All You Need Is Love, But a Little Chocolate Now and Then Doesn't Hurt

Welcome to the 933rd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them.

Comic Book Legends Revealed: Was a Famous Quote About Love and Chocolate Incorrectly Attributed to Peanuts?

Welcome to the 933rd installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. In the second legend of this all-Peanuts installment, learn whether a famous quote involving love and chocolate has been incorrectly attributed to Charles Schulz and/or his comic strip, Peanuts.

In the brilliant Michael Barrier interview with Charles Schulz that I've quoted a few times now, Schulz discussed how big the Peanuts characters had become as licensed characters (used in commercials and cartoons and stuff like that), and he nicely explained how the most famous comic characters tend to become more than just "yours" after a while:

Now, there are some people who are against licensing, and in a way, I suppose it should be flattering. They have become fond of your work, and they clutch it to themselves very selfishly. They want it to be theirs. They have discovered this new comic strip and they want to talk about it with their friends, and all of a sudden it becomes popular. It's like hearing a new singer for the first time, and you think she's just wonderful, and before you know it she's got four or five hit records and everybody in the country is talking about her. You've lost her-she's not yours any more. You've lost your discovery, and I suppose this is one of the things that people don't like. But we live in a culture where this is almost taken for granted. Everybody is involved in licensing. If Bill Cosby can sell chocolate pudding and all of the other things that he sells, and Willie Mays can sell things with his picture, and all the movie actors, everybody does it, why should I say, "No, I'm too good for this sort of thing"? Because it's not all mine anyway. As I said back at the beginning, this is not a pure art form by any means, it's a commercial product, and I've always said, "How can a commercial product be accused of turning commercial?" It doesn't make sense. As I've also said, I've been very careful about all the things that we've done. Perhaps we've made some mistakes, but I don't think we've ever turned out anything that was offensive, and I know I've never drawn anything that was offensive. Our television cartoons are as inoffensive as we can make them, without being sugary sweet and dumb. All I can say is that I've just done the best that I can, that's all.

While Schulz is more specifically talking about licensing, it speaks, also, to the idea that when a character becomes REALLY famous, their creators really don't have "ownership" over them, at least not when it comes to the public's imagination. It sort of ties to something I wrote recently about headcanon. You're obviously always owed your personal take on a character, even if you have no direct control over the character, no one else can tell you what to THINK about the character.

And so Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have long entered into the sort of public consciousness (just not the public domain, of course), and so people really feel like they KNOW them, and BECAUSE they know them, they like to quote them a lot...like, a LOT. Even if the quotes might not belong to them...

I just did a cursory look of the internet for this phrase related to Peanuts, and, well, great googley moogley, it is WIDESPREAD. I picked just four almost at random (my father hates the way people use the word "random," as people almost never use it correctly, as if you use any sort of control over your choices, you are inherently NOT doing it at random. So I just throw in qualifiers like "almost at random" to mollify the voice in my head of my dad moaning about me using "random" incorrectly)....

As you can see, the public really loves this quote, "All you need is love ... but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt," and it loves to attribute it to Charles Schulz in general, or Peanuts in specific (sometimes even specific characters WITHIN Peanuts, even Lucy Van Pelt).

We see this come up frequently with cool quotes, where Mark Twain gets credited for almost every old witty line. And Jack Kirby often gets credited for cool comic book innovations, whether he did them or not, as Twain and Kirby are both famous, beloved figures, who we tend to gravitate to when we're talking about moments and quotes that we don't recall specifically. The same goes for Schulz.

The great Peanuts expert, Derrick Bang (who I've cited a few times in the past for Peanuts