Peanuts Gallery

If you know Charles Schulz’s cartoon kids solely from greeting cards, holiday specials, and advertisements shilling Dolly Madison (the cakes, not the historical figure), then you might be forgiven for dismissing Snoopy and his friends as saccharine pabulum. If that’s the case, then you definitely don’t know peanuts about Peanuts,...

By Nicholas Gerbis

June 30, 2011

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If you know Charles Schulz’s cartoon kids solely from greeting cards, holiday specials, and advertisements shilling Dolly Madison (the cakes, not the historical figure), then you might be forgiven for dismissing Snoopy and his friends as saccharine pabulum.

If that’s the case, then you definitely don’t know peanuts about Peanuts, pal, as the long-running comic strip was equal parts existential, subversive, deeply human, and hilarious. Consider taking a second look at an old favorite by paying a visit to Arizona Museum for Youth’s Peanuts at Bat: The Life & Art of Charles Schulz.

The exhibition consists of 200 Peanuts comic strips from the past 40 years, including a section focusing on the gang’s iconic baseball outings, plus plenty of fun for kids and kids at heart who can play Schroeder’s symphonies at a pint-sized piano, sit at Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth (still offering advice for only five cents), or hang out in a glow-in-the-dark Great Pumpkin Patch.

The Schulz-centric exhibition runs through Sunday, September 11, at 35 North Robson Street in Mesa.

Sundays, 12-4 p.m.; Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., 2011

Nicholas Gerbis

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