Everyone’s favourite paper lunch-bag-wielding hero will finally hit the big screen in the summer of 2015, in the form of the new Peanuts movie.
For anyone not familiar with Charles Schultz’ iconic comic strip, Peanuts chronicles the lives, loves and failures of Charlie Brown and his neighbourhood friends, including Lucy, Linus, and Charlie’s pet dog, Snoopy. The strip ran for 50 years until 2000, and has become probably the most influential comic of all time, spinning off all kinds of merchandise as well as tv movies, musicals and even an amusement park.
The hero, or antihero really, is Charlie, a melancholic, philosophical, and terminally unlucky little boy, passionately in love with the little girl with red hair, to whom he can never pluck up the courage to speak. Even in the schoolyard, he would rather put his paper lunch bag over his head than risk having to make eye contact with her. Meanwhile, Snoopy lives a life of ease and fantasy, leading scout troops of birds on mountain treks, composing novels on a typewriter and imaging himself as a WW1 fighter ace.
It’s fantastic that a new generation of children will get to enjoy the antics of the Peanuts gang and hopefully it will inspire new interest in the classic comic strips that so many people grew up with and remember fondly. Hopefully the team behind the film will get it right! And you know you can happily take the kids along because besides all the slapstick there’s bound to be several of the adult themes running through it that made Peanuts resonate so deeply – the existentialism, the isolation, that will let parents understand another level of humour.
No doubt there will be plenty of merchandise doing the rounds next year so if you want your kids to be the most on-trend at school then maybe equip them with some of our paper bags to pack their lunch in!
