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Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 25, 2017, 04:07:00 PM
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For Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty was consulted by you, so that's not fair... 8)
Quote from: SAGG on March 25, 2017, 06:32:31 PM
Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 25, 2017, 04:07:00 PM
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For Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty was consulted by you, so that's not fair... 8)
Have you ever noticed that
nobody ever calls him just plain "Charlie"? It's always his full first and last name, "Charlie
Brown". What's up with
that? How weird would it be if anytime someone addressed you by name, they
always used your full given and family name? Peppermint Patty is the only character that talks to him like he was a normal person.
Can you imagine if Chuck Clayton was never referred to by any of the other characters as anything
but "Chuck Clayton"?
"Hey, there's Chuck Clayton! How's it going, Chuck Clayton? We're all meeting down at Pop's later on - me, Jughead, Betty, Veronica, Reggie, Dilton, Moose, and Midge. Would you and Nancy like to join us, Chuck Clayton?"
You might try searching images for "Chuck and Nancy", and while you will find both images of the
Shazzan and Archie Comics characters in there somewhere, it's amazing how few of those show up, compared to the main volume of completely unrelated "Chuck and Nancy" images.
Archie (Archibald), Veronica, Midge, and Reggie (Reginald) are all fairly uncommon names, to say nothing of Dilton, Jughead (or Forsythe), and Moose (whether his given name is Merton Matowski or Marmaduke Mason). Josie, Melody, and Pepper are all pretty uncommon, and Valerie only semi-common. Only Betty is (or was) a very common name (one of the many possible diminutives of Elizabeth). Chuck and Nancy are names both so common as to be generic, which makes you think that when they were originally introduced in Archie Comics, there wasn't much thought expended by way of making them unique or memorable in some way. That makes them token characters, but I'm undecided on whether that's better or worse than having chosen some more 'obvious' name for Chuck like "Fast Willie Jackson" or "Tyrone Washington". At least maybe if they'd given him some atypical name, it might have seemed like it was necessary to attach some distinguishing personality traits, talents or interests along with the name. Those early Chuck stories were all over the place, experimenting with who he was and what his defining traits were. For years, really the closest they get to defining him as a person is "sports guy". Well, Reggie and Moose are both sports guys, too, so I guess that's common enough, but it just seems like a bit of lazy writing to say "oh, he's into sports" and let it go at that. How much more interesting would he be if he had turned out to be a chess champion or a serious history buff or jazz musician or an early computer tech hobbyist? Or maybe a serious motorhead auto buff, or into woodworking or scale modeling or something. What's all the more puzzling about that is that the lack of distinguishing character traits wasn't a result of his only appearing in minor supporting roles in what was essentially someone else's story -- for years he was the virtual co-star of ARCHIE AT RIVERDALE HIGH, so the failure to define him much isn't a result of a lack of room to do it in the stories. I'm not sure if this was the result of fear on the part of Archie Comics. They could point to Chuck and say, look, we have a black person living in Riverdale, and he's exactly indistinguishable from the average Riverdale teen in every way, so in that way he's representative of all black people. The only problem with that idea is that by being so relentlessly dead average, he sticks out as
not like the other characters. None of the
other continuing characters in Archie Comics can be described as average, so why should Chuck be? They finally settled, sometime in the early 1990s (more than 20 years after his introduction) on an interest in comics and art. Nancy remains vaguely defined in characterization, talents and interests to this day (even more true for Midge, who's been around even longer), while continuing or reoccurring characters created later are generally easier to identify in terms of their individuality.
SHAZZAN's Chuck and Nancy were brother and sister, like SPACE GHOST's Jan and Jace. The SUPER FRIENDS' Zan and Jayna have names and identical costumes (and a pet space monkey) suspiciously similar to Jan and Jace, and like them, are young superheroes-in-training -- but just like Chuck and Nancy had to touch the two halves of their magic ring together and invoke the name "Shazzan!" in unison to summon their magical genie, Zan and Jayna had to bump fists and shout "Wonder Twin powers, activate!" together, to access their respective super-abilities to transmute into any form or water/any form of animal. (In my avatar icon, I had Dan Parent draw Superteen and Powerteen bumping their fists together with a magical glow as an homage to the Wonder Twins.) I doubt the Archie creators were paying much attention to SHAZZAN, and ACP's Chuck and Nancy weren't introduced at the same time. In the earliest stories Chuck had no regular girlfriend. They're just common names, and were probably chosen from a group of names that you might find among any typical school classroom of students. A closer connection would be that Nancy (from
Shazzan) was portrayed by the same actress who was also Josie's voice in
Josie and the Pussycats -- Janet Waldo.