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An Entertaining Education: Tivola Publishing's New Mac Games

50 Years of Peanuts

Charles “Sparky” Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts debuted on October 2, 1950 and quickly became a success, leading to Yale University naming him Cartoonist of the Year in 1958. He was nicknamed “Sparky” shortly after his birth in 1922 by an uncle who loved the horse Sparkplug in the Barney Google comic strip.

Peanuts was originally called L’il Folks, but his syndicate changed the title because strips called Little Folks and L’il Abner already existed. Schulz never liked the new name, but eventually he learned to live with it as he spent almost 50 years drawing the adventures of Charlie Brown (the similarity in first names is no coincidence), Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty, Pigpen, Schroeder, and the rest of the gang.

He died of complications from colon cancer on February 12, 2000, only hours before his final strip ran in newspapers across the country. The strip that started in 7 newspapers appeared in 2,600 of them around the world by the time of his death, and many of them still run a Classic Peanuts strip that reprints popular storylines.

The Peanuts characters have appeared in numerous cartoons, books, and other merchandise over the decades. Where’s the Blanket Charlie Brown? is the latest in a long line of games that feature the characters, and it likely won’t be the last.