Today we take a look at Rerun Van Pelt, the comic book character who basically took over Peanuts by Charlie Brown in the late 1990s.
Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share a piece of comic history that interests me.
Charles Schulz was clearly one of the greatest comic book creators of all time, with his Peanuts comic being one of the best comics ever made. One of the fascinating things about Schulz, however, is that he was also one of the most open creators in terms of sharing his various struggles over the years with the creation of his classic strip. He gave many excellent interviews that offered powerful insights into how he approached the creation of Peanuts and it’s amazing how many times he’ll speak candidly about the difficulties of doing an ongoing comic like Peanuts.
Anyway, one of the areas where everyone would have trouble is coming up with new ideas on a regular basis for DECADES and in the case of Peanuts, in the late 1990s, Schulz’s response turned out to be that the tape was more or less taken from its normal lead role, Charlie Brown, and given a character introduced in the 1970s who has virtually no wasn’t used until the early 1990s and then suddenly basically became the star of the strip in the late 1990s to the point where he actually outlived his two MUCH more famous siblings, Linus and Lucy, in the tape itself. I am of course talking about Rerun Van Pelt.
HOW RERUN WAS INTRODUCED IN PEANUTS
In 1972, Schulz was almost certainly thinking, “Hey, we haven’t had a kid on the show in a looooong time,” and so Linus and Lucy Van Pelt received a baby brother in May 1972 (as part of the much-heralded and just invented by me this second comic period May Sweeps)…
A week later, Linus named his baby brother…
It’s funny, it’s a nice gag, but boy, it’s a weird thing to go with a single gag and have it be a character’s name for the rest of their time in the band, huh ?
It took Rerun a year to reach the age of a toddler, when he made his strip debut in 1973…
And then…nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, Rerun actually had a remarkable storyline from the start. He joins Charlie Brown’s baseball team and the team actually wins a game, but is then lost when it turns out that Rerun and Snoopy had bet on the game. So it wasn’t like Rerun made an appearance and never showed up again. However, after these initial stories, Rerun basically disappeared from the tape. Essentially Schulz realized he had a new character but the character had no purpose, but he couldn’t really get rid of Rerun either, because he was tied to two of Schulz’s biggest characters, Linus and Lucy.
So Rerun popped up here and there, but never gave any major storylines.
HOW RERUN FILLED PEANUTS IN THE LATE 1990s
Things changed for Rerun in the early 1990s. Rerun started showing up a bit more, with just basic toddler storylines like learning to count or learning to tie your shoes (I think Rerun might have being taught to tie one’s shoes about 95 times over the years)…
Then Schulz had a clever idea where he would put Rerun on the back of his mother’s bike, then have Rerun narrate the ride like a nature documentary, while the toddler was scared to death…
It’s a bit funny and Schulz said it many times.
In his interview with Gary Groth for the cartoon diary #200 in 1997, Schulz then revealed why he aged Rerun a bit to kindergarten age (after first noting that he thought Rerun was initially a mistake as a character) :
I think he was wrong at first. I was looking for something different. I put him on the back of his mom’s bike, and the only time he appeared was on the back of that bike. I like those. And then we had some grandkids who had to go into kindergarten and kindergarten, and I also see grandkids in the arena. I started to have ideas and so he was the perfect person to start kindergarten. he is different from Lucy and Linus. He’s a little more outspoken. And I think it’s going to be a little strange… [laughs] as it already is.
Now that he was about five years old, Rerun was allowed to become more of a character and clearly Schulz found this new character very compelling, because he was SO different from his veteran characters that he could do new stories that wouldn’t’ t did the others, including, as Schulz notes, many strange ideas. Another recurring element was that Rerun was fascinated by Snoopy and wanted a dog of his own and we got to experience a character who was actually EXCITED by Snoopy. Charlie Brown obviously loved his dog, but he wasn’t EXCITED by Snoopy like Rerun. It was kind of fun and as we would see in the late 1990s Rerun basically took over the tape (this also allowed Schulz to literally re-do some Linus stories with Rerun going through the same experiences as his older brother growing up ). Here Rerun having fun with Snoopy in 1999…
Here he is with his kindergarten classmate (and sort of crush), the little pigtailed girl, with Rerun’s recurring gag of making weird drawings when they were supposed to be drawing flowers or something that…
Again, Rerun was just a little WEIRD, which was awesome, it gave him some jokes you’d never get from Charlie Brown or Linus…
Schulz explained to Groth, “I find that coming up with ideas never ends and never gets easier. And you find yourself going in a certain direction just to survive. Lately, Rerun has almost taken over the bandaged.”
Amazingly, once the daily comics ended in early January 2000, Rerun actually outlived his two much more famous siblings, when they last appeared in Peanuts were December 1999 for Lucy…
and January 1, 2000 for Linus…
While Rerun appeared in two Sunday strips (Sunday strips continued after the dailies ended), with one final Rerun/Snoopy strip…
and one last drawing of weird stuff in the class tape..
It was the penultimate Peanuts strip EVER and it featured Rerun!
Of course, Schulz never TOTALLY gave the tape to Rerun, as he noted to Groth, he also knew people wanted the classic characters, so he always managed to get back to it, and Charlie Brown starred in the final narrative strip (with Sally) in February 2000, then Charlie Brown and Snoopy were both in the final strip, which was released a day before Schulz’s tragic death.
If anyone has any suggestions for interesting bits of comic book history, feel free to message me at brianc@cbr.com.
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