peanuts

Chris Knight's avatar

As someone who works often in artificial intelligence, I will be the first to state that there are some things that the technology will never ever improve upon.

Charlie Brown and the gang is one of those.
For whatever reason – maybe the idea for this was hatched late one night by a first-year community college kid wishing he was old enough to get drunk – somebody fed a classic 1978 Peanuts comic strip into an AI.  Maybe they were trying to make it even funnier than what it already is.  Who knows?  The result however is downright lopsided and more than a little disturbing.
Here is the original strip.  Click to enlarge:

And here is the, ahem, “AI enhanced” edition:

That final word balloon is cracking me up!  What was the AI trying to render?!  Also, when Marcie first speaks it comes out like the Swedish Chef.
I’m actually
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Chris Knight's avatar

 

Premiered on CBS on December 9th, 1965.

No matter how many times I’ve seen this, I always take time to watch it again every Christmas season.  A few years ago I bought the Blu-ray containing A Charlie Brown Christmas along with the Halloween and Thanksgiving specials.

I can barely remember it, but when I was two or three years old CBS had scheduled the Christmas special for broadcast.  But a football game went over long and completely pre-empted A Charlie Brown Christmas.  I was furious!  Mom said I was really crying about not getting to see Charlie Brown.  It bothered Mom too.  Enough so that she called CBS affiliate WFMY in neighboring Greensboro to complain about it.  I don’t know what she said to them but they gave her the home phone number of the station’s general manager!  Mom let him have it, telling him it was wrong ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Seventy-nine years ago today.

That’s a still from the animated special What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?  It was the follow-up to the film Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown.  Charlie Brown Linus, Peppermint Patty, Marcy, and Snoopy are on their way back to America.  They stop and camp for the night and Linus thinks they’re something familiar about the place.

Wow.  That premiered forty years ago last week.  It’s well worth tracking down and watching.

Remembering all who came ashore at Normandy on this day nearly eighty years ago.

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Chris Knight's avatar

Love the appearance of the CGI here. It’s a spot-on merging of modern animation style with Charles Schulz’s classic look.

But the highlight of course is the characters.  Looks like most of the Peanuts gang all in one shot, including Snoopy’s siblings (even Olaf made the cut!).  And ya gotta appreciate the Little Red Haired Girl’s face hidden behind the bag of popcorn…

The Peanuts Movie arrives on November 6th....

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Chris Knight's avatar

In 1986, CBS Television was presented with the following roughly-animated proposal for a new Peanuts holiday special. Apparently it was decided somewhere that Charles Schulz’s classic characters needed upgrading to become more timely and “Eighties” in order to “reinvigorate the franchise”. Network execs saw the proposal – a short film by Jim Reardon – and immediately and quietly chose to bury it within the CBS vault. More than twenty years later and thanks to YouTube, it has finally seen the light of day! Here is Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown…

(For the real story of Reardon and his hilarious short, mash down here.)...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This is the third death that I’ve had to report in the past day or so. Hope this is not about to become a trend…

Bill Melendez has passed away at the age of 91. He was an animator who began work at Disney, and then moved on to Warner Bros. But it was a 1959 meeting with cartoonist Charles M. Schulz that would propel Melendez to everlasting fame. The two became fast friends after Melendez was hired to work on a series of commercials featuring Schulz’s Peanuts characters. And after that, Melendez was the only person that Schulz gave permission to animate Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and the rest of the Peanuts gang. A few years later Melendez collaborated with Schulz to produce A Charlie Brown Christmas: forty years later it remains a seminal classic of the holiday season.

In addition to the various Peanuts movies and ...

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