On 5/7/2022 5:40 PM, Your Name wrote:
As I said ... "main original characters *that* *are* *best* *known*". :-\
Of the ten characters chosen, only Charlie Brown and Snoopy are
"original." But let's say we focus only on characters who were
introduced pre-1970, so as to exclude Rerun and Spike. Then I
would say that Franklin is no more of an outlier than Pig-pen.
I don't have a complete database, but if we start tracking from
1970 onward, Franklin shows up considerably more often in the
strip than Pig-pen does (this is true not just in the 1970s, when
Pig-pen practically vanished from the strip, but remains true
through the 1980s and 1990s). Franklin also made more of an
impression when he debuted, because that was back when some
newspapers would cancel the strip purely on the grounds that it
depicted Franklin and Peppermint Patty in the same classroom, so
anyone old enough to have been around at the time would probably
remember Franklin at least as well as they remember Pig-Pen.
It's also pretty clear that a lot of African-Americans remember
Franklin much better than they remember Pig-pen. Even though
African-Americans are a minority, if you do some kind of weighted
average, giving more weight to stronger memories than to weaker
memories, then I would expect Franklin to get a boost, since I
don't expect there to be as many people who have as strong memories
of Pig-pen as African-Americans have of Franklin.
The one big advantage that Pig-pen has over Franklin is that because
he debuted earlier, Pig-pen shows up in "A Charlie Brown Christmas"
and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and "A Boy Named Charlie
Brown." On the other hand, Franklin shows up in "A Charlie Brown
Thanksgiving" and "Snoopy, Come Home," so he did get a fair amount
of screen time.
Minor characters typically suffer from having only one distinctive
feature, which means that they will show up only as often as the
artist can think of a way to work that feature into the gag, and
that they will stick in readers' minds only insofar as that feature
grabs their attention. (To some extent, Schroeder suffers from this
problem as well, although Schulz managed to have Schroeder play a
big role in the baseball team, and also managed to incorporate music
rather often into the strip.) Franklin's most salient characteristic,
his race, was something that Schulz deliberately avoided "playing up"
in the strip, and so that meant that there was less chance that
Franklin would stick in readers' minds. (Superfans might have noticed
that Schulz often invoked Franklin in the later years of the strip
when he wanted to talk about grandparents, but this is a very subtle
point that most readers would never have noticed.) By contrast, Pig-
pen's most salient characteristic is "in your face" in almost every
panel in which he appears. For this reason, Franklin might have been
less "memorable" than Pig-pen, but I don't think that he was clearly
"less known" than Pig-pen, if we go by whether readers would recognize
him.
The reason I thought that Rerun or perhaps Spike might have been a
better choice than Pig-pen was that they---Rerun especially---played
an increasingly large role in the last decade of the strip. Including
Rerun would have been a nod to the generation of fans who grew up with
Rerun as a major character, as well as an acknowledgment that Schulz
was continuing to break new ground and introduce new ideas into the
strip even during its fifth decade---which is more than can be said
of any other cartoonist I can think of.
---
Tim Chow
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