YouTube user Garren Lazar came up with a wonderful idea: combine cherished iconic tunes like “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Freebird,” and “Stayin’ Alive” with excerpts from Charles M. Schulz’s famed Peanuts cartoons.
The overwhelming passions in these songs match the equally overwhelming experiences of the characters in the comics, who were all alterations of Schulz himself. The comic strip and its numerous animated offshoots are, in the words of Jeff Kinney in the preface to Chip Kidd’s book Only What’s Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts, “arguably the most richly layered autobiography of all time.”
It’s appropriate therefore that one of Lazar’s early Peanuts mashups used Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall, an epic filled with reflections about how restrictive youth can be as well as social and personal anguish, intense anxiety, isolation, and insecurity. Like, well, Peanuts, I guess.
Why can’t the names Roger Waters and David Gilmour summon these illustrious literary figures if Schulz’s comic strip and drawings can? Charlie Brown is the only person who has ever felt like merely another brick in the wall. The Peanuts gang and Schulz may have favored jazz, but one can detect in their existential agony and periodic episodes of melancholy the same type of disillusionment Roger Waters drives home in his masterwork. Marvel at Lazar’s editing abilities in “Charlie Brown vs. The Wall.”
Once more, Garren Lazar delivers. Here is his cover of the Peanuts gang performing Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall.” It is a great one!