My go-to cartoon characters as a kid were Bugs/Daffy/Porgy (Warner Brothers) and Charlie Brown/Lucy/Snoopy/Linus Charles M. Schultz). Everything else was the bunk. I’ve written before–rather recently in fact–about my loathing for all things Disney. Ditto Hanna-Barbara and their cheap, flat animation which did nothing to enhance their cheap, flat writing.

Now, the Warner Brothers gang was on every day after school. But ‘Peanuts’ was limited to holiday specials which made it a kind of cartoon connoisseur event. Whether it was the Great Pumpkin, the Thanksgiving or the Christmas episode, the prime-time Peanuts airing was a big-time event for me. I insisted my mom buy a box of Zingers (the official chocolate and cream Peanuts junk food) which I ate an entire box of during the showing. (A good deal of milk accompanied it). These warm and fuzzy childhood events have stayed with me for years and, lets face it, so much of it had to do with Vince Guaraldi’s brilliant scoring of the specials, to say nothing of Charles M. Schultz’s insistence that his music be the official Peanuts soundtrack (apparently the powers that be didn’t ‘get it’ and thought the jazz would turn off kids). Thus we come to the above clip. It’s an excerpt of a performance of the “Linus and Lucy” theme as played by the composer on a show intriguingly titled “The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Music Fillers Programs”, from WNET. For some reason the beginning and end are clipped off but since I can’t find a complete version of this anywhere else I figured it’s better than nothing. Note that I haven’t commented on the most important thing on view; Vince’s moustache. If you had to cast a beatnik jazz guy from northern California, it wouldn’t be Vince Guaraldi. You’d consider it a little too on-the-nose to be convincing.