Dude, who even knows.
Photo reblogged from Sigh In A Storm with 43 notes
Tween boy enthralled by cleavage. Norman Rockwell never painted that!
Um, I’m fairly certain that this painting is referencing the newspaper comic strip Peanuts; the red Fokker triplane and the beagle (Snoopy and the Red Barron) jumped out to me.
I believe you’re right!
Post with 122 notes
I’m pretty sure Peanuts is the apex product of the midcentury American canon, and more specifically the Charlie Brown holiday TV specials.
Like, A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965, the first one.
Coca-Cola commissioned a 30-minute animated film with a jazz soundtrack based off the breakthrough comic strip repackaging depressive cynicism for kids. The plot is that the protagonist is depressed and so his psychiatrist tells him to conduct religious rituals to gain a sense of purpose but no one’s even taking the rituals seriously so they don’t work and the climax is literally straight-up King James Bible verses about our savior Jesus Christ reminding them to take the Christmas rituals seriously, at which point everyone is happy.
And America was like “yes, correct, this is so correct that we want to incorporate it itself into our national-popular Christmas rituals every year”, like the Swedes and their Donald Duck thing.
In fact, how about more like that, let’s reenchant every holiday in the civic canon with this vision of Protestant reserve in the face of failure. Let’s do Halloween, let’s do Thanksgiving, let’s do Election Day, Valentine’s Day, let’s… GAINAX made a Charlie Brown holiday special in 2002? What the fuck.
Let’s do Easter, come the ‘70s let’s do Arbor Day (that one didn’t catch on)…