Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown: "Peanuts" Turns 64 Today

Good grief! You're almost a senior citizen, Charlie Brown.

Today, October 2nd, marks the 64th anniversary of the first published "Peanuts" comic strip, and by extension, the world of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and many other timeless characters.

The strip, written and illustrated by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, shows Charlie Brown walking by two children. As he passes them in the strip's first three panels, one child says, "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown/ Good Ol' Charlie Brown...Yes, sir!/ Good ol' Charlie Brown..." But once Charlie Brown passes his peers and is absent for the fourth and final panel, the child remarks "...How I hate him!" So, yes, that sense deprecation and loathing has been a staple of Charlie Brown's life since Day One.

That's certainly not the case for the comic strip, however. During the strip's 50-year run, more than 350 million readers followed Charlie Brown in his hopeless pursuit of happiness, Linus' fruitless quest for the Great Pumpkin, and Snoopy's misadventures as the Red Baron. Producing more than 18,000 Peanuts strips before retiring, and sadly passing away, in 2000, Schulz built a cartoon franchise that remains viable to this day. In fact, a "Peanuts" CG-animated feature film is slated for a theatrical release in early 2015.