Comment by pinnochio

I'm enjoying the discussion of Charlie Brown, but while Peanuts is indeed an American pop cultural institution, I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.

While there were cartoons where he's the protagonist (I recently watched A Charlie Brown Christmas), his main medium is the comic strips, and Peanuts generally didn't tell a continuous story (if at all), unlike, say, the superhero comic strips. Instead, they're little vignettes of life, and like most serial comic strips, you're meant to relate to them, get a nugget of wisdom or insight, or a chuckle. We mostly read them as kids who were bored and wanted something like a cartoon until Saturday came around (I realize adults read them, too, but today that seems rare, almost unimaginable to me now). So I'm not sure Charlie Brown really counts as a counterexample, here.

Even the cartoons are not so beloved that they're widely rewatched by adults for their storytelling. People have nostalgia for them because they're something they watched as children. This is the main reason I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas recently, and it's kind of a mostly sad story with a weird resolution. Thanksgiving was practically unwatchable. The Garfield cartoons also do not hold up, imo.