through Chip's books and reconnecting with those old strips and realizing what an effect it had on me. And so many people who tried to make a living being funny. You know, I think not only cartoonists owe him a debt, Craig, but so many comedians, so many comedy writers, so many humorists, you know, who learn timing from those strips. Yeah. The timing of playing out a gag in four panels. And then he would play with the space, too. He would play with the boxes, you know, the penmanship, where they're smearing the ink and writing up along the side of the panel.

He learned over time, too, to work with that canvas in creative ways. It's great to look at Chip's books and see that evolution. I think the other fascinating thing is really that you think of the comic strip, which we kind of associate as 1960s America. you know, the common sense of which we kind of associate as 1960s America, but, you know, the content that goes into the strips and the human emotions that deal with those things has really been able to resonate worldwide. It doesn't make no difference whether you're in Japan, China, South Korea, whatever. They all deal with the same thing. Loss, love, humanity, you know, and that's what makes it so timeless because it will, those feelings and those feelings of loss

and such, you know, never go away, no matter where you are in the world. Yeah. Yeah, it's universal. Now I'm getting, it's just got stuck in my mind, the comic strips. There was Mary Worth, Family Circus, Gasoline Alley, Dundee, and oh, the girl reporter. Brenda Starr. Yeah, yeah. I'm just, oh, that's popping back in my head now.

And Peanuts was always the first one I read when I opened the newspaper. If I got a paper, if I was out of town and I got an out-of-town paper or something, or somebody introduced a new newspaper and there was no peanuts in the comic section, I was crushed. You said he had a difficult time with his own celebrity, in a way, Craig. But this isn't maybe a naive question. How aware was he of the worldwide impact, the emotional impact, that he was having on millions of readers. Because in the Cavett interview that I dug up, Cavett tells him, you know, you've got several hundred people, several hundred million people reading this strip on a daily basis. And he says

that's something best not thought of. Yeah. I don't know. You know, when you hear him talk and the way he acted and so forth, it's like, I mean, he hadn't been aware of the impact. You know, I think Lee talks about there was one day in the 1960s when you had X number of hundred million people reading the comic strip. There was a show on Broadway, the TV special was playing and there was a movie in the movie theaters. When you totaled up all the number of views and all the penis content on that one day it was like half the planet's watches yeah yeah but he was such a humble person and i think he always knew that it could disappear at any moment you know in your cartoon it can be ripped right out of your hands at any second so i think he appreciated what he got to do and you know you know, it's funny when I look back

and again, I look back at it and study it, you think that, you know, certain people land at a certain time in history and if they landed 10 years either side of that, it might not have happened. You look at Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, my dad, you know, if that comic strip would have come in, you know, 20 years earlier or 20 years later, you know, I don't know that would have sold, you know? So I think it's almost like a destiny thing that certain people are meant to do a certain thing at a certain time and whether it be luck or whatever you want to call it, it's pretty, pretty amazing. Yeah. It's a lot to put on a man who really just wanted to draw a comic strip, but Chip, I think you'd agree with me that he's as important an artist in the 20th century as Walt Disney. He's as important a humorist as Mark Twain. Well, absolutely, no question. And what I continually try to remind people is between

Schultz and Disney, I mean, obviously, Disney's a great figure. But after the first couple of years, I mean, he was not drawing Mickey Mouse anymore. He was running an empire. And Schultz was a hand-on artist who hand-drew over 18,000 comic strips and wrote them. And he was the hands-on creator who made this universe. Literally, it was his hands, paper, ink, and a pen. He made it all out of that. Disney had casts of thousands to do his bidding, and there's nothing wrong with that. But they're different. Yeah, it's just...

Yeah, I don't think you can compare them to him. No, I agree. Disney was an absolute visionary. The stuff he created, and you go to his museum and see what he created as far as film and his vision and what he was going to do, it's reminiscent more of Steve Jobs. You know, people look at Steve Jobs, what he did,

but he didn't actually make all the pieces for those computers and all those different things. He found people to do them. He put him, stuck his name on the thing and he gets the credit for it all. But, you know, it's the same way, Disney. Well, I want to read this passage, Chip, that you closed the second book with, which I found beautiful. The contributions to American and world culture by Charles M. Schultz are happily incalculable. It's simply impossible to know how many lives he touched, smiles he brought, spirits he raised, hearts he uplifted, or artists he inspired. But we know that he did it all using only his mind, ink, some pens, and 17,897 pieces of paper. He made all of that out of nothing.

And out of nothing, he made everything. It's quite beautiful and quite accurate. Well, it's all true. That's the amazing thing. It's all true. I mean, you know, the simplicity of it, and the more I peel away the layers of the onion, Craig, and I learn more about your dad, that he just wanted to draw. He just wanted the daily discipline. He just thought that having a comic strip was the greatest thing in the world.

And all of these other things that happened, the fame and the merchandising and the television shows and the movies and the world that was created seems quite accidental. Yeah, I think to sum it up right, and that wasn't that important to him. Not that important to him, ironically.

But it did influence his life. Luckily, he was sort of an unknown celebrity for the most part. If he would go somewhere, it wasn't like, you know, a Hollywood star walking down the street where people would flock to you and ask you for your autograph and so forth. But invariably, I remember we were watching World Team Tennis with Billie Jean King one time

and he's sitting in the stands, you know, and you see eventually one person looks over and says, you can even whisper, I think that's Charles Schultz. And then somebody will be bold enough to come down with a piece of paper. And once he signed one autograph, that was it. Then end of the wedge, yeah.

Yeah, it would ruin the whole tennis match. On the other hand, he could cash in. I mean, that's a funny story. He takes us over to England to watch Wimbledon. So I think the whole family flew over first class to Wimbledon. We get on the grounds, and everybody's getting ready to play. And we go, Dad, where are the tickets? He goes, I don't have any.

I said, what do you mean you don't have the tickets? We're at Wimbledon. John Mack runs over there. And he goes, we'll just go to the players' lounge and stand by. So he's at the players' lounge and all of a sudden Billie Jean comes by. And he goes, oh, Sparky, come on upstairs. And she starts introducing everybody. And in no time, he's handed all these tickets to all the different matches and stuff.

And we're like in. And that's what his celebrity and his ability to draw on this. And once they get recognized, the world would open up for him. But he wasn't one to kind of push his celebrity on anybody. Yeah, it's fascinating in a way. There's a gentleman who listens to this show, Craig, named B.W. Radley. He says he's from your hometown. Craig and his family have lived near my hometown for years.

His dad and stepmother were neighbors of my ex-brother-in-law. He remembers, he has a memory, he wants to know if you remember this, of Peggy Fleming and the Vince Giraldi trio showing up at the ice rink. Oh, yeah. Does that ring a bell? Absolutely. Yeah, we had Peggy, you know, the ice rink opened in

1969. And in the early 60s, the local Peggy. The ice arena opened in 1969. And in the early 60s, the local ice arena got condemned because of water damage. So my mom was sitting in bed with my dad one night, and she says, you know, we need to give Santa Rosa kids an ice arena. And my dad agreed to do that. And they built what became the Repert Empire Ice Arena. And in 1969, we had Peggy Fleming, who was the Olympic champion, come in opening ceremonies. And we've still seen her to this day. She comes in and we'll see her every now and then.

And Geraldi played. And we've had Bill Cosby. We had Liberace. We've had, I mean, all the great entertainers played at the Ice Arena. I'm reminded of Snoopy's crush on Peggy Fleming. Yeah, that's why. In the strip.

It's funny you mention that. Whenever you wanted to meet a celebrity, in this way, Billion King, he would put their name in the comic strip, and invariably they would contact him. So if there was somebody he wanted to meet, slip the name in the comic strip, and then he would wait for the phone call to come up.

Oh, thank you for putting my name in the comic strip. That's great. Gilbert, you've got to steal that. Put somebody in your act that you want to meet. Craig, what is life like for you now? You're involved. Tell us about your duties and your responsibilities with Creative Associates. And you oversee a lot.

You oversee the ice rink and many Peanuts-related projects in Santa Rosa. Yes. Sadly, my career was in aviation. Basically, I was a flight instructor. I had my own air taxi service and I flew my dad's private jet whenever he wanted to go somewhere, whether it be business or golf or whatever else. And, you know, my career ended when he passed in 2000. So then the family got together and we decided, you know, who was going to oversee this company. And since I was the only one in Santa Rosa, the rest of them lived out of the area, I would kind of oversee it and pass on to them,

that sort of stuff. So myself and Jeannie, dad's wife, we collaborated on the oversight for the thing. And as years went by, I did a lot of different P&S projects for fundraisers, stuff around the community and trying to keep it in the spotlight. And that's when the idea for the movie came up.

And my son had just graduated from film school trying to keep it in the spotlight. And that's when the idea for the movie came up. And my son had just graduated from film school and he had sold a film to Spielberg and so forth. And I approached him with the idea. I said, hey, what do you think of this idea for film? And he said, well, dad, you need to do this, this, this, this. I was a little off on it. So I said, would you want to collaborate? So him and his writing partner, Neil Uliano,

came up and I paid them for a month to sit down and try to create this story, which we did. And then we approached, you know, Fox and sold it to them. And again, that was the intent of just trying to get Peanuts out there, try to drive people to the strip and get them to read. And I think it did a lot of that. It really kind of reinvigorated in Japan. And Japan was always our biggest market. And there's a huge resurgence in Japan. And now it's starting to take over in China. So I didn't want the comic strip to end up as nothing more than a simple t-shirt. And that's kind of the direction it was going. We just had something characters on t-shirts. And I was so

disillusioned with that because my dad had written so many bits of genius in that comic strip over 50 years. And for people not to read that was just disheartening to me. So whatever I can do to drive him back to the comic strip and get him to read it, that's my objective. That's a good one. Well, congratulations. I think seeing how much the movie made and how popular it was, I think you've achieved it. Well, you're doing other projects. I'm reading about these things.

The Christmas Tree Grove and grove, excuse me, and peanuts on parade and outdoor movie and Halloween events. You're organizing regular peanuts related events. I mean, obviously not in COVID, but when this, when this,

when this thing finally lifts. No, you know, my dad, he put on a, on probably what was kind of named the kind of the greatest ice show ever in the ice room. Every Christmas,

he would have some of the top Olympic show ever in the ice room every Christmas, he would have some of the top Olympic athletes come and the top entertainers in ice skating, and we'd put on a show for like a month. Well, after he died, we kept hearing, you know, when are you going to bring that ice show? When are you going to bring that ice show? Well, he had the budget to do the ice show. I don't have the budget to do the ice show. So my wife and I decided, why don't we give back to the community? Let's create these special events that are free to everybody in the community.

So we had like on Halloween, we had, well, Lee came up and spoke. We set up a big screen outdoors and people would watch the Great Pumpkin on the big screen outdoors. We had a trick-or-treat trail. And then we had a big Easter egg hunt during Easter. And we had a Valentine's celebration day in the Easter and people come with their dates and skate and chocolate and everything else and, you know, reinvigorate their love. So we did a lot of that for, you know, 10 or 15 years for the community. And they were nice because you'd see people, literally, people would come down the street and they'd put their hands on the fence and looking through the fence and think, what's going on? And you say, well, you can go in,

that's free to go in. And they go, I got to go home and tell my mom that. And they'd run home and bring their parents down. They would come in and sit down and to go in. And they go, I got to go home and tell my mom that. And they'd run home and bring their parents down. They would come in and sit down and watch the show. So it was nice to give back to the community. It's nice to keep all this alive. And tell us, I assume the Schultz Museum is not operating during COVID, but will reopen at some point.

Yeah, it definitely will reopen at some point. Sadly, it is sort of shut down. They kind of limited an X number of people for a while, but just as of tomorrow night, we're shut down for another four weeks, so everything we open has to close. You know, the ice arena, we opened it back up, and then it shut down, so we melted the ice, so we put the ice back up, and now we've got to shut it down again. So that's been a very frustrating thing. People should read about the museum. They can go on the website and learn about it and learn about everything they can see there. And as I say, when this chaos finally passes,

people who love Peanuts and love Schultz should go. The museum is absolutely beautiful. It's so well done. It's just the best. The thing is, I think what's interesting is you actually get to go and see the comic strips the way they were drawn. Because when the reality of it is, and this is what's so disheartening to my dad compared to a regular artist or fine artist, is a typical comic strip would be taken from its original size, which is probably eight by eight in each panel, sent to the newspaper, printed on the cheapest quality newspaper you could ever come up with, shrunk down to one inch by one inch. And the average person read it for like four seconds. And then it ended up at the bottom of a birdcage.

If you're an artist, that's probably the most insulting thing you can ever do with a piece of art you've created. So when you go to the museum and you literally see the artwork he created and you can see the pencil lines before he put the ink down, and the full scope of it all, you really start to appreciate his ability to do these things. And, again, I watched him for years and years and years. He used India ink, and I don't think I ever saw him splatter India ink the way Charlie Brown does when he's writing his letters out.

I love that one. Yeah, it was amazing. And your father had feelings about how cartooning was never considered an art form, like when you went to a museum. Yeah, absolutely. He always kind of felt it was beneath him as far as comparing it to a true artist and so forth um i think he's changed that perception though absolutely now absolutely yes i said to be in the loo of number one was the the highlight of his career i think that i think the other highlight of his career is to take peanuts and put it in outer space you know one point on the apollo 10 mission the mission before we landed on

on the moon you know there was a capsule called snoopy and one called charlie brown if you listen to the old tape you know it's like you hear them learn to say that so when you think of nasa and this is like just mind-blowing to me think of nasa in the 1960s and they asked the astronauts what do you want to call your capsule and And they could deal with, you know, biblical things, mythology, history, any number of thousands of terms you come up with, and they decide they want to call their capsule a lunar lander, Snoopy and Charlie Brown. If that isn't like the highest honor you could ever get in your lifetime, I don't know what is. How wonderful. I think it undersells him in a way, too, just to refer to him as a cartoonist.

As I said before, one of the great humorists of our time. Oh, absolutely. Of the 20th I said before, and one of the great humorists of our time. Oh, absolutely. Of the 20th century. Well, and authors. And authors, and storytellers. You know, Chip, and I hope both of these books, we had you on to talk about the Batman books. Sadly, one of them was out of print.

I'm going to hope that both of your, that we're not a video podcast, but the books are visible behind Chip on his shelf. I'm going to hope that both of your—we're not a video podcast, but the books are visible behind Chip on his shelf. I'm going to hope that these books are still in print and still available. So let's by all means promote them. Well, yes. So the two latest Peanuts books, the one's called Only What's Necessary, The Art of Charles M. Schultz. Beautifully designed.

And then the new one is the Peanuts poster book. And I'm actually going to be doing a virtual event for the Schultz Museum next Thursday night. I believe it's either 7 or 7.30 East Coast time. And that's going to be regarding the poster book, and we're going to have a visual component to that. We will promote that on our social media and get the word out. And a mention to your

collaborator, Jeff Spear, and again, the great Charlie Kochman. Yes. These are books that should be read because you really get, if you're a fan, you really get the experience. Not only do you get these wonderfully nostalgic feelings about the old strips, but you really see the journey of this artist and this storyteller over time. confidence grow. Yes. And his hand gets stronger and more confident as he starts to come into his own as an artist and maybe buoyed by success. Yeah. Do you have a strip? It's an impossible question, I know. But do you have a favorite strip? Well, all right. And then I'm going to ask Craig the same question. So you get to think about it, Craig. All right. I have a sort of soundbite answer to this, but it's a very early strip from the 50s. And it's, you know, it's just four panels and it's Charlie Brown and Patty. And so in the first panel, Charlie Brown has bought a waste paper basket at the store.

at the store. And, you know, and Patty's like, what do you have there? Well, I bought a waste paper basket at the store. Oh, it's in a bag. So he takes out the waste paper basket from the bag and crumples up the bag and puts it in the waste basket. Great. And that's the final panel. Gee, it's handy to have a wastebasket like that. And it's just, and then Lily Toplin stole that in the 60s as part of her routine. Or she either stole it or got the exact same concept. Well, let's steal from the best. But she tells the story like, yesterday I went to the store and I bought a waste paper basket and they

put it in a bag. And when I got home, I put the bag in the waste paper basket. And it's just this bizarre commentary on consumerism. But again, it's like Schultz did it in 1951 or 2. And it's

just such a great idea and simple but deep. It's crazy. I'm reminded of the movie Moonstruck when Nicolas Cage tells Cher that he's in love with her and she slaps him and she says, snap out of it. And I remember snap out of it from a peanut strip. Oh, yeah. Lucy screaming snap out of it as part of her cure. As part of her cure for Charlie Brown's depression. His depression. The strip that stays with me,

and it's not necessarily a sentimental one, but I think it's one that sums up the Charlie Brown-Lucy relationship, and I think it's a Sunday strip, is when Charlie Brown is desperate to get the Joe Shbotnik trade card. Joe Slobotnik. You guys know this one?

Yeah. And Lucy opens up one. He's been trying for months. He's been buying every trading card pack in the store, desperate to get, and anybody who ever collected trading cards, bubblegum cards like I did, knows the pain of this. He's dying to get Joe Shlobotnik. Lucy opens up

the one pack that she's ever bought and there's Joe Shlobotnik. Remember this one, Craig? Yeah, well, you... And he offers to trade every player that he has. I love the strip, too, because it reveals your dad's love of Major League Baseball.

So he offers her a Jim Bunning and a Willie Mays and a Hank Aaron and a Pete Rose and every, every, and it's panel after panel after panel and she doesn't want to part with it because he's kind of cute.

Do you remember this? Hell yeah. And he tries every card, every offer, he exasperates himself. And finally, he just slinks out of the last frame or the next to last frame saying, My whole life, I'd do anything for a Joe Slobotnik card. And he's out of the frame, and Lucy in the last frame looks at the card, and she says,

Eh, he's not as cute as I thought he was, and tosses it in the trash. And that one sums it up for me. Yeah, we got Joe Slobotnik kind of tied in in one of our latest ones that's come out on Apple TV. Oh, you do? Good. Oh, that's great. We reference him. That's great. Yeah, and I like it too, as I said, because your dad was a lifelong sports fan,

and the details, his love of baseball, he names every star player in that strip. And it just, it uses the space. It uses up every frame in such a clever way. You know, I love how easily he adapted to the extra frames on Sunday. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, the first two panels were what they call the throwaway panel. So when you have the opening sequence where it had, you know, peanuts and that was just for him to be able to play with the artwork in that panel and the one next to it because he knew most newspapers didn't print those two panels. Those were throwaways. And so the story almost had, you know, two stories in one because one was just a quick gag. And then the real story started on the next line down for the Sundays. on the next line down for the Sundays. Yeah, I think he would use all of those panels to drag out a drama. Chip, I'm also reminded of the one

where Linus is pouring the cereal. And he wants the cereal to be crunchy and the phone rings and it's Charlie Brown. Do you remember this one? Oh, yeah. And every frame is just Charlie Brown just going on and on and on. And every frame is just Charlie Brown just going on and on and on. And finally, Linus is sweating. He's got flop sweat. And in the next to last panel,

he screams into the phone, my cold cereal is getting soggy. And the last panel is just Charlie Brown holding the other end of the phone, that deadpan stare into space. So it was great the way he, over time, would figure out how to best use what he had to work with. Yeah, it was groundbreaking. I mean, the other groundbreaking one was the one where Charlie Brown standing beneath the cutting tree. And that went on for like five or six dailies in a row of him just standing, and there was nothing more than that. I mean, that was a bold undertaking to do that, you know, without getting some kind of rebellion from the syndicate. But you ask

about my favorite strip. Yeah. So I think this is, for me, this is what's interesting because, again, growing up with the thing, you see it from a children's perspective. And in those days, in the early 60s, 50s, and 60s, I think most kids literally learned how to read by reading the comic strips in the newspaper or in the books. That's how I learned to read. As you grow older, and now they look back being an old adult, you can see that the strip, in most cases, always had two perspectives. There's an adult perspective of it, and there's a childhood perspective of it. And there's simply just the love of the art.

So this is a very simple strip. For me, this hits home really personal. Charlie Brown walks up to the barbershop, and he says, My dad likes to have me come down to the barbershop and wait for him. The next panel goes, No matter how busy he is, even if the shop is full of customers, he always stops to say hi to me. Then he goes inside. I sit here on the bench until six o'clock when he's through, and then we ride home together. It's going to make me cry because I think about it, because the final line is, it really doesn't take much to make a dad happy.

Now that I'm a father, you realize it's the simple things that are important in life. And I look back on when I was a kid and I didn't really appreciate what my dad was doing. But in the later years, I would go in and he might have like five or six comic strips laid out on his desk. And I would look at them and I'd kind of point to him. I said, oh, that one's funny. Now I really regret I didn't compliment them more than I should have, you know, because you don't realize how important it is when you're a father

that your kids recognize the things you accomplish in life. They just kind of assume you're there and you come and you go and so forth. And now for me it's a retrospective thing that has hit home. And that strip really sums it up. How beautiful. I had forgotten that one. I remember that. Yeah.

It's perfection. It's high art. And thanks for sharing that with us, Craig. Glad to. All right. We want to thank some people, too. We want to thank Melissa Menta, who's somewhere on here. She's listening and observing

at Peanuts Worldwide and Craig Herman and of course our friend John Murray who is engineering the show our trusty audio producer who never lets us down and we want to thank

a man who we've mentioned several times Charlie Kochman and I want to mention my friend Mike Dobkins who is the biggest Peanuts fan I know and he is particularly a fan of that strip you just talked about, Craig. That's a beautiful one.

By the way, I think, are you familiar with the movie Rushmore? Oh, yeah. It's Anderson's movie? Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure the main character's father is a barber because of Peanuts and Charlie Brown. I'm pretty sure he is, like our friend Paul Feig, he's a big Peanuts fanatic. So it's just nice to see other things turning up in the culture, you know, that have been inspired by this wonderful comic strip. So we thank you guys

for doing this. And I'll, uh, I'll say this, even though the show is not going to, we're not going to put this up in time, but the Charlie Brown Christmas will air on Saturday night on PBS. There was an outcry because it wasn't going to be on free television. So PBS, PBS road to the rescue. It's going to be on December 13th. We'll air after that, but we'll, we'll do a big,, but we'll do a big push of it to remind people on social media. I think people of my generation worship that show. Absolutely. I was born in 61. True work of art. Even putting the DVD in the other day, Craig, and that opening sequence where you just see the tracking shot across the ice and the snow falling and the Giraldi music starts.

It just, of course I'm nostalgic for it because it's something from my childhood, but it's Charlie, excuse me, Chip talked before about the quiet of it. The simple beauty of it. I could watch it a hundred times. So thanks, guys. Well, listen, thank you. And Craig,

what an honor to be on here with you. Oh, it's good seeing you again, Chip. It's been a while. I think it was 2008 I saw you. Yeah. I got to say this too, Craig, people should find the Peanuts movie. Absolutely. Don't have to search for it. It's, it's available everywhere and it's beautifully done and there are two love stories at the center of it with Snoopy's girlfriend and the little red-haired girl. Not giving too much away, but it's

really, really exquisitely made. Well, thank you. So congratulations to you and your son, Brian. And we forgot to thank Lindsay, who did the tech on Craig's end. I don't know if she's still there. She's there, my producer who did the tech on Craig's end. I don't know if she's still there. She's there, my producer. There you go, Craig's daughter, Lindsay, who's been great and a real pro.

And it takes a village to make these shows, so we appreciate everybody. So tell us about your podcast that you've been doing for a while now. Yeah, it's called Middle Brow, and it's a contemporary art podcast that we set out to make an unpretentious podcast, which seems a little bit impossible, but we do our best. Okay, and where can people get it? Wherever podcasts are sold, right? Anywhere you find your podcasts. Okay. Ironically, Gilbert and I set out to do a pretentious podcast. But neither one of us had the intelligence to carry it off. We didn't know what the word pretentious meant.

We weren't totally sure. Thank you, Lindsay, for your help. Thank you, John. We'll assemble all this. And thank you guys again. Happy Christmas. Happy New Year. Thanks for being a part of it.

Thank you. Thank you for the shout out. All right. Thank you, guys. Again, happy Christmas. Happy New Year. Thanks for being a part of it. Thank you. Thank you for the shout out. All right. Thank you, guys. So this has been Gilbert Gottfried's amazing, colossal podcast with my co-host, Frank Santopadre. And this has been a total tribute to Peanuts and its creator, Charles Schultz, with his son, Craig Schultz, and the world's expert on peanuts, Chip. I think that's overselling me a little bit. He's certainly one of them.

He's certainly one of them. Thank you, gents. This was a lot of fun. I'm sorry we lost Lee Mendelsohn last year because I wanted to do this for a number of years. We got you guys, and thanks for being a part of this and making it special. And Merry Christmas to everybody. All right. Well, listen, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

See you.