Today marks the 13th Anniversary of the passing of Charles M. Schulz, whose simple pen and ink comic strip Peanuts parlayed into a worldwide empire of riches, success and set the bar and standard as one of the greatest comic strips of all time.

Schulz, who was a passive and insecure man in real life, utilized those “traits” as the building blocks to the main character of Peanuts, the young tyke Charlie Brown. The sparse-haired, zig-zagged-shirted Brown, became the true embodiment of the seminal “loser” type everyman who seemed to never get a break, let alone an even one, in his life…always coming up empty, always rolling snake eyes with the metaphorical dice he was given.

A Boy Named Charlie Brown, a collection of jazz songs by The Vince Guaraldi Trio which were from the earliest Peanuts television specials, is now available on MP3 format from Amazon this month for only $5.00, as part of their monthly $5 MP3 Album Deals.

Vince Guaraldi was a jazz pianist responsible for some traditional, samba and bossa nova-style acoustic jazz during his career. He scored a minor hit with the song “Cast Your Fate To The Wind,” which was released in the mid-1960s and won him a Grammy Award. It was on the strength of this song, which netted him the gig to score the Peanuts specials, starting with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 1965. That score, became an instant smash and is regarded as a traditional Christmas album to this very day. He wound up scoring the next 15 specials afterwards, all infused with the bright, upbeat fast-paced and sometimes mellow rainy ballads that permeated and made the specials as memorable and identifiable as the animation or the narratives within them. His career was cut tragically short when he died of a heart attack in February of 1976, capping not only a loss to the jazz community, but also ending an era of the sound and feel of the Peanuts specials. Specials continued to be produced well into the 21st century, but replacement sound alike composers for them couldn’t muster up the great energy that came from the mind of Vince Guaraldi, and thus, they were never the same again.

The MP3 album deal of the day is the soundtrack A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, which is on sale for only $3.99.

The album, which is the 2012 Remastered & Expanded Edition, contains 14 songs that are a mix of traditional Christmas songs (“Hark, The Herald Angels Sing”), classical music (“Fur Elise”), Charlie Brown themes (“Linus And Lucy”) and comes with a PDF Digital Booklet. The CD version is available for $6.99.

Browse the main sale page for 100 albums on sale for only $5 each in MP3 format through the end of November 2012.

There’s nothing like a good mash–up, and today brings with it a special one to behold.

Artist and cartoonist Charles Forsman has taken one of the most simple and innocent bits of nostalgia in Charles Shultz‘s famed comic strip, Peanuts, with Charlie Brown, and fused it together with the relentless oceanic terror that is Steven Spielberg‘s classic, JAWS.

The mash–up was so popular that the limited amount of 11″ by 17″ prints that Forsman had available were gone in the blink of an eye, which is rather depressing for those of us who see the genius and want to own a piece. But never fear””Forsman is pondering a second print run if it gets enough attention, so let him know how badly you want it on the Twitter…or at least ask him to send me one!

You can see the full Peanuts/Jaws mash–up below now.