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>All that said, IMHO, having Peanuts characters on MetLife ads, or visiting Camp Snoopy doesn’t cheapen or weaken the original strips.

I'd say it very much does.

The focus on Snoopy itself is when the strip "jumped the shark" (here's a take, https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 ).

Of course Schulz dilluted it decades before the end of the strip, getting all too into repeatition and mass market concessions.



The archived version of that kotaku article has the original strips that are missing from the current version: https://web.archive.org/web/20150815184327/https://kotaku.co...


If I write a book and it's good, me doing other stuff later, even with the same characters doesn't change the original book.

You want to feel like the subject is yours, and if it's too widespread, lots of people will learn about it, in an "inpure way" (scoff, learning about an amazing comic strip in a movie) and so it cheapens it. Only with this "hipster" view on things you could say that. I think it's impossible to cheapen something without changing it.

If the first edition was cool and the second edition changes the language for sensitivities for example, that can cheapen it, because it actually changed it. McDonald's offering a toy of a character from the first edition, changes nothing.


>If I write a book and it's good, me doing other stuff later, even with the same characters doesn't change the original book.

Only technically. In that the actual printed words wont change.

In how it's perceived in the culture, how it's read, how new readers relate to its characters, what it's seen as the start of, and so on, it does retroactively change the original.

Same how the horrendous 8th season of GoT tainted the previous seasons too. Now it's a journey to a pointless ending - and many people who haven't seen it are unwilling to get into it because they know that. Even someone rewatching the first season, now has a bad taste knowing the later plot of Danny for example, or how various things shown as prominent in the first seasons (the mysterious signs of the deathwalkers, or even the death walkers themselves) play no significant role, or are just skipped over later.


I don’t think I have to say anything more than “Game of Thrones” to prove you wrong in most people’s minds. The last episodes sullied the whole series, and I have no longer any desire at all to revisit any of the first seasons, even though I enjoyed them a lot when I watched them originally.


It’s like a divorce vs becoming widowed.

Your understanding of the events that occurred are recontextualised and your feelings are forever changed.

Perhaps we as an audience enjoyed the conceit that Schulz was writing those comics because he loved the characters and that alone.


I'm reading Good Omens again right now, and I just got to the "whole damn sea full of brains" scene, and I keep hearing it in Doctor Who's voice. Plus the whole shipping reading from S1/S2 kinds bleeds back.




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