Cartoonist Charles Schulz produced over 18,000 Peanuts comic strips from 1950 to 2000.

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Watch American Masters: Good Ol’ Charles Schulz on Monday, Oct. 29 at 9 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 4 at 1 a.m. and noon.

Read some fun facts about Peanuts at the end of this blog

In one of those Parade magazine “I-have-a-movie-coming-out” interviews, Brad Pitt said he lives with a “pervasive sadness.” Strangely, I thought better of him for it. He, too, must endure the human condition.

In another one of life’s mysteries, or possibly one of the miracles of synaptic activity, Brad Pitt made me think of Charles Schulz.

At the beginning of the American Masters documentary Good Ol’ Charles Schulz, we are told the cartoonist watched the film “Citizen Kane” 40 times over the course of his life. “Forty times?” marvels one of the interviewees. “What was he looking for?”

Apparently the same thing as Charles Foster Kane: some ineffable thing that is lost and cannot be found.

For all the pleasure the comic strip Peanuts has brought to readers around the world, its creator lived with a chronic sense of loss, sadness and a feeling that he was unappreciated. Peanuts was the venue in which Schulz’ psyche played out — all of his hopes, fears and anxieties. Linus never sees the Great Pumpkin. The Red Baron always gets away. Charlie Brown never kicks the football. The Peanuts gang endured unrequited love, loneliness, resentment and despair for almost 50 years — just like their creator.

That may explain the real mass appeal of the comic strip. Of course, the characters are lovable. But it wasn’t usually a laugh-out-loud comic strip. It was wistful and poignant and illustrated in plainly drawn frames truths and experiences we all recognize, even as children.

Which brings me back to Schulz’ obsession (40 times qualifies) with “Citizen Kane.” For all of the money, power and fame Kane accumulated, he failed to find that ineffable something that could make him feel whole. And neither, apparently, could this beloved cartoonist. Despite a lifetime spent pondering the mysteries of being, Schulz concluded, “I don’t think I know anything about life. It’s all a mystery to me.”

Fun facts about Peanuts:

• For the television specials, director Bill Melendez created the voices of adults (“wa-wa-wa”) on a trombone, using a plunger as a mute.

• In the Sunday strips of May 16 and 23, 1954, you can actually see grown-ups — or at least their legs — surrounding Lucy and Charlie Brown at a golf tournament Lucy has entered. Schulz later expressed regret at showing adults even in this limited fashion.

• Snoopy’s siblings from the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm are Spike, with the mustache, from a desert outside of Needles, California; Belle, his only sister; Marbles, “the smart one,” a spotted beagle; Olaf, aka “Ugly Olaf,” a much fuller-bodied beagle; and Andy, the fuzzy-haired sibling.

• Charlie Brown’s dad works as a barber, just as Schulz’s own father did.

• Generally, the signs on Lucy’s psychiatry booth read: “Psychiatric Help 5¢” and “The Doctor Is In,” but the cost of psychiatric help rose as high as 47 cents.

• In April 1960, the world first learned that “happiness is a warm puppy.” Fewer people remember that in October of that year, Snoopy rejected another “warm-puppy” hug from Lucy, declaring that “My mother didn’t raise me to be a heating pad.” In October 1964, Linus hugged Snoopy and then asked “What’s so happy about a warm puppy?”

• The girl “with the naturally curly hair” is known as Frieda.

• The dancing girls featured in A Charlie Brown Christmas are twin sisters named “Three” and “Four,” who were characters from the daily Peanuts in the 1960s. They had an older brother named “Five.” In the strip’s story line, their father names them with numbers in protest of society’s ever-growing trend of reducing human lives to statistics. Their last name is actually 95742, the family’s zip code. Most have deduced that this was a bit of Schulz’s social commentary. The three characters were seldom seen after the early ’70s.

• Between 1990 and 1991, Charlie Brown had a girlfriend. He met Peggy Jean at summer camp and was so enamored (and extremely nervous), that he introduced himself as “Brownie Charles,” the name by which she would know him until she moved away. Throughout their relationship, he was continually torn between Peggy Jean and his affection for the Little Red-Haired Girl.

• If you purely follow the strip (which is the preferred interpretation of the story lines by most Peanuts purists), the Little Red-Haired Girl is never given a name. Actually, she’s never even seen in the strip. The Little Red-Haired Girl did appear in one of the Peanuts TV specials (It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, 1977), in which she was called “Heather.” But in that instance, the creative decisions regarding her appearance were decided by the show’s animators, not Schulz.

• The names of the teachers in Peanuts are Mrs. Donovan, mentioned as Charlie Brown’s teacher; Miss Othmar, later Mrs. Hagemeyer, Linus’s favorite teacher; Miss Halverson, Linus’s new teacher, after Miss Othmar is fired during a strike (she later reappears, sending Miss Halverson into comic-strip limbo); and Miss Swanson, mentioned as Peppermint Patty’s teacher. Peppermint Patty also had another teacher, named Miss Tenure, who most notably accused her of stealing a box of gold stars from her desk.

• By Schulz’s wishes, no new Peanuts strips will ever be drawn and published. There are new animated specials in development, but the story lines will be based entirely on themes and dialogue from the strip’s history. The strips still published in daily newspaper and on the www.Snoopy.com Web site are reprints from the nearly 50-year/18,000-strip history of Peanuts.

Source: Charles M. Schulz Museum and Lumiere Productions.