Charlie Brown and the gang have been brought back to animated life in a batch of 20 new webisodes.
The 3 – 4 minute videos were taken directly from the classic 1964 comic strips.
Fans can download two of the 20 new episodes for free on Apple’s iTunes for a limited time. The whole set of 20 can be purchased on the digital store for $7.99.
In one of them, Linus runs for class president, only to be bedeviled by a controversial skeleton from his past: his strident belief in his Halloween hero, the Great Pumpkin.
The videos are all new, made with Flash animation and new voices for the characters. But even though it's new technology, attention has been paid to maintaining the integrity of both the strip and its beloved animation specials.
"You're not trying to change it," said Jeannie Schulz, widow of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. "You're trying to keep it the same and freshen it."
The score, for example, is reminiscent of Vince Guaraldi's famous jazz that accompanied the "Peanuts" television specials.
But what would the Peanuts creator -- who died in 2000 at the age of 77 -- think of his old strips showing up decades later, fully animated on laptops and cell phones?
"I'm sort of glad that Sparky -- Mr. Schulz -- isn't alive (to see it)" laughs his wife. "But even though he would not understand why people wanted to look at things on their telephone, he understood stories and telling stories."
