Craig Schulz on Why His Dad Felt 'Disrespected'
As the guardian of the Peanuts legacy, Craig Schulz loves to create new stories for Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and the other beloved Peanuts characters, while at the same time upholding the traditions that his late father Charles M. Schulz started in 1950 with the first Peanuts comic strip.
The younger Schulz's latest endeavor, Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie, tells the story of Marcie, Peppermint Patty’s shy sidekick, who purposely stays away from the limelight until she's pressured to run for class president. Suddenly the center of attention, Marcie—who's clearly a natural problem solver—has a major problem coping with the new role and begins to hide from her classmates. Perhaps, she learns, there's more than one way to lead.
Parade spoke with Schulz about the inspiration behind the special, which is now available to stream on AppleTV+, the importance of fans, and why he's not interested in a live-action Peanuts.
Talk about the theme of the new movie. Being introverted and uncomfortable is not a story that often adults and kids talk about.
We’ve dealt with media and celebrities my whole life pretty much, and I realized that the celebrity has the limelight shone on them all the time and you don’t really see the 20-to-30 people behind the scenes that are making the celebrity who they are.
We wanted to get that message across to children and their parents that it’s OK to be the person behind the scenes that’s doing all the work—you don’t need to be the one in the spotlight. The people behind the scenes are probably more important than the ones in the spotlight because of the work they put in.
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Why is that message important to you?
Well, because I think it reflects 99 percent of the population. Very few of us get to be in the limelight and the rest of us just go about our work, day in and day out, helping everyone around us. We don’t get acknowledged for the work we put in, sadly, but we grind through and make things happen.
Do you know why Marcie calls Peppermint Patty, “Sir”?
That’s just one of my dad’s great gags. He was a master of dealing with language and humor and insight and so many different things, and for some reason that just popped out and it was one of those great ongoing themes that he created that everybody seems to love. I have no explanation for why she does that and why Peppermint Patty doesn’t like being called “Sir.”
What kind of responsibility is it to keep all of this going, and going in the way that your dad would certainly approve?
Well, it’s tremendous. And I look back on how he took the responsibility. His comic strip created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and he felt very responsible to those people that were doing all that work. So people might ask how he could do a comic strip for 50 years. Well, a lot of it was because he felt responsible to all those people. But the other thing was that was his love of his life. There was nothing he liked more than sitting at the drawing table and drawing those comic strips and literally living with that gang of kids.
The one thing I like about animation that I haven’t really mentioned to anybody else is that [with] the comic strip and what my dad did, he felt really kind of disrespected. Because when you draw a comic strip, they’re like 8x8-inch drawings, and then they go in the newspapers and they get shrunk down to 1x1-inch. They get put on the lowest grade paper you can ever imagine and then they’re in the newspaper for a day and then they get thrown away. There’s nothing more disrespectful to an artist than doing that. You couldn’t imagine Picasso having his drawings shrunk down to 1x1.
With animation, you get to see that comic strip come to life in 3D, full color, on a big-screen TV, and it's so unlike reading the comic strip and I think that’s the attraction. The sad thing is that kids simply aren’t reading comic strips the way they did when we were kids. And we hope, and one of our goals is that if you watch these specials, hopefully it will drive you back to buying the books and reading the comic strip. Because that really is the bible of Peanuts, those 50 years of comic strips.
Photo by CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
Would you ever consider a live-action Peanuts movie?
Live action with kids, or adults playing kids?
I guess kids playing kids.
Yeah, I think that’s been done so much. There are a lot of people, like Paul Feig for example, [whose projects were] basically a takeoff on live-action Peanuts. As he told me when we did the [2015] Peanuts movie together, Freaks and Geeks was kind of based upon that. And Wes Anderson, most of his stuff he said gets inspiration from Peanuts. So all those things are so inspired by the comic strip that my dad created. It’s fun to see that type of material, but no, I haven’t given any thoughts to a live-action one.
We do have a live-action show, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, where the adults play the characters, and that’s been the most reproduced stage play in all of history, I believe. So I think we’re leaving it there for now; I’m concentrating on the animation and some other things.
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What would you say is the best part of producing this kind of material, and the most challenging part?
Well, it’s very challenging, but the most rewarding thing is really the fanbase and the response we get from the Peanuts fans. I’ve talked to people that had Snoopy when they were a little kid and the Snoopy now is 40 years old—it’s brown and dirty and ragged but they’ve simply refused to let go of their Snoopy. There’s just so many emotional stories. Someone called my dad up and said, “Is it OK if we use Snoopy on my daughter’s tombstone, because she died when she was young and she loved Snoopy.” He said, “Absolutely.” They engraved a Snoopy on her tombstone. So it’s stories like that that really get to me.
My agenda has strictly been to continue my dad’s legacy and uphold the brand, which is what the family really strives to do. It’s a global brand—we have input from any number of sources—and everybody’s trying to take it in a different direction. We like the feeling that that neighborhood and those kids are locked in a certain timeframe. They’ll never have iPads or iPhones or any of that sort of stuff.
Are there one or two pieces of advice from your dad about anything, artistically or otherwise, that keeps you in good stead?
Well, he wasn’t really one to give much advice, I would say, which is nice. But I just think I stick with his morality and his Midwestern ethics and how he treats people and how he’d want to be treated. He was a very down-to-earth person, as am I. We talk to anybody, listen to everybody and just try to be good people.
Snoopy Presents: One-of-a-Kind Marcie debuts on Apple TV+ on Friday, Aug. 18.
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