Friday, October 14, 2005

You're an Expensive Thing to Collect, Charlie Brown!

Kim Thompson gives us a little preview of the fifth volume in the Complete Peanuts series. He also writes to me...

I too collected the Holt, Rinehart books religiously as a teenager and ended up with at least the first 20 --most of those original copies are still sitting under "S" in the Fantagraphics library, in fact-- and to be honest, if my house was burning down and I had to choose between the HR books and the new Fanta books I might very well pick the HR ones myself, even though they omit part of the opening Sunday panel and are missing a bunch of strips, etc. I think all Peanuts fans my age and older have a permanent sentimental attachment to those books.

The matter of which strips were "killed" by Schulz or anyone else for later reproduction is endlessly intriguing. Based on the fact that (as we've found out) there are significant holes in both United Feature Syndicate and the Schulz Estate's files of proofs, it's possible that some of the missing strips are missing simply because they didn't have any copies of them when they were putting together the HR books. (I particularly suspect this is the case when an entire week's worth of perfectly good strips were never reprinted.) As for the others...

I recently picked out several examples from our upoming fifth volume — strips that have never, so far as I (and, more importantly, my cadre of Peanuts experts) know, been collected since their ephemeral appearance in daily newspapers around the world nearly 50 years ago — and offered a few educated guesses as to why that might be.

Those are the ones posted at the above link and it gets me to wondering: Does anyone have any solid info on how the Holt, Rinehart books sold? And more interestingly, how did they impact the syndication of Peanuts? I know there have been cases where a top-selling reprint collection prompted a lot of editors to say, "Hey, that strip's popular. We'd better pick it up for our paper." That was a big factor in the success of Garfield and Dilbert, and I think maybe with Doonesbury, as well. Also, both Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson told me how the popularity of A Charlie Brown Christmas (which Mendelson produced) had an astronomical impact on the merchandising of the characters. Does anyone know if the rise of Peanuts to 2600+ newspaper clients was slow and steady or if it spiked because of the books and/or TV special?

• Posted at 4:45 PM · LINK

To My Fellow Writers Guild Members...

This is what our next strike will be about. Unless, of course, we just fold like we did with home video. You remember when certain parties, some of whom now deny it, assured us there was never going to be "significant revenue" from selling movies — and especially old TV shows — to watch at home.

• Posted at 3:24 PM · LINK

Quick Link

Now, here's how you write an eBay listing.

• Posted at 1:31 PM · LINK

Friday Afternoon

Several folks have sent links that work for them to view the videos I mentioned on the C-Span website. Unfortunately, these links seem to only work for specific browsers...and not even all the time. C-Span has their video clips on an "RTSP" protocol (Real Time Streaming Protocol) which is almost a guarantee that visitors will have trouble, plus they link to some of them in a pop-up window that doesn't want to pop up, at least in any of my browsers. I can download the files but not watch them online...which I find is happening with more and more websites that get fancy with pop-ups and JavaScript and other bells 'n' whistles.

A correspondent who asked to remain nameless suggests that since you need to have Real Player installed to watch them at all, you can cut and paste these addresses, one at a time, into that program (use the "open" tab) and that should do it. Here you go...

• rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/iraq/iraq101305_bush.rm
• rtsp://video.c-span.org/60days/whpb101305.rm

Or you might try pasting those addresses into your browser to see if it supports RTSP. There are also a number of programs around that will allow you to download an entire streaming video clip if you can figure out the RTSP address for it.

In the meantime, a few of my correspondents have argued that the chat Bush had with those soldiers was not exactly "scripted." No, in a literal sense it wasn't — though when deputy assistant defense secretary Allison Barber rehearsed the troops beforehand, that was a word she used. My complaints were not that everything was controlled to the point where everyone knew in advance what everyone was supposed to say. You kinda expect that to happen with any president and especially with this one. It's that it was done so poorly and almost in a manner so as to insult our intelligence. We know George Bush (or, again, any president) can have his aides pick out ten or twelve soldiers who are on his side and will stay "on-message" and say just what the administration wants to represent as the truth. But doing it the way they did and doing it so ineptly deserves a certain amount of ridicule. Bush hammering away at a home for Katrina victims the other day on The Today Show was another phony stunt. I dunno...I have this idea that anyone else could have driven those nails as well or better, and Bush could have used the hour or two in some way that would have helped those people more. I kind of expect him, as the most powerful man in the world, to do something my handyman couldn't do.

I keep thinking about something Jon Stewart said on a recent Daily Show, which is that this president refuses to answer questions from adults as if they are adults. The answer to everything lately seems to be, "Shut up...I know what I'm doing." That's hard to believe when they don't even know how to stage a simple media event involving a satellite link.

• Posted at 1:15 PM · LINK

Cartoon Collection

ASIFA is the international animated film society and its various branches do great things to honor and preserve good animation and even some of the less-good variety. The Hollywood wing is presently establishing an archive that deserves your attention if not your support. Stephen Worth is the main mover-and-shaker behind this most worthwhile endeavor and he's started a weblog to tell us all how it's going.

• Posted at 11:18 AM · LINK