Fun Freetime: 70th Anniversary of Peanuts

 

This week was the 70th anniversary of Peanuts, the beloved comic strip created by Charles Schulz. Craft Recordings celebrates this milestone with new music and video releases featuring Vince Guaraldi’s original songs, which have helped define the Peanuts experience over the past seven decades. Families planning to celebrate the holidays at home this year will enjoy streaming playlists and new music videos, and to share new collectible editions of the Charlie Brown Christmas album with a new generation.  To kick off the 70th anniversary and the holiday season, a new animated video, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz” debuted on the official Vince Guaraldi YouTube channel. The song is instantly recognizable from the 1966 animated television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Craft Recordings also launched a “Peanuts 70th Anniversary Playlist” across music streaming services, featuring 70 favorite songs from various television specials and compilations.

As part of the anniversary celebration, Craft Recordings also presents a one-time vinyl pressing of A Charlie Brown Christmas featuring a bonus “dancing” lenticular print of the original 1965 album cover with Schulz’s iconic illustration. The LP has been pressed on a range of colors and picture discs for participating retailers. The soundtrack album, featuring music from the 1965 animated television special A Charlie Brown Christmas, includes timeless classics such as “Christmas Time Is Here,” “O Tannenbaum,” and “Linus and Lucy.” The certified 4x Platinum soundtrack album remains the second best-selling jazz title in history, and the animated show continues to be a signature television special every holiday season.   A native of San Francisco, Vince Guaraldi became one of America’s most successful jazz artists of the 20th century. Though Guaraldi’s legacy is most famously tied to his association with Peanuts, he was already an established, GRAMMY® Award-winning artist by the time that producer Lee Mendelson tapped him to score the first of many animated specials based on the comic strip by Charles Schulz. In a 2003 interview, excerpted from the biography Vince Guaraldi at the Piano (Derrick Bang; McFarland Books), Mendelson declared, “There was no doubt in my mind that if we hadn’t had that Guaraldi score, we wouldn’t have had the franchise we later enjoyed.”   The 70th Anniversary of Peanuts vinyl releases are highly collectible; LPs released earlier this year are already sold out. To learn more about these and other releases from Craft Recordings visit https://craftrecordings.com/collections/peanuts-music.

About Craft Recordings: Craft Recordings is home to one of the largest and most prestigious collections of master recordings and compositions in the world. Its rich and storied repertoire includes legendary artists such as Joan Baez, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Vince Guaraldi, John Lee Hooker, Little Richard, Nine Inch Nails, Thelonious Monk, Otis Redding, R.E.M. and Traveling Wilburys, to name just a few. Renowned imprints with catalogs issued under the Craft banner include Concord, Fania, Fantasy, Fearless, Milestone, Musart, Nitro, Prestige, Riverside, Rounder, Specialty, Stax, Sugar Hill, Vanguard, Vee-Jay and Victory, among many others. Craft creates thoughtfully curated packages, with a meticulous devotion to quality and a commitment to preservation—ensuring that these recordings endure for new generations to discover. Craft Recordings is the catalog label team for Concord Recorded Music. For more information,visit  CraftRecordings.com  and follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify.    About Peanuts: Charles M. Schulz first introduced the world to the Peanuts characters in 1950, when the  Peanuts comic strip debuted in seven newspapers. Since then, Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang have made an indelible mark on popular culture. The new series Snoopy in Space launched on Apple TV+ on November 1, 2019. Peanuts animated specials and series air on major networks and streaming services, including ABC, CartoonNetwork.com and Boomerang in the U.S., Family Channel in Canada, and the WildBrain Spark network on YouTube. Fans also enjoy Peanuts through thousands of consumer products around the world, amusement parks attractions, cultural events, social media, and a daily comic strip available in all formats from traditional to digital. In 2018, Peanuts partnered with NASA on a multi-year Space Act Agreement designed to inspire a passion for space exploration and STEM among the next generation of students. The Peanuts characters and related intellectual property are 41% owned by WildBrain Ltd., 39% owned by Sony Music Entertainment (Japan) Inc., and 20% owned by family of Charles M. Schulz.   About Lee Mendelson Film Productions Inc.: Lee Mendelson Film Productions Inc. is the publisher of the Vince Guaraldi catalogue of music associated with Peanuts. Since 1963, along with Bill Melendez Productions, Lee Mendelson Film Productions produced and co-owns the classic Peanuts television library along with Peanuts Worldwide LLC including many documentaries and entertainment properties and the beloved and perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas. These 50-plus specials and entertainment programs are still enjoyed by families around the world.