Peanuts animator passes

Jerry Beck reports on the passage of Bill Littlejohn, who worked as an animator on a number of Peanuts specials dating all the way back to A Charlie Brown Christmas, as well as quite a respectable list of other projects.

It’s been 45 years since that first Peanuts special. As the release of Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown – the first full special without any of the original team – approaches, we have to realize that the future of Peanuts animation will not be filled with those who know how it was done from the inside, but from those who study the results. Will that work out? I suspect so; the legacy that people like Littlejohn, Melendez, Guaraldi,  Schulz, and the still-with-us Lee Mendelson have built is powerful.

Share
Tweet this thing
Follow the AAUGH Blog
Schulz/Peanuts news
New Peanuts podcast

Peanuts fans have had a number of podcasts to listen to over the years. Currently, there’s Unpacking Peanuts (working its way through the Peanuts canon four months per episode), Talking Nuts (working its way through the canon one month per episode), and It’s a Podcast, Charlie Brown (focused on, but …

Schulz/Peanuts news
Drawing Peanuts

Matt dropped me a line to show me this video that he had made, digging through every documentary source the he could find to clip footage of Charles Schulz drawing, including Schulz’s own commentary. It does get a bit mesmerizing. I kinda prefer that there was more strip work than …

Animated Peanuts
RIP Willie Mays

Willie Mays has died. The baseball great lived until the age of 1993. “Why is that relevant to a Peanuts blog?” I hear of a few of you cry (though many of you know better.) Before Lee Mendelson had any connection to Peanuts, he made a documentary about Mays… and …