You're [not] elected Charlie Brown!

Following up yesterday’s post, with a little more research I found Charles Schulz created an animation that aired 9 days before the 1972 US election called You’re Elected, Charlie Brown, except he was not elected, so they had to change the title art, inserting the “NOT”, so the story goes.

Read the fascinating story of this rare Charles Schulz “political” work, from 1972 but derived from the original comic strip story published in 1964, on Wikipedia. The animation is hard to find. Apple TV has it. Watch a horrible ABC partial version with ads here (starts at 2:25). An interesting comparison between the animation and the 1964 published comic strips is here.

I wasn’t able to extract the images below from the Schulz Museum .pdf about Schulz and politics, so here’s a screengrab of the whole thing. I was surprised to read that Schulz was friends with Ronald Reagan. There’s so much we don’t understand about American politics, and politics in general. Really there is no “right” and no “left”. There are no fascists and no communists. Such terms are like racism, they are gross over-simplifications, usually meant to be dismissive, staining everything and everything with the same dirty brush. Is “politicism” a word?

So, in the animation, Charlie Brown was not elected. In fact, he wasn’t even running, Linus was. Lucy was his campaign manager, threatening to pound anyone who wouldn’t vote for Linus. But in the end, Linus blew it with his final election speech about the Great Pumpkin. Aaaagh! He was a laughing stock. And that was that.

Nobody’s laughing at Mr. Trump of course. Nobody.