Overview
- A Polygon retrospective published this week highlights the line “What’s the good of living if you don’t try a few things?” from a February 1966 Peanuts strip and calls it Schulz’s standout quote.
- The line appears in a 16-strip spelling-bee storyline that the article says later served as the core narrative for the first Peanuts feature film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969).
- Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for roughly five decades and produced nearly 18,000 strips, a body of work the piece uses to show how small moments gain lasting cultural weight.
- Schulz announced his retirement after multiple strokes and advancing colorectal cancer and created his final strip shortly after that announcement; routine weeks-long lead times for Sunday pages explain why the last strip ran the day after his death.
- The retrospective argues that the strip’s simple wisdom and Schulz’s habit of running extended story arcs explain why single panels still resonate and why his work moved from newspapers into films and other media.