In all of the Peanuts 50-plus-year television history, we’ve never seen something quite like this.

Boomerang, Cartoon Network’s sister station that focuses on reanimating classic cartoon franchises, is launching a new Peanuts series based on original story lines from the comic strip that Charles Schulz drew from 1950 until his death in 2000. They will be shown in a vignette format that, in a break with tradition, features strip panel lines at the beginning and end of each segment.

Mashable has an exclusive preview.

Unlike the CGI Peanuts Movie, which gave the character’s dimension, but took pains to maintain the original look and tone of the Schulz strip, this new series has a more old-school pen and ink feel. The animation is almost as spare as the art in the original strip and, though each vignette is an animated expansion of original gags found in Schulz's four-panel approach and the more expansive Sunday comics, the tiny comic tales are just a few minutes long.

The series, which launches Monday, May 9 at 11:30 a.m. ET and will appear on the network daily, is produced by French animation studio Normaal in association with Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Together with Boomerang, they assembled a completely new voice cast that includes Aiden Lewandowski as Charlie Brown, Jude Perry as Linus and Bella Stine as Lucy.

Image: Peanuts worldwide llc/normaal

“We spent a lot of time casting the kids, with an ear toward original animation,” said Kim Towner SVP of Media Production and Development for Peanuts World Wide.



The vignettes span content that appeared in strips between 1960 and 2000 and, according to Towner, “Aside from some transitional material, the stories featured in all the vignettes appeared in Schulz’s original work,” she said.

Normaal created a total of 12.5 hours of content, which breaks down into 500 90-second shorts and 104 7-minute blocks. Some portions of the show will also appear on Cartoon Network’s app.

The classic look

I also viewed some samples on the Normaal Web site. Series director Alexis Lavillat has managed to replicate the Schulz line look and color palette, with a sort of water-color flair. There’s even a hint of paper grain texture underneath it.

“We were going for that look. We definitely wanted to take the viewer into the comic strip, to feel texture of paper, water color and pen in Schulz's original comic strip,” said Towner.

Image: peanuts worldwide llc/normaal

To achieve this look Normaal scanned in the original strips, traced them into vector shapes and animated them in the computer.

The new animated series is part of an ongoing effort to introduce a new, younger generation to the Peanuts comic strip universe, one that started in earnest four years ago after Iconix Group partnered up with Peanuts World Wide in 2010.

“As a part of that whole marker in our history, we sat down with Schulz family and really looked to the future. This series was a very big part of that, as was the movie. [All] part of larger initiative at this point in our history,” Towner told me.

Despite Schulz’ death 16 years ago, the comics have run continuously in papers across the U.S. Many children, though, don’t read newspapers and, even if they do, the number of papers is diminishing. Like most legacy brands, Peanuts must continue to expand on as many platforms as possible to engage a younger, digitally-distracted audience.

Peanuts lives on the web, in apps and the aforementioned movie (Fox Studios has yet to announce a sequel). However, putting Peanuts on morning TV, in front of an audience looking for entertainment parents and their kids can watch together (Towner says that Boomerang’s ability to serve up a “co-viewing audience” was one of the chief draws for the brand), may be the best way to hook the next generation of Peanuts fans.

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.