For a comic strip focusing on such young kids, it's strange that the Peanuts characters seem to capture quite a large amount of emotion. How many times have we felt down and defeated, like Charlie Brown? How often do we want to jump for joy, like Snoopy?

Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz went to great lengths to not only ensure that readers could see themselves in the Peanuts kids, but that they could see mankind as well. "I feel that Peanuts reflects certain attitudes of life in our country today and perhaps some basic fears," said Schulz during an interview with Penthouse. "However, I like to think that these things are part of the entire human condition and not simply something involving one generation of people in this country."

Both the comic strip and Peanuts television specials were able to capture audiences of various ages, young and old.

"We get a strong group of letters each day from little kids, but we also go right on up through teenagers to grandparents," said Schulz. "We get letters from quite a broad spectrum of professions, too - doctors, priests, lawyers, nuns, rabbis, athletes, pilots, servicemen, musicians. I hope it is because I comment on their interests in a reasonably intelligent way."

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Charles Schulz hoped to leave you with something

Of course, Schulz not only wrote from his own experience, but took the time and energy to understand the things he wrote about, but hadn't lived through. "That doesn't mean that I'm an authority on them but the things I draw I research to a certain extent," he said. "If you're going to do humor at all, you have to know something about the subject you're dealing with. We frequently get one hundred letters a day - sometimes more."