"Good grief." - W.J. Flywheel, Webporium Curator PEANUTS Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, which ran from October 2nd, 1950, to February 13th, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. The comic strip is the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all, making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being". At its peak, Peanuts ran in over 2,600 newspapers, with a readership of 355 million in 75 countries, and was translated into 21 languages. It helped to cement the four-panel gag strip as the standard in the United States, and together with its merchandise earned Schulz more than $1 billion. Reprints of the strip are still syndicated and run in almost every U.S. newspaper. The strip focuses entirely on a social circle of young children, where adults exist but are rarely seen or heard. The main character, Charlie Brown, is meek, nervous, and lacks self-confidence. He is unable to fly a kite, win a baseball game, or kick a football held by his cruel friend Lucy, who always pulls it away at the last instant. Peanuts is one of the literate strips with philosophical, psychological, and sociological overtones that flourished in the 1950s. The strip's humor (at least during its '60s peak) is psychologically complex, and the characters' interactions formed a tangle of relationships that drove the strip. Peanuts achieved considerable success with its television specials, several of which, including A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, won or were nominated for Emmy Awards. The Peanuts holiday specials remain popular and are currently broadcast on TV during the corresponding seasons. TV Guide ranked the Peanuts television specials the fourth Greatest TV Cartoon of All Time. The Peanuts franchise also met acclaim in theatre, with the stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown being a successful and often-performed production. A computer-animated feature film based on the strip, The Peanuts Movie, was released on November 6th, 2015. Peanuts had its origin in Li'l Folks, a weekly panel comic that appeared in Schulz's hometown paper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from 1947 to 1950. He first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like the early 1950s version of Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post which published 17 single-panel cartoons by Schulz. The first of these was of a boy sitting with his feet on an ottoman. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a firm run by the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped in early 1950. Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate - also operated by Scripps-Howard - with his best work from Li'l Folks. When his work was picked up by United Feature Syndicate, they decided to run the new comic strip he had been working on. This strip was similar in spirit to the panel comic, but it had a set cast of characters, rather than different nameless little folk for each page. The name Li'l Folks was too close to the names of two other comics of the time: Al Capp's Li'l Abner and a strip titled Little Folks. To avoid confusion, the syndicate settled on the name Peanuts, after the peanut gallery featured in the Howdy Doody TV show. Peanuts was a title Schulz always disliked. In a 1987 interview, Schulz said of the title Peanuts: "It's totally ridiculous, has no meaning, is simply confusing, and has no dignity, and I think my humor has dignity." The periodic collections of the strips in paperback book form typically had either "Charlie Brown" or "Snoopy" in the title, not "Peanuts", because of Schulz' distaste for his strip's title. From November 20th, 1966, to January 4th, 1987, the opening Sunday panels typically read Peanuts, featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown. Peanuts premiered on October 2nd, 1950, in nine newspapers: The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Tribune, The Allentown Morning Call, The Bethlehem Globe-Times, The Denver Post, The Seattle Times, The New York World-Telegram & Sun, and The Boston Globe. It began as a daily strip. The first strip was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other young children, Shermy and Patty. Shermy lauds Charlie Brown as he walks by, but then tells Patty how he hates him in the final panel. This was groundbreaking. Until then, rarely had children expressed hatred for others in comic strips. Snoopy was also an early character in the strip, first appearing in the third strip, which ran on October 4th. Its first Sunday strip appeared January 6th, 1952, in the half-page format, which was the only complete format for the entire life of the Sunday strip. Most readers did not know that they often missed one or more panels, so their newspaper could save space. Most of the other characters that eventually became the main characters of Peanuts did not appear until later: Violet (February 1951), Schroeder (May 1951), Lucy (March 1952), Linus (September 1952), Pig-Pen (July 1954), Sally (August 1959), Frieda (March 1961), "Peppermint" Patty (August 1966), Woodstock (introduced April 1967; given a name in June 1970), Franklin (July 1968), Marcie (July 1971), and Rerun (March 1973). Schulz decided to produce all aspects of the strip himself from the script to the finished art and lettering. Schulz drew the strip for nearly 50 years, with no assistants but did hire help to produce the comic book adaptations of Peanuts. Thus, the strip was able to be presented with a unified tone, and Schulz was able to employ a minimalistic style. Backgrounds were generally not used, and when they were, Schulz's frazzled lines imbued them with a fraught, psychological appearance. This style has been described by art critic John Carlin as forcing "its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions." Schulz held this belief all his life, reaffirming in 1994 the importance of crafting the strip himself: "This is not a crazy business about slinging ink. This is a deadly serious business." While the strip in its early years resembles its later form, there are significant differences. The art was cleaner, sleeker, and simpler, with thicker lines and short, squat characters. For example, in these early strips, Charlie Brown's famous round head is closer to the shape of an American football or rugby football. Most of the kids were initially fairly round-headed. As another example, all the characters (except Charlie Brown) had their mouths longer and had smaller eyes when they looked sideways. Charlie Brown was also unique in appearing to have virtually no hair. Though this is often interpreted as him being bald, Charles Schulz explained that he saw Charlie Brown as having hair that was so light, and cut so short, that it wasn't seen very well. Schulz described his style as "The Toothpick School," i.e., as though drawn with a toothpick. Peanuts did not have a lead character from the onset. Its initial cast was small, featuring only Charlie Brown, Shermy, Patty (not to be confused with Peppermint Patty), and a beagle, Snoopy. The strip soon began to focus on Charlie Brown, though. Charlie Brown's main characteristic is his self-defeating stubbornness: he can never win a ballgame, but continues playing baseball; he can never fly a kite successfully, but continues trying to fly his kite. Others see this as the character's admirable determined persistence to try his best against all odds. Though his inferiority complex was evident from the start, in the earliest strips he also got in his own licks when socially sparring with Patty and Shermy. Some early strips also involved romantic attractions between Charlie Brown and Patty or Violet, the next major character added to the strip. As the years went by, Shermy and Patty appeared less often and were demoted to supporting roles, while new major characters were introduced. Schroeder, Lucy van Pelt, and her brother Linus debuted as very young children - Schroeder and Linus both in diapers and pre-verbal. Snoopy, who began as a more or less typical dog, soon started to verbalize his thoughts via thought bubbles; eventually he adopted other human characteristics such as walking on his hind legs, reading books, using a typewriter, and participating in sports. The 1960s was the golden age for Peanuts when some of the most well-known themes and characters appeared, including Peppermint Patty, Snoopy as the "World War One Flying Ace", Frieda and her "naturally curly hair", and Franklin. Peanuts is remarkable for its deft social commentary, especially compared with other strips appearing in the 1950s and early 1960s. Schulz did not explicitly address racial and gender equality issues so much as he assumed them to be self-evident in the first place. Peppermint Patty's athletic skill and self-confidence is simply taken for granted, for example, as is Franklin's presence in a racially integrated school and neighborhood. The fact that Charlie Brown's baseball team had three girls was also at least ten years ahead of its time (and in fact, the 1966 TV special Charlie Brown's All-Stars dealt with Charlie Brown refusing sponsorship of the team because the sponsor said the league does not allow girls or dogs to play). The 1960s also saw the strip began to focus more on Snoopy. Many of the strips from this point revolve around Snoopy's active, Walter Mitty-like fantasy life, in which he imagined himself to be (most famously) a World War I flying ace or a bestselling suspense novelist, to the bemusement and consternation of the children who wonder what he is doing but also occasionally participate. Snoopy eventually took on more than 150 distinct personas over the course of the strip, from "Joe Cool" to Mickey Mouse. Schulz would throw satirical barbs at any number of topics when he chose. Over the years he tackled everything from the Vietnam War to school dress codes to the "New math." In 1963 he added a little boy named "5" to the cast, whose sisters were named "3" and "4," and whose father had changed their family name to their ZIP Code, giving in to the way numbers were taking over people's identities. In 1958, a strip in which Snoopy tossed Linus into the air and boasted that he was the first dog ever to launch a human, parodied the hype associated with Sputnik 2's launch of "Laika" the dog into space earlier that year. Another sequence lampooned Little Leagues and "organized" play when all the neighborhood kids join snowman-building leagues and criticize Charlie Brown when he insists on building his own snowmen without leagues or coaches. Peanuts touched on religious themes on many occasions, most notably the classic television special A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible (Luke 2:8–14) to explain to Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about (in personal interviews, Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side). Robert L. Short wrote several books in which he claimed he detected theological messages in the strips. Additionally, he used them as illustrations during his lecturing about the gospel. Schulz supported such interpretation but ultimately attempted not to align himself with it. Although he was a Christian who once taught Bible classes, and whose Linus character routinely quoted scripture, Schulz referred to himself more than once as a secular humanist. In 1975, the panel format was shortened slightly horizontally, and shortly after the lettering became larger to accommodate the shrinking format. Previously, the daily Peanuts strips were formatted in a four-panel "space saving" format beginning in the 1950s, with a few very rare eight-panel strips, that still fit into the four-panel mold. Beginning on Leap Day in 1988, Schulz abandoned the four-panel format in favor of three-panel dailies and occasionally used the entire length of the strip as one panel, partly for experimentation, but also to combat the dwindling size of the comics page. Later in the 90s, Schulz abandoned the early characters Patty, Violet, Pigpen and Franklin (possibly because Schulz focused more on the major characters Charlie Brown, Sally, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and Woodstock) due to his concentration on the limit of the characters. In the late 1970s, during Schulz' negotiations with United Feature Syndicate over a new contract, syndicate president William C. Payette hired superhero comic artist Al Plastino to draw a backlog of Peanuts strips to hold in reserve in case Schulz left the strip (above). When Schulz and the syndicate reached a successful agreement, United Media stored these unpublished strips, the existence of which eventually became public. Plastino himself also claimed to have ghostwritten for Schulz, apparently uncredited, while Schulz underwent heart surgery in 1983. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the strip remained the most popular comic in history, even though other comics, such as Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes, rivaled Peanuts in popularity. Schulz continued to write the strip up until announcing his retirement, on December 14th, 1999, due to his failing health. The final daily original Peanuts comic strip was published on Monday, January 3rd, 2000. The strip contained a note to the readers of the strip from Schulz and a drawing of Snoopy, with his trusty typewriter, sitting atop his doghouse deep in thought. Beginning the next day, a rerun package premiered in papers that had elected to pick it up. Although Schulz did not draw any daily strips that were to run past January 3rd, he had drawn five extra Sunday strips and these had yet to run. The first of these strips appeared six days after the last daily on January 9th. On February 13th, 2000, the day following Schulz's death, the last-ever new Peanuts strip ran in papers. The strip, which was three panels in length, began with Charlie Brown answering the phone with someone on the end presumably asking for Snoopy. Charlie Brown responded with "No, I think he's writing." The panel next to shows Snoopy sitting at his typewriter with the opening to a letter, addressed as "Dear Friends". The final panel features a large blue sky background over which several drawings from past strips are placed. Underneath those drawings is a colorized version of Schulz's January 3rd strip, with almost the same note he wrote to the fans which reads as follows: Dear Friends, I have been fortunate to draw Charlie Brown and his friends for almost fifty years. It has been the fulfillment of my childhood ambition. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to maintain the schedule demanded by a daily comic strip. My family does not wish "Peanuts" to be continued by anyone else, therefore I am announcing my retirement. I have been grateful over the years for the loyalty of our editors and the wonderful support and love expressed to me by fans of the comic strip. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them... - Charles M. Schulz Many other cartoonists paid tribute to Peanuts and Schulz by homages in their own strips, appearing on February 13th, 2000, or in the week beforehand. The comic was reprinted the day after that, but only had the farewell letter. After Peanuts ended, United Feature Syndicate began offering the newspapers that ran it a package of reprinted strips under the title Classic Peanuts. The syndicate limited the choices to either strips from the 1960s or from the 1990s, although a newspaper was also given the option to carry both reprint packages if it desired. All Sunday strips in the package, however, come from the 1960s. Despite the end of the strip, Peanuts continues to be prevalent in multiple media, through widespread syndication, the publication of The Complete Peanuts, the release of several new television specials (all of which Schulz had worked on, but had not finished, before his death), and Peanuts Motion Comics. Additionally, BOOM! Studios has published a series of comic books, which feature new material by new writers and artists, although some of the new material is based on classic Schulz stories from decades past, as well as including some classic strips by Schulz, mostly Sunday color strips. Universal Uclick's website, GoComics.com, announced on January 5th, 2015, that they would be launching "Peanuts Begins", a feature rerunning the entire history of the strip from the beginning, in colorized form. This was done to honor the sixty-fifth anniversary of the debut of Peanuts. On June 3rd, 2010, United Media sold all its Peanuts-related assets, including its strips and branding, to a new company, Peanuts Worldwide, LLC, a joint venture of the Iconix Brand Group (which owned 80 percent) and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates (20 percent). In addition, United Media sold its United Media Licensing arm, which represents licensing for its other properties, to Peanuts Worldwide. United Feature Syndicate continued to syndicate the strip, until February 27th, 2011, when Universal Uclick took over syndication, ending United Media's 60-plus-years stewardship of Peanuts. In May 2017, DHX Media announced that it would acquire Iconix's entertainment brands, including the 80% stake of Peanuts Worldwide and full rights to the Strawberry Shortcake brand, for $345 million. DHX officially took control of the properties on June 30th, 2017. Schulz received the National Cartoonist Society Humor Comic Strip Award for Peanuts in 1962, the Reuben Award in 1955 and 1964 (the first cartoonist to receive the honor twice), the Elzie Segar Award in 1980, and the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. A Charlie Brown Christmas won a Peabody Award and an Emmy; Peanuts cartoon specials have received a total of two Peabody Awards and four Emmys. For his work on the strip, Charles Schulz (along with Snoopy) are credited with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a place in the William Randolph Hearst Cartoon Hall of Fame. Peanuts was featured on the cover of Time on April 9th, 1965, with the accompanying article praising the strip as being "the leader of a refreshing new breed that takes an unprecedented interest in the basics of life." The strip was declared second in a list of the "greatest comics of the 20th century" commissioned by The Comics Journal in 1999. Peanuts lost out to George Herriman's Krazy Kat, a strip Schulz admired (and in fact was among his biggest inspirations), and he accepted the positioning in good grace, to the point of agreeing with the result. In 2002 TV Guide declared Snoopy and Charlie Brown equal 8th in their list of "Top 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time", published to commemorate their 50th anniversary. The December 1997 issue of The Comics Journal featured an extensive collection of testimonials to Peanuts. Over forty cartoonists, from mainstream newspaper cartoonists to underground, independent comic artists, shared reflections on the power and influence of Schulz' art. Gilbert Hernandez wrote "Peanuts was and still is for me a revelation. It's mostly from Peanuts where I was inspired to create the village of Palomar in Love and Rockets. Schulz' characters, the humor, the insight... gush, gush, gush, bow, bow, bow, grovel, grovel, grovel..." Tom Batiuk wrote: "The influence of Charles Schulz on the craft of cartooning is so pervasive it is almost taken for granted." Batiuk also described the depth of emotion in Peanuts: "Just beneath the cheerful surface were vulnerabilities and anxieties that we all experienced, but were reluctant to acknowledge. By sharing those feelings with us, Schulz showed us a vital aspect of our common humanity, which is, it seems to me, the ultimate goal of great art." In 2001, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors renamed the Sonoma County Airport, located a few miles northwest of Santa Rosa, California, the Charles M. Schulz Airport in his honor. The airport's logo features Snoopy as the World War I Flying Ace (goggles/scarf), taking to the skies on top of his red doghouse (the Sopwith Camel). A bronze statue of Charlie Brown and Snoopy stands in Depot Park in downtown Santa Rosa. Schulz was included in the touring exhibition "Masters of American Comics" based on his achievements in the art form while producing the strip. His gag work is hailed as being "psychologically complex," and his style on the strip is noted as being "perfectly in keeping with the style of its times." Despite the widespread acclaim generated by Peanuts as a whole, some critics have alleged a decline in the strip's quality in the later years of its run, as Schulz frequently digressed from the more cerebral socio-psychological themes that characterized his earlier work in favor of lighter, more whimsical fare. For example, in an essay published in the New York Press at the time of the final daily strip in January 2000, "Against Snoopy," Christopher Caldwell argued that the character of Snoopy, and the strip's increased focus on him in the 1970s, "went from being the strip's besetting artistic weakness to ruining it altogether". PEANUTS IN TV AND MOVIES In addition to the strip and numerous books, the Peanuts characters have appeared in animated form on television numerous times. This started when the Ford Motor Company licensed the characters in early 1959 for a series of color television commercials for its automobiles and intros for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show which they sponsored. While the show ended in 1961, the deal lasted another three years. The ads were animated by Bill Meléndez for Playhouse Pictures, a cartoon studio that had Ford as a client. Schulz and Meléndez became friends, and when producer Lee Mendelson decided to make a two-minute animated sequence for a TV documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown in 1963, he brought on Meléndez for the project. Before the documentary was completed, the three of them (with help from their sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company) produced their first half-hour animated special, the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was first aired on the CBS network on December 9th, 1965. This episode is undoubtedly the most widely recognized of all Peanuts TV specials. This came after Coca-Cola asked Mendelson if he had a Christmas special. He said "yes." The next day he called Schulz up and said they were making A Charlie Brown Christmas. The animated version of Peanuts differs in some aspects from the strip. In the strip, adult voices are heard, though conversations are usually only depicted from the children's end. To translate this aspect to the animated medium, the sound of a trombone with a solotone mute was used to simulate adult "voices." A more significant deviation from the strip was the treatment of Snoopy. In the strip, the dog's thoughts are verbalized in thought balloons; in animation, he is typically mute, his thoughts communicated through growls or laughs (voiced by Bill Meléndez), and pantomime, or by having human characters verbalizing his thoughts for him. These treatments have both been abandoned temporarily in the past. For example, they experimented with teacher dialogue in She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. The elimination of Snoopy's "voice" is probably the most controversial aspect of the adaptations, but Schulz apparently approved of the treatment. The success of A Charlie Brown Christmas was the impetus for CBS to air many more prime-time Peanuts specials over the years, beginning with Charlie Brown's All-Stars and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown in 1966. In total, more than thirty animated specials were produced. Until his death in 1976, jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi composed musical scores for the specials; in particular, the piece "Linus and Lucy" which has become popularly known as the signature theme song of the Peanuts franchise. Schulz, Mendelson and Meléndez also collaborated on four theatrical feature films starring the characters, the first of which was A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969). Most of these made use of material from Schulz' strips, which were then adapted, although in other cases plots were developed around areas where there were minimal strips to reference. The 1971 TV special Play It Again, Charlie Brown was the first time that someone other than Peter Robbins voiced Charlie Brown which in this case was Chris Inglis. The characters voices were slightly deeper than usual. It would be like that for the rest of the TV specials. In 1972, the second feature film Snoopy, Come Home was released. This was the first time that Snoopy's thoughts were communicated to the audiences. The film's theme of loss made it have as much sadness as any animation centering on Charlie Brown. Snoopy and Charlie Brown's parting, Charlie Brown's inability to cope without his friend, and Snoopy's farewell to his former owner Lila are often pointed out as poignant moments in the history of Peanuts. Starting with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Phil Roman would direct the specials. It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown was the last special produced during Vince Guaraldi's lifetime as he died two months before this special aired. It was dedicated to him. Ed Bogas composed the musical scores of Peanuts movies television specials 1977 until 1989. Judy Munsen composed the musical scores alongside Ed Bogas from 1977 until 1992. Desirée Goyette briefly composed the musical scores on and off during the 1980s. Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown was the first project done after Guaraldi's death. It used the same voice cast as You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown. It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown and What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown! featured Linus & Lucy arrangement's Ed Bogas and Judy Munsen. Starting with A Charlie Brown Celebration Bill Melendez would direct the specials again. A Charlie Brown Celebration, It's an Adventure, Charlie Brown, and The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show all had vignettes while It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Snoopy!!! The Musical were musicals though there were two songs in Happy New Year, Charlie Brown!. It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown was the only special during this period in which Ed Bogas, Judy Munsen, or Desiree Goyette weren't involved in music production with Paul Rodriquez as the composer. The former and latter would stop scoring the specials in 1990. David Benoit redid Vince Guaraldi's musical scores from 1992 until 2006. Since then, various composers have composed the musical scores in more recent productions. By the mid-1990s, the specials' popularity had begun to wane, and CBS showed disinterest in new specials, even rejecting It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown completely. An eight-episode TV miniseries called This is America, Charlie Brown, for instance, was released during a writer's strike. Also, NBC aired You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown in 1994 (the first special not to air on CBS) ten days before Super Bowl XXVIII. Eventually, the last Peanuts specials made during Schulz' lifetime were released direct-to-video, and no new ones were created until after the year 2000 when ABC obtained the rights to the three fall holiday specials. The Nickelodeon cable network re-aired a package of most of the specials produced before 1992, as well as The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show and This Is America, Charlie Brown, under the umbrella title You're on Nickelodeon, Charlie Brown between 1997 and 2001. Eight Peanuts-based specials have been made posthumously. Of these, three are tributes to Peanuts or other Peanuts specials, and five are completely new specials based on dialogue from the strips and ideas given to ABC by Schulz before his death. He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, was telecast on ABC on November 20th, 2006, following a repeat broadcast of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Airing 43 years after the first special, the premiere of He's a Bully, Charlie Brown was watched by nearly 10 million viewers, winning its time slot and beating a Madonna concert special. In the 2010 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, it was announced that a new Peanuts animated special, Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown, would debut in 2011. The special was released on DVD first, on March 29th, 2011, and later premiered on Fox, on November 24th, 2011. Many of the specials and feature films have also been released on various home video formats over the years. To date, 20 of the specials, the two films A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home, and the miniseries This Is America, Charlie Brown have all been released to DVD. In October 2007, Warner Bros. acquired the Peanuts catalog from Paramount for an undisclosed amount of money. As aforementioned, they now hold the worldwide distribution rights for all Peanuts properties including over 50 television specials, these are originally managed by Warner Bros. Television and Warner Bros. Television Animation. Warner has made plans to develop new specials for television as well as the direct to video market, as well as short subjects for digital distribution, and some of these have in fact already been released via Warner Premiere. Paramount retains the rights to the theatrical releases, as the first two movies (A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home) are owned by CBS and distributed for home video through Paramount while CTD distributes for television, and the other two (Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!)) were handled in-house by Paramount, with Trifecta holding TV distribution rights. Peanuts Worldwide has partnered with Normaal Animation and France Télévisions to produce 500 90-second animated short films, adapted from the strip Peanuts, which aired in fall 2014, including on French television station France 3. In October 2012, it was announced that a 3D computer-animated feature film titled The Peanuts Movie would be released on November 6th, 2015, coinciding with the 65th anniversary of the debut of the comic strip and the 50th anniversary of the television special, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Written by Charles Schulz's son, Craig, his grandson, Bryan, and Cornelius Uliano—who are also producing the film alongside Paul Feig, it was animated by 20th Century Fox's Blue Sky Studios, and directed by Steve Martino, the director of Horton Hears a Who! and Ice Age: Continental Drift. The Peanuts characters have been featured in many books over the years. Some represented chronological reprints of the newspaper strip, while others were thematic collections such as Snoopy's Tennis Book, or collections of inspirational adages such as Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. Some single-story books were produced, such as Snoopy and the Red Baron. In addition, many of the animated television specials and feature films were adapted into book form. Peanuts characters even found their way to the live stage, appearing in the musicals You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Snoopy!!! - The Musical, and in "Snoopy on Ice", a live Ice Capades-style show aimed primarily at young children, all of which have had several touring productions over the years. You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown was originally a successful Off-Broadway musical that ran for four years (1967–1971) in New York City and on tour, with Gary Burghoff (who would later play Radar in M*A*S*H) as the original Charlie Brown (below back row right). An updated revival opened on Broadway in 1999, and by 2002 it had become the most frequently produced musical in American theatre history. It was also adapted for television twice, as a live-action NBC special and an animated CBS special. Snoopy!!! The Musical was a musical comedy based on the Peanuts comic strip, originally performed at Lamb's Theatre Off-Broadway in 1982. In its 1983 run in London's West End, it won an Olivier Award. In 1988, it was adapted into an animated TV special. The New Players Theatre in London staged a revival in 2004 to honor its 21st anniversary, but some reviewers noted that its "feel good" sentiments had not aged well. In 1962 Columbia Records issued an album titled Peanuts, with Kaye Ballard and Arthur Siegel performing (as Lucy and Charlie Brown, respectively) to music composed by Fred Karlin. Fantasy Records issued several albums featuring Vince Guaraldi's jazz scores from the animated specials, including Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown (1964), A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), Oh, Good Grief! (1968), Charlie Brown's Holiday Hits (1998), and Peanuts Portraits (2010). All were later reissued on CD. Columbia Records released soundtrack albums for the films A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969) and Snoopy, Come Home (1972), although neither has been reissued on CD. Other jazz artists have recorded Peanuts-themed albums, often featuring cover versions of Guaraldi's compositions. These include Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and Wynton Marsalis (Joe Cool's Blues, 1995); George Winston (Linus & Lucy, 1996); David Benoit (Here's to You, Charlie Brown!, 2000, and Jazz for Peanuts, 2008); and Cyrus Chestnut (A Charlie Brown Christmas, 2000). The 1989 GRP Records release Happy Anniversary, Charlie Brown! and the 2005 Peak Records release 40 Years: A Charlie Brown Christmas also include interpretations of Guaraldi's themes by various smooth jazz and blues artists. The 1960s American rock band The Royal Guardsmen recorded several songs about Snoopy's fantasies of flying against the Red Baron in World War I, including the hit singles "Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron" and "Snoopy's Christmas." The first song was released without Schulz's consent, and he and UFS sued successfully for royalties but allowed the group to make future songs and even contributed album artwork for such releases as Snoopy and His Friends. Cast recordings (in both original and revival productions) of the stage musicals You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Snoopy!!! The Musical have been released over the years. Numerous animated Peanuts specials were adapted into book-and-record sets, issued on the "Charlie Brown Records" imprint by Disney Read-Along in the 1970s and '80s. Also issued on Charlie Brown Records, via Disneyland Records, was the soundtrack to Flashbeagle in 1984, which featured Desiree Goyette and Joey Scarbury (of "Theme from the Greatest American Hero" fame) on the title track and other songs written by Ed Bogas and Goyette. In 1992, RCA Victor released an album of classical piano music ostensibly performed by Schroeder himself. Titled Schroeder's Greatest Hits, the album contains solo piano works by Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and others, performed by John Miller, Ronnie Zito, Ken Bichel, and Nelly Kokinos. In 1983, Knott's Berry Farm, in Southern California, was the first theme park to license the Peanuts characters, creating the first Camp Snoopy area and making Snoopy the park's mascot. Snoopy is also the official mascot of all the Cedar Fair parks and operated a Camp Snoopy area at Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom, Worlds of Fun, and Valleyfair. Snoopy and Peanuts-themed attractions have also been featured at California's Great America, Canada's Wonderland, Carowinds, Kings Dominion, Kings Island and Valleyfair. The Peanuts characters can also be found at Universal Studios Japan in the Universal Wonderland section along with the characters from Sesame Street and Hello Kitty. Over the years, the Peanuts characters have appeared in ads for Dolly Madison snack cakes, Chex Mix, Bounty, Cheerios, A&W Root Beer, Kraft Foods, and Ford automobiles. In 1994, Pig-Pen appeared in a memorable spot for Regina vacuum cleaners. The characters (mostly Snoopy) served as spokespeople in print and television advertisements for the MetLife insurance company for 31 years. The characters have been featured on Hallmark Cards since 1960, and can be found adorning clothing, figurines, plush dolls, flags, balloons, posters, Christmas ornaments, and countless other bits of licensed merchandise. In East Asia, RM Licensing has licensed the Peanuts characters for fashion stores, children's apparel, and restaurants including Charlie Brown Cafe, a Hong Kong-based fast casual restaurant chain. There is also a Charlie Brown Cafe, themed with Peanuts characters, in Hongdae, Mapo-gu, Seoul, South Korea. The Peanuts characters have been licensed to Universal Studios Japan (while Peanuts merchandise in Japan has been licensed by Sanrio, best known for Hello Kitty). The Apollo 10 lunar module was nicknamed "Snoopy" and the command module "Charlie Brown". While not included in the official mission logo, Charlie Brown and Snoopy became semi-official mascots for the mission. Charles Schulz drew an original picture of Charlie Brown in a spacesuit that was hidden aboard the craft to be found by the astronauts once they were in orbit. This drawing is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center. Snoopy's connection with NASA actually began before Apollo 10. In 1968, NASA chose the beagle as an icon who would "emphasize mission success and act as a 'watchdog' for flight safety." Established that same year, the agency's "Silver Snoopy Award" is considered the astronauts personal award, given for outstanding efforts that contribute to the success of human space flight missions. Award winners receive a sterling silver Snoopy lapel pin flown in space, along with a certificate and letter of appreciation from NASA astronauts. Fewer than 1% of the workforce is recognized with a Silver Snoopy annually, making it one of the most prized awards in the industry. Giant helium balloons of Charlie Brown and Snoopy have long been a feature in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. Snoopy first appeared in 1968 as the World War I Flying Ace (below left, below right is Snoopy at the parade in 2014). Peanuts on Parade is St. Paul, Minnesota's tribute to Peanuts. It began in 2000, with the placing of 101 5-foot-tall (1.5 m) statues of Snoopy throughout the city of Saint Paul. The statues were later auctioned at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. In 2001, there was "Charlie Brown Around Town", 2002 brought "Looking for Lucy", and in 2003, "Linus Blankets Saint Paul". Permanent bronze statues of the Peanuts characters are found in Landmark Plaza in downtown Saint Paul. A Peanuts World War I Flying Ace U.S. commemorative postage stamp was released on May 17, 2001. The value was 34 cents, First Class. The Peanuts characters have appeared in various video games, a special edition of the Funk & Wagnalls children's encyclopedia called the Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia and The Peanuts Collectors Edition Monopoly board game, released by USAopoly. The game was created by Justin Gage, a prolific collector and friend of Charles and Jeannie Schulz. The game was dedicated to Schulz in memory of his passing. Good Ol' Charlie Brown and friends... CHARLIE BROWN Charlie Brown is the central protagonist of Peanuts. Depicted as a "lovable loser," Charlie Brown is one of the great American archetypes and a popular and widely recognized cartoon character depicted as a person who frequently suffers, and as a result is usually nervous and lacks self-confidence. He shows both pessimistic and optimistic attitudes: on some days, he is reluctant to go out because his day might just be spoiled, but on others, he hopes for the best and tries as much as he can to accomplish things. The character's creator, Charles M. Schulz, has said of the character that he must be the one who suffers because he is a caricature of the average person. Most of us are much more acquainted with losing than winning." Despite this, Charlie Brown does not always suffer, as he has experienced some happy moments and victories through the years, and he has sometimes uncharacteristically shown self-assertiveness despite his frequent nervousness. Lee Mendelson, producer of the majority of the Peanuts television specials, has said of Charlie Brown that, "He was, and is, the ultimate survivor in overcoming bulliness, Lucy or otherwise." Initially Charlie Brown suggests he lives in an apartment with his grandmother occupying the one above his; a few years into the strip, he moves to a house with a back yard. His name was first used on May 30th, 1948, in an early Schulz comic strip called Li'l Folks in which one boy has buried another in a sandbox and then denies that he has seen the other boy ("Charlie Brown") when asked. He made his official debut in the first Peanuts comic strip, on October 2nd, 1950. During the strip's early years, Charlie Brown was much more playful than he is known today, and often played pranks and jokes on the other characters. On December 21st of the same year, his signature zig-zag T-shirt appeared; formerly, he only wore a plain one. On the March 6th, 1951, strip, Charlie Brown first appears to play baseball, as he was warming up before telling Shermy that they can start the game; however, he was the catcher, not yet the pitcher. Charlie Brown is the manager and pitcher of a baseball team which frequently loses. His entire team is not skilled, especially his right fielder Lucy van Pelt, who is the worst baseball player in the entire Peanuts universe. Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy, who is his shortstop, is purported to be his best player, his best friend Linus was his second baseman, and his next closest friend Schroeder. Charlie Brown is often hit by a line drive back through the box on the same ball he pitched, resulting in him being stripped of all his clothes with the exception of his shorts, a literal example of being "undressed" by a hard hit ball. Despite the fact that his team almost always loses, usually with no runs scored, he remained determined and acted as an ambitious commander of a team of players who often appeared to be uncooperative; aside from this, none of the other players seem to share his determination. While the team frequently loses, it has some wins. While terrible misfortune has placed some of Charlie Brown's team's wins when Charlie Brown is not playing, there are times in which Charlie Brown has heroically led his team to a championship. Charlie Brown's relationships with other Peanuts characters initially differed significantly before they reached their more established forms. An example is his relationship with Violet Gray, to whom he was introduced to on the February 7th, 1951, strip. The two constantly remained on fairly good terms, a bit different from their now-known relationship. On the August 16th, 1951, strip, she called Charlie Brown a "blockhead", and that is the first time Charlie Brown was referred by that insult. November 14th of that year, Charlie Brown is first unable to kick a football, and Violet is responsible after letting go of the ball for fear of her hand being kicked. Charlie Brown is introduced to Schroeder on May 30th, 1951. As Schroeder is still a baby, Charlie Brown cannot converse with him. On June 1st of the same year, Charlie Brown stated that he felt like a father to Schroeder; in fact, for quite some time, he sometimes acted like a father to him, trying to teach him words and reading stories to him, and on September 24th of that year, he taught Schroeder how to play the piano, thus allowing Schroeder to become the piano prodigy he is known by Peanuts readers today. Then on that year's October 10th strip, he told Schroeder the story of Beethoven and set the piano player's obsession with the composer. Charlie Brown placed the Beethoven bust on Schroeder's piano on November 26th, 1951. Schroeder aged rapidly over time, catching up to Charlie Brown in age, and Charlie Brown became less like a father figure and more like a close friend to Schroeder. Charlie Brown had Schroeder become his catcher for the first time on the April 12th, 1952, strip. Around this point, their final relationship has pretty much been established. Charlie Brown made his appearance on the first Sunday Peanuts strip on January 6th 1952 and is first seen interacting with the character Lucy van Pelt on March 3 of that year. He was on better terms with her than later in the strip, as they often made fun of each other out of mere playfulness. The November 16th, 1952, strip is the first strip in which Charlie Brown was prevented by Lucy from kicking a football; on this strip she pulls it away because she fears that Charlie Brown will get her new football dirty, and then on the same strip, she holds it too tightly, so Charlie Brown is unable to kick it for a second time. Charlie Brown first began flying a kite on the April 25th, 1952, strip. Another one of Charlie Brown's characteristics is his inability to fly a kite. Almost every attempt to fly a kite resulted in failure, usually due to his nemesis, the Kite-Eating Tree and his lack of skills was often commented on by other characters, most often Lucy. On the March 7–8th, 1958 strips, Charlie Brown got his kite to fly into the air, but it spontaneously combusted, making his victory worthless. Charlie Brown is first seen with Linus on the September 19th, 1952. Charlie Brown was unable to talk to him because he was introduced as an infant. Similar to Schroeder, Linus caught up to Charlie Brown in age and settled as being slightly younger than him., and on the January 18th, 1956, Linus befriended Charlie Brown, and eventually he would become Charlie Brown's best friend as their current relationship was established. It was on September 1st, 1958, that Charlie Brown's father was formally revealed to be a barber (after earlier instances in the strip that linked Charlie Brown to barbers by implication.) Charlie Brown's traits and the events he underwent are inspired by those of Schulz, who admitted in interviews that he'd often felt shy and withdrawn in his life. In an interview with Charlie Rose in May 1997, Schulz observed: "I suppose there’s a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening." Furthermore, both Charlie Brown's and Schulz's fathers were barbers and their mothers housewives. Charlie Brown's friends, such as Linus and Shermy, were named after good friends of Schulz, and Peppermint Patty was inspired by Patricia Swanson, one of Schulz's cousins on his mother's side. Schulz devised the character's name when he saw peppermint candies in his house. Even Charlie Brown's unrequited love for the Little red-haired girl was inspired by Schulz's own love for Donna Mae Johnson, an Art Instruction Inc. accountant; When Schulz finally proposed to her in June 1950, shortly after he'd made his first contract with his syndicate, she turned him down and married another man. Charlie Brown's general love interest was dubbed "The Little Red-Haired Girl", as he didn't know her name and had never even talked to her. Charlie Brown liked to watch the little Red-Haired girl but hid from her sight because he is too shy to let her see him. She was usually not shown, being outside the panel, and her only actual appearance was silhouetted. Charlie Brown did fall in love with Peggy Jean, a girl first featured in the July 23rd, 1990 strip. Most of the other girls call him "wishy-washy"; however, the characters Peppermint Patty and Marcie were both infatuated towards him. Peppermint Patty had delusions that Charlie Brown liked her, though Charlie Brown considered her as only a friend. Her delusions show when she asks Charlie Brown on a Sunday Strip: "You kind of like me, don't you, Chuck?"; her saying on another Sunday strip that Charlie Brown "doesn't even understand who he likes"; her sending a Valentine to Charlie Brown that said: "I know you like me." Marcie, on the other hand, was usually too shy to admit her feelings. SNOOPY Snoopy is Charlie Brown's pet beagle. Since his debut on October 4th, 1950, Snoopy has become one of the most recognizable and iconic characters in the world. The original drawings of Snoopy were inspired by Spike, one of Schulz's childhood dogs. Snoopy was originally named "Sniffy," but the name was already being used in a different comic strip. Schulz apparently remembered that his deceased mother, Dena Schulz, had said if the family had ever gotten another dog, it'd be named Snoopy. Snoopy is a loyal, innocent, imaginative and good-natured beagle who is prone to imagining fantasy lives, including being an author, a college student known as "Joe Cool" and a World War I Royal Flying Corps ace. He is perhaps best known in this last alternate persona, wearing an aviator's helmet and goggles and a scarf while carrying a swagger stick. All of his fantasies have a similar formula: Snoopy pretends to be something, usually "world famous", and fails. His short "novels" are never published, and his Sopwith Camel is consistently shot down by his imaginary enemy, the Red Baron. Schulz said of Snoopy's character in a 1997 interview: "He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don't envy dogs the lives they have to live." Snoopy can be selfish and/or lazy at times, and had his share of moments where he is mocking his owner, Charlie Brown, but through it all, he has shown great love, care, and loyalty for his owner (even though he can't even remember his name and always refers to him as "The Round-Headed Kid"). Snoopy imagines himself to speak, but never actually does; much like with real life animals, the human characters are unaware of his musings. Though very rarely, he talks, but usually to himself. His (very articulate) thoughts are shown in thought balloons. In the animated Peanuts films and television specials, Snoopy's thoughts are not verbalized; his moods are instead conveyed through growls, sobs, laughter, and monosyllabic utterances such as "bleah" or "hey" as well as through pantomime. The only exceptions are in the animated adaptions of the musicals You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Snoopy!!! The Musical in which Snoopy's thoughts are verbalized by Robert Towers and Cameron Clarke respectively. (His dialogue, however, is not "heard" by the other characters except Woodstock and other non-human characters.) Snoopy's doghouse defies physics and is shown to be bigger on the inside than the outside (like a Tardis). It is usually shown in a side view, so you cannot see the inside, except for the May 13th, 2007 comic strip in the second frame. It is also his "airplane" in his fantasies. Snoopy appeared on the October 4th, 1950, strip, two days after the first strip. He was called Snoopy for the first time a month later, on November 10th. On March 16th, 1952, his thoughts were first shown in a thought balloon. Snoopy first appeared upright on his hind legs on January 9th, 1956, when he was shown ice-skating across a frozen lake. In early Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown was not Snoopy's owner (as seen in the February 2nd, 1951, strip), and it was initially not clear who his owner actually was. The September 29th, 1951 strip implied that Snoopy was owned by Shermy. Charlie Brown was first portrayed as being responsible for Snoopy in the strips of November 1st and 3rd, 1955; it was not until September 1st, 1958 that Snoopy was specifically said to be Charlie Brown's dog. Snoopy frequently tries to kiss Lucy on the cheek and/or nose, which Lucy, who is afraid of dog germs, thoroughly hates. These actions occasionally result in Lucy hurting Snoopy. Despite their rivalry toward each other, each seems to care for the other: in Snoopy, Come Home, Lucy is sad to see him go and is (momentarily) glad when he comes back home. In some strips, Lucy goes to Snoopy for help, such as in the April 16th, 1961 strip, wherein a jealous Lucy and Frieda are beating each other up at Schroeder's piano, Lucy ends up winning, and shakes hands with Snoopy in the end, looking slightly injured. Snoopy also commandeers Lucy's psychiatric booth either in her absence or when she ends up being the one needing help. Snoopy often tries to steal Linus' blanket, leading to slapstick fights which Snoopy often wins. Snoopy was often stated to have seven siblings. Five appeared at various times in the strip: four brothers, Andy, Marbles, Olaf, and Spike; and one sister, Belle. The two others were never mentioned by name in the comic strip. According to the 1991 TV special Snoopy's Reunion, their names are Molly and Rover; however, their appearance is not considered canonical in the comic strip. In the June 6th, 1959 comic strip, following the birth of Charlie Brown's sister Sally, Snoopy remarks that he has no brothers or sisters, and is an "only dog." However, in a March 18th, 1971 strip, Snoopy writes in his autobiography: "I was born one bright Spring morning at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. I was one of eight puppies." Their mother is called Missy, but has appeared only once in Peanuts, on July 26th, 1996. A t-shirt that was sold for several years at Target and other stores shows Spike, Andy, Snoopy, Marbles and Olaf in a parody of the famous dogs playing poker print, despite the advertising copy which misidentified the characters. Snoopy's father, Baxter, is said to have lived in Florida, and he wears glasses and has a mustache. Snoopy's mother looks like a female version of Snoopy (similar to Belle and Molly). Andy, Marbles, Olaf, Spike, and Belle appear briefly in during the credits of The Peanuts Movie. Spike (below top left) appeared most frequently in the strip. His appearance is similar to that of Snoopy, but he is substantially thinner, has a perpetually sleepy look, and sports a long, droopy mustache and a fedora. He sometimes wears Mickey Mouse shoes which were a gift from Mickey Mouse. He is called Snoopy's older brother during the first story in which he appears. Spike lives alone in a cactus, in the middle of the desert near Needles, California, only occasionally interacting with the principal characters in the strip, generally in visiting Snoopy. When he was introduced to the strip, it was revealed that Spike's exceptionally low weight was because he had been living with coyotes. A large statue of Spike resides in a Subway restaurant in Needles. Andy and Olaf live together on a farm. Andy is distinguished by his shaggy coat, but otherwise looks like Snoopy. Olaf does not bear much resemblance to Snoopy and is pretty chubby compared to his other siblings. He also wears a hunting cap. Olaf now has taken residence in Orange, California and works as a maintenance manager in a department store. Olaf also says his favorite book is still "Joe Bunny", which he has owned since puppyhood. Olaf is first seen during a series on January 19th, 1989, in which he visits Snoopy. During this sequence, Lucy enters Olaf in an "ugly dog" contest, which he wins (much to his disappointment). He He appears again in 1994 (beginning February 14th), where he, Andy, and Spike visit Snoopy, who is in the hospital. After Snoopy gets better, the three brothers leave without saying good-bye. This is the first appearance of Andy in the strip. After that, Olaf and Andy are shown four times in 1994. They are sitting against a barn, contemplating what direction their lives should go in. They appear sporadically after that. Olaf usually plays the jug, and Andy has a full drum set, but is rather clumsy when carrying it and drops it from time to time. Andy and Olaf spent some time traveling to Needles to live with Spike. However, after "two right turns and twenty-three wrong ones" they eventually ended up back at Snoopy's doghouse. After a brief stay and failure to become Rerun's dogs, they continued to wander around and were considering buying banjos in their last appearance on September 27th, 1999. Notably, Andy is the only Peanuts character to have originated in animation before appearing in the strip: his animated debut was the 1991 TV special Snoopy's Reunion. Andy is based on a wire-haired fox terrier (also named Andy) that Schulz owned from October 1988 to March 1994. Both Olaf and Andy made their second animated appearance in I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown via a flashback scene. Belle (above bottom left) is Snoopy's sister. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri, with her teenage son, whom Snoopy noted as resembling the Pink Panther. She is known for making bows. Once she made a bow which looked like the British flag. She also wore a beret in the Snoopy and his Siblings episode, "Ma Cherie: The Trip to Paris". Belle herself resembles her brother, but with longer eyelashes. In addition, she wears a lace collar. Sometimes, she wears a pearl necklace an similar to Spike, Belle also plays the violin. Belle only made a few appearances in the strip, but is remembered because of the Belle stuffed animal toys sold in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many people who were not regular readers of the comic strip mistakenly thought that she was Snoopy's girlfriend, rather than his sister. In Snoopy's World War I fantasies, Belle is a nurse. Snoopy's sister made her first appearance in the comic strip on June 28th, 1976, though she was mentioned by Snoopy earlier on June 22nd, 1976. Belle also appeared briefly in the opening sequence of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. While she was mentioned in the lyrics to the opening theme song, Belle never made an appearance in the cartoon series. Belle's only animated special was 1991's Snoopy's Reunion. Also she was mentioned, but not seen, in 2003's I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown. In 1984, Snoopy and Belle inspired fashion designers around the world, including Lagerfeld, Armani, and de la Renta to create one-of-a-kind outfits in their honor. Both beagles modeled for the "Snoopy in Fashion" exhibition held that year in Japan. Marbles, reputedly the smartest of the siblings, is a spotted beagle whose few appearances in the comic strip were in 1982 from September 30th to October 9th. Unlike Snoopy's siblings Spike and Belle, he does not share in Snoopy's fantasy World War I scenery, seeing Snoopy's Sopwith Camel as his doghouse, an "ambulance" as a shopping cart, etc. while commenting that "...he [Snoopy] was always the quiet one in the family." He was also seen to wear jogging shoes. He also appeared in the 1991 animated feature Snoopy's Reunion, and in a flashback from I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown, when Charlie Brown was talking to Rerun about Snoopy's siblings. Marbles plays the banjo. The two other siblings, Molly and Rover, appeared in the 1991 TV special Snoopy's Reunion; however, Schulz never depicted or named these characters in the comic strip, so these names are not considered to be canonical. In the television show, these two siblings play the dobro and the mandolin. Molly is shown to be pampered because she has her own makeup. Schulz attended Central High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he failed Latin, English, algebra and physics. In 1975, looking back at his time in school, Schulz said, "It was not until I became a senior that I earned any respectable grades at all." Although Ripley's Believe It or Not! accepted a drawing of a dog from Schulz when he was just 15 (his first published drawing), the yearbook committee at Central didn't see Schulz's work as a good fit for its publication. Now Central High School has an educationally themed 5-foot statue called "Scholar Snoopy." WOODSTOCK In the early 1960s, Snoopy began befriending birds when they started using his doghouse for various occasions: a rest stop during migrations, a nesting site, a community hall, or a place to play cards. None of these birds were ever given names, although they did, on occasion use speech balloons, lettered in what would become the classic 'chicken scratch marks' of Woodstock's utterances. What set Woodstock apart from all these earlier birds was the fact that he attached himself to Snoopy and assumed the role of Snoopy's sidekick and assistant. There had been no recurring relationships between Snoopy and the earlier birds who visited the yard of the Browns, and Snoopy was as often as not more hostile than friendly toward those birds. In the Peanuts daily comic strip on the March 3rd, 1966, a mother bird flew in while Snoopy was lying on top of his dog house. She chose Snoopy's stomach as a good place to make her nest, and Snoopy says "Why does this always happen to me?" She then lays two eggs and flies away, leaving Snoopy alone with the nest. Two babies hatch, and one of them becomes Woodstock. Schulz began to establish character traits for Snoopy's new friend by revealing that he could talk (more accurately that he could complain, in the form of repetitive sounds in word form, "gripe, gripe, gripe, gripe", "complain, complain, ..."), that, unlike normal birds, he didn't like to fly south every winter, and that his flying skills were not quite up to snuff (he flutters around in an erratic fashion, often upside down, and frequently crashes into things). By the end of this four-strip sequence, Snoopy, in character as the World War I Flying Ace, learns that the bird is his new mechanic, Woodstock's first supporting role. After this introduction, the unnamed Woodstock is seen with Snoopy on occasion, and other birds continue to appear as they had for years. But Woodstock is singled out as the bird who befriended Snoopy. On April 25th, 1968, the most important aspect of Woodstock's relationship with Snoopy is made clear: Snoopy first refers to this bird as his buddy. This identification was more than enough for readers to know, if they hadn't already figured it out, that this little bird, name or no name, had assumed the role of a regular character in the Peanuts cast. Schulz did not give him a name until June 22nd, 1970. Schulz acknowledged in several print and TV interviews in the mid-1970s that he took Woodstock’s name from the rock festival. (The festival’s logo shows a bird perched on a guitar.) The only non-bird character who can understand Woodstock’s speech is Snoopy. When depicted in the comic strip, his speech is rendered almost entirely in "chicken scratch" marks, with Snoopy's either directly translating or allowing the reader to deduce Woodstock's meaning in the context of Snoopy's replies. Woodstock and his fellow yellow birds (named Bill, Harriet, Olivier, Raymond, Fred, Roy, and Conrad) often join Snoopy for group activities, with Snoopy as the 'de facto leader. Most frequently they embark on Beagle Scout expeditions with Snoopy as Scoutmaster - or as a patrol of the French Foreign Legion on their march for Fort Zinderneuf, led by Snoopy as their sergeant. They also have formed football and ice hockey teams (on one occasion a football team composed of Snoopy and the birds defeated a human football team led by Peppermint Patty). The birds and Snoopy occasionally are shown playing bridge. Although all but Raymond (who is darker) look alike, Snoopy seems to be able to tell them apart. At one point Snoopy attempts to identify what type of bird Woodstock is with the aid of a field guide, asking Woodstock to attempt to imitate various birds: crow, American bittern, Carolina wren, rufous-sided towhee, yellow-billed cuckoo, Canada goose, warbler and mourning warbler. Snoopy finally gives up trying to figure it out, and says, "For all I know, you're a duck!" Woodstock then cries and Snoopy hugs him and apologizes. LUCY VAN PELT Lucille "Lucy" van Pelt is the older sister of Linus and Rerun. Lucy is characterized as a "fussbudget", crabby, bossy and opinionated girl who bullies other characters in the strip, particularly Linus and Charlie Brown. While she is not exactly cold-hearted, and technically one of the main protagonists of the series, she can be quite antagonistic, often playing the villain role in a number of stories. She is also characterized as vain, as she believes she is beautiful and thinks she is perfect (though she once admitted complaining is the only thing she can do. Christopher Caldwell has said about the character: "Lucy is no 'fussbudget.' She's an American nightmare, a combination of zero brains, infinite appetites and infinite self-esteem, who is (for that reason) able to run roughshod over all her playmates. At her best, she is the most terrifying character in the history of comics [strips]." While she often bullies and makes fun of characters like Charlie Brown, he still thinks of Lucy as a good friend and deep down, Lucy does have a fondness of him, with a couple of times that she said that "he's full of surprises." She has a strong unrequited crush on Schroeder. Lucy also operates a psychiatric booth, parodying the lemonade stand operated by many young children in the United States. Here, she offers advice and psychoanalysis for five cents to the other characters in the strip, most frequently an anxious Charlie Brown; this "advice" is usually completely useless and nonsensical. The third new character in Peanuts after Violet and Schroeder, Lucy made her debut on March 3rd, 1952. She was originally a goggle-eyed toddler who continually annoys her parents and the older kids, but aged up over the next two years so that by 1954, she was the same age as Charlie Brown (the early strips with toddler-age Lucy were not reprinted until after Charles Schulz’s death). Schulz then altered Lucy's eyes to have the same appearance as that of the other characters, except for small extra lines around them which were also sported by her two siblings. Lucy has short, black hair and wears a blue dress with blue socks and saddle shoes until the 1970s when Schulz began showing the strip's female characters in pants and shirts in order to keep their outfits more contemporary. By the late 1980s, she had switched to this look permanently. Lucy was named after Louanne van Pelt, a former neighbor of Charles Schulz in Colorado Springs and, according to David Michaelis of Time Magazine, was modeled after Schulz's first wife, Joyce. LINUS VAN PELT Linus van Pelt is the best friend of Charlie Brown and the younger brother of Lucy van Pelt and older brother of Rerun van Pelt. He first appeared on September 19th, 1952, but was not mentioned by name until three days later. He was first referred to two months earlier, on July 14th. Linus spoke his first words in 1954, the same year he was first shown with his security blanket. The character's creator, Charles M. Schulz, has said of the character, "Linus, my serious side, is the house intellectual, bright, well-informed which, I suppose may contribute to his feelings of insecurity." Though young, Linus is very intelligent and very wise and acts as the strip's philosopher and theologian, often quoting the Gospels. Juvenile aspects of his character are also displayed; for example, Linus is almost always depicted holding his blue security blanket, or which he is often mocked by other characters, and often sucks his thumb. In the earlier strips, Linus's relationship to his blanket was one of intense emotional attachment to the point of manifesting physical symptoms if he was deprived of it even for a short while. He suffered weakness and dizziness, for example, when Lucy took it from him only long enough to have it laundered, spontaneously recovering when it was restored to him. He invented his own legendary being, the Great Pumpkin, who, Linus claims, appears every Halloween at the most "sincere" pumpkin patch, bearing gifts. Linus is the only person who believes in the Great Pumpkin, although he occasionally temporarily convinces other characters the Great Pumpkin is real, only to stubbornly maintain his faith when they lose theirs. On one occasion, Linus had a commanding lead in the polls for school president, until he brought up the subject of the Great Pumpkin, at which point he was nearly laughed out of the election. (He ended up winning anyway by one vote, cast by his opponent, who decided that Linus would make a better school president.) A similar occurrence was featured in a strip with the same storyline; Charlie Brown asks him why he had to bring up the Great Pumpkin and Linus gives his reasons. After Linus says that Charlie Brown is looking at him as if he was crazy, Charlie Brown responds, "I'm looking at you like I could've been vice president!" Linus has brown hair and normally wears a red shirt with stripes on it, black shorts, and tennis shoes. On February 5th, 1962, Linus began wearing eyeglasses after being diagnosed with myopia, but after the Sunday strip of September 9th, 1962, the glasses were not seen again. In an earlier strip of July 17th, 1962, Linus had told Charlie Brown that his ophthalmologist said he may not have to wear his glasses all the time: thus explaining their eventual disappearance. Linus is Charlie Brown's best friend. Linus is sympathetic towards Charlie Brown, and often gives him advice after listening to Charlie Brown's various insecurities. Similarly, Charlie Brown generally observes Linus's faults, such as his undying faith in the Great Pumpkin, his dependence on his security blanket, or any of his other odd quirks. They are also together in an allegiance over a common enemy: Lucy, who harasses and bullies Charlie Brown as much as she does Linus. The two are often seen having discussions while sitting on a street curb or leaning up against the brick wall. At some point in the strip, Linus begins to appear sitting behind Charlie Brown in school, despite being a year younger. Linus generally plays second base on Charlie Brown's baseball team, but has substituted as pitcher for Charlie Brown when the latter has been unable to pitch. On these occasions, Linus's skill has served to propel the team onto an uncharacteristic winning streak. Upon the introduction of Charlie Brown's little sister, Sally Brown, in 1959, Linus had the desire to marry her. However, as the strip progressed, he outgrew this idea, while Sally on the other hand fell in love with Linus, calling him her "Sweet Babboo", much to his displeasure. Linus in turn has an innocent crush on his school teacher, Miss Othmar (later Mrs. Hagemeyer). In some of the later 1990s strips he developed an interest in Lydia, the girl who sits behind him, who keeps changing her name and, as Linus is two months older than she asks him, "Aren't you kind of old for me?" (This is a subtle reference to cartoonist Schulz and his own second wife, who was twenty years younger than him). It was also Linus who first introduced Frieda, as "...a sort of a friend of mine" who sat behind him in school. He also fell for several different girls in various animated television specials, as well as a girl called Truffles, whom he and Snoopy met while looking for the fungi bearing her name. Linus is often bullied by his older sister Lucy, to which he responds by either giving in or taking revenge. He often defuses and defeats Lucy's bullying through passive resistance and clever use of his intellect, either logically talking Lucy out of hitting him or confusing her into submission. Later in the strip, the pair got a younger brother, Rerun, who looks nearly identical to Linus, though smaller. Coincidentally, this occurred at the same time Lucy kicked Linus out of the house, leading her to cry in dismay: "A new baby brother? But I just got rid of the old one!" SCHROEDER Schroeder is distinguished by his precocious skill at playing the toy piano, as well as by his love of classical music and the composer Ludwig van Beethoven in particular. Schroeder is also the catcher on Charlie Brown's baseball team, though he is always seen walking back to the mound with the baseball, never throwing it, admitting in one strip he did not want the other team to discover his lack of ability. He is also the object of the unrequited infatuation of Lucy van Pelt, who constantly leans on Schroeder's piano, much to Schroeder's annoyance. Charlie Brown, Frieda and Snoopy are also occasionally depicted as leaning on Schroeder's piano. After Linus and Snoopy, Schroeder is probably Charlie Brown's closest friend; he once angrily berated Violet for giving Charlie Brown a used valentine well after Valentine's Day had come and gone, only to be undercut when Charlie Brown eagerly accepted it. Schroeder also joined Linus in dressing down the girls (Lucy, Patty, Violet and Frieda) and Snoopy in Charlie Brown's All-Stars, when it was discovered Charlie Brown would not sacrifice the girls and Snoopy just to get uniforms for the baseball team. He also is one of the few players who has any respect for Charlie Brown as a manager. Schroeder was voted an honorary member of the Epsilon Iota chapter at Florida State University of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity, the oldest and largest music fraternity in the world. A stained glass window in New York's Buffalo Westminster Presbyterian Church honoring Albert Schweitzer has a corner showing him playing his toy piano. In honor of Schroeder's passion for Beethoven, the Charles M. Schulz Museum (Santa Rosa) and the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies announced the launching in December 2009 of a permanent online exhibit of 60 of the 300 Schulz's cartoons that involve Schroeder and Beethoven. Schroeder's other distinguishing mark as a character is his constant refusal of Lucy's love. Lucy is infatuated with Schroeder, and frequently lounges against his piano while he is playing, professing her love for him. However, Beethoven was a lifelong bachelor, and Schroeder feels he must emulate every aspect of his idol's life, even if it is insinuated that he reciprocates Lucy's feelings. But that doesn't stop Lucy who regularly vexes and perplexes Schroeder with speculations about what their lives would be like if they were married. For the most part, Schroeder and Charlie Brown were the best of friends, with the exception of one argument from the mid-1950s when the two were fighting over who was greater: Beethoven or Davy Crockett. SALLY BROWN Sally Brown is the younger sister of Charlie Brown and was first mentioned in early 1959 and throughout a long series of strips before her first appearance in August 1959. Sally can be a somewhat complex character. On one hand, she is good-hearted, sweet, and innocent. However, on the other, she can be lazy, naive, slow, obsessive, greedy, insecure, and sometimes even self-centered and manipulative. Sally has a "take it easy" approach to life, preferring to slide by while doing as little work as possible. Her favorite pastime is sitting in her beanbag chair watching TV. Sally has a good heart and a strong moral sense; like her older brother she is extremely sensitive to the unfairness of life. Charlie Brown usually goes to Lucy in her psychiatric booth when he is feeling depressed, but Sally prefers to confide her troubles to the school building, which is very protective of her and will drop a brick on anyone who does not treat her nicely. Sally has a lot of trouble in school. For one thing, she has a problem with malapropisms, both in speech and writing. For example, she says "violins broke out" rather than "violence broke out," or "controversial French" instead of "conversational French". One of the strip's running jokes is the unintentionally humorous school reports she gives at the front of the class, which are frequently inspired by malapropisms and end with her feeling humiliated as all of her classmates laugh at her. Some of the more memorable reports she has given over the years include "Santa and His Rain Gear," "Footbidextrousers" people, and "The Bronchitis" (a dinosaur which supposedly became extinct from coughing too much), and her report on the oceans of the world, in which she reported that there are no oceans in individual landlocked states in the U.S. She often struggles with homework despite Charlie Brown's patient efforts to help her, and she has a particular dislike for math, which she largely finds both intimidating and incomprehensible. However, she has expressed interest in becoming a nurse once she becomes an adult, although this is due to her interest in wearing white shoes, as opposed to the job itself. Sally also can be very naive. In one strip, she thinks her family is famous, because their name appears in the telephone book. Another time, she is watching TV and wonders why Monday Night Football is not on. When Charlie Brown tells her the day is Wednesday, she says "That's no excuse". Unlike most of the Peanuts gang, Sally does not seem to have much interest in playing sports. On the rare occasions when she does play, it is usually because Linus invites her. She is one of the few children in the neighborhood who has never played on Charlie Brown's baseball team, and her attempts to play catch with a football usually lead to comic results. She joins a "snow league" in a series of strips from November and December 1973 in which the local adults turn snowman building into an organized sport, but her team is not very good. They lose one match when the referee penalizes them for "improper mittens," and lose another because their snowman is offside. Being Charlie Brown's sister, she refers to him as "big brother", having called him by his full name only on very rare occasions. Sally was born on May 26th, 1959, with Charlie Brown receiving a telephone call from the hospital and dashing out of the house yelling that he had a new baby sister. She was given the name "Sally" on June 2nd, 1959. Although Sally was often talked about and was the cause for a celebration that included Charlie Brown passing out chocolate cigars, it was not until August 23rd, 1959 that she finally made her first appearance in the strip. Charlie Brown doted on her in the beginning, and was usually very patient with her. Yet Sally has never developed proper respect for her big brother, and invariably ends up disappointed in him when he fails to protect her from being teased or threatened by bullies. However, Sally constantly relies on Charlie Brown to help her with her homework, which usually results in his doing her assignments for her. Sally often annoys Charlie Brown and regularly complains to him. She obviously thinks that Charlie Brown has a better bedroom than she does because she often tries to take it over from him. However, deep down Sally loves her big brother. As a baby Sally liked playing with empty baby bottles, which she used for everything from building blocks to bowling pins, and being taken out for walks. Like other characters, such as Linus and Schroeder (who were also introduced to the strip as babies), Sally grew up quickly. On August 22nd, 1960, she took her first steps, and in the next day's strip she fell in love with Linus for the first time. Her first day of kindergarten came on September 5th, 1962. Although the first glimpse of her new school made her run away screaming, she had a wonderful day once she got there. Unfortunately, her lack of aptitude for formal education quickly became apparent, as she nervously admitted in a later strip that she was sure they had made her go through kindergarten again because she had failed flower-bringing. Nevertheless, she did eventually complete kindergarten and settled in at about first or second grade age for the remainder of the strip's run. Interestingly, it was originally Linus who expressed a possible romantic interest in Sally. In a strip appearing shortly after Sally's birth, Linus is seen scribbling calculations on a fence. When Charlie Brown wanders by, Linus asks him, "When I'm 22 and Sally is 17, do you think she'll go out with me?" When Schulz revived the joke more than a year later, though, it was Sally who fell for Linus rather than the other way around. In a storyline which began on November 29th, 1965, Sally was diagnosed with amblyopia ex anopisa (lazy eye) which required her to wear an eye patch for a while. Her eye patch often went missing because Snoopy took it to play pirates. Sally gave Snoopy the eye patch after her ophthalmologist told her that she did not need to wear it anymore. Some of the strips in which Sally was diagnosed with lazy eye were later reprinted in a comic book, Security is an Eye Patch, which was published and distributed for free by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In the later years of the strip, Sally started developing "Philosophies" on life. They were not the most well thought out philosophies, basically being phrases such as, "Who cares?", "Why me?", and "How should I know?" Like Lucy Van Pelt, Sally does not care that much for Snoopy and often calls him a stupid beagle. Sally usually complains when her big brother asks her to feed Snoopy whenever he is away from home. When she was still an infant, Sally had a friendly and playful relationship with Snoopy. In one comic strip, dated August 30th, 1959, Snoopy is shown happily playing with Sally, then stating that he liked playing with her and felt that they had something in common because, "She's the only one around here who knows how to walk on four feet." During this time period, Snoopy and Sally were also seen teaming up to snatch away Linus' blanket. In later years, Sally occasionally enlists Snoopy's help in school assignments. Sally has a strong crush on Charlie Brown's friend Linus Van Pelt. She calls him her "Sweet Babboo" and when Linus says something Sally finds especially witty or intelligent, she expresses her admiration by asking, "Isn't he the cutest thing?" Her crush is a frequent source of embarrassment to Linus, but he endures it stoically for the most part, although he is sometimes driven to yell in exasperation, "I'm not your sweet babboo!" As Schroeder does with Lucy, Linus often attempts to fend Sally off with a sarcastic remark. Her devotion remains unwavering no matter how vigorously he protests, although on one occasion she treats Linus with an air of indifference leading to jealousy on his part, much to Sally's enjoyment. Sally was the first character to befriend Eudora, the last major character to be introduced to the strip. Sally first met her during a trip to summer camp in 1978. She became a pupil in Sally's class later that year and was Sally's closest friend for most of her run in Peanuts. But Sally does get angry at her at times, when Eudora shows feelings towards Sally's crush, Linus. From 1983 to 1985, a not quite 10 year old Stacey Ferguson (aka Fergie: vocalist for the hip hop/pop group the Black Eyed Peas, R&B singer-songwriter, and actress below left) provided the voice of Sally Brown for two Peanuts animated TV specials: It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown (1984), and Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown (1985), in which also voices Violet. Fergie also voiced Sally, as well as Patty, in the 1985 season of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. PEPPERMINT PATTY Patricia "Peppermint Patty" Reichardt is one of a small group in the strip who lives across town from Charlie Brown and his school friends (although in The Peanuts Movie she, along with Marcie and Franklin, lives in the same neighborhood and attends the same school). She has freckles and auburn/brunette hair and generally displays the characteristics of a tomboy. She made her first appearance on August 22nd, 1966. The following year, she made her animated debut in the TV special You're in Love, Charlie Brown and began (in the comics) coaching a baseball team that played against Charlie Brown. Uniquely, she refers to Charlie Brown and Lucy as "Chuck" and "Lucille", respectively. Schulz described in one interview how, "By 1966, I realized that it had been quite some time since I'd introduced a new character, five years since Frieda's debut and seven since Sally's. I got the idea for her name after looking at a dish of candy on my desk and decided that 'Peppermint Patty' was such a great name that I just had to use it before some other cartoonist beat me to the idea." He also stated that his original intention had been to develop Peppermint Patty as the main character of a new comic strip, but since he did not have the time to pursue the project, he instead incorporated her into Peanuts. At the time, Schulz already had a different character named Patty as a regular cast member in the strip; the original Patty's role, already in decline because of Schulz's inability to flesh out a unique role for her, was consequently cut back to cameo appearances. Schulz also said that Peppermint Patty was created in response to the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s as part of an attempt to have a character that defied standard gender norms. As a result, he gave her a tomboy personality in addition to being the first female character in the strip to wear a shirt and shorts instead of a dress. In addition, she was shown as being raised by her father in a single-parent household. Peppermint Patty enjoys a close relationship with her father, even though he apparently has to do a lot of traveling. He refers to his daughter as his "rare gem", a nickname with which Patty is extremely pleased. Her mother apparently died long ago, for Peppermint Patty has no memories of her. No siblings are ever mentioned, thus Peppermint Patty is presumed to be an only child. In the comic strip she has often lamented her lack of having a mother but mentions her mother in the television special He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown. Schulz repeatedly stated that the situations presented in the cartoon adaptations are not canonical to the strip. Peppermint Patty is noted for her persistent habit of profoundly misunderstanding basic concepts and ideas that most people would consider obvious, then blindly ignoring any counsel against her latest fixation, which leads to ultimately embarrassing situations for which she blames everyone who warned her. For a long time she seemed unaware that Snoopy was a dog, referring to him as "the funny looking kid with the big nose." Peppermint Patty is widely known for receiving a D- grade on every test or assignment in school and by her tendency to sleep through class. Peppermint Patty hired Snoopy twice to serve as her watchdog and retained his services as her attorney as well. The first strip in which the character's full formal name, Patricia Reichardt, was mentioned, appeared on January 15th, 1972; her formal name appeared again at least one more time, in the February 5th, 1993 strip, in which she reads to Marcie an ad she has placed in the paper. Peppermint Patty's closest friend, Marcie, calls her "Sir". It is never revealed whether this eccentric habit, dating to Marcie's first appearance in the strip in 1971, is the result of misguided manners, poor eyesight, a snarky reference to Patty's tomboyish ways, or some other reason. For a long time, this was a major annoyance to Patty, and she would continually snap at Marcie, "Stop calling me Sir!" but, eventually, she got used to it, although she still preferred that Marcie not call her "Sir". The first character to call Peppermint Patty "Sir" was not Marcie, but a pigtailed girl named Sophie in Peppermint Patty's cabin at summer camp, who appeared in the same series of strips in the summer of 1968 that introduced Marcie's predecessor, Clara. When Sophie and Clara (this time sans glasses) re-appeared in Peanuts in the summer of 1987, they called her "ma'am", which also annoyed her. Not until a few years after she was introduced into the strip did it become apparent that Peppermint Patty had a crush on Charlie Brown, although she frequently denied it, the relationship is pursued and received with varying degrees of projection, enthusiasm, and obliviousness, especially on the part of Charlie Brown, whos true love was the unattainable Little Red-Haired Girl, so having a girl actually like him was unexplored territory. Peppermint Patty would occasionally employ reverse psychology; and would often say, "You kind of like me, don't you, Chuck?" In one Sunday strip on July 22rd 1979 (drawn as part of a storyline in which Charlie Brown was in the hospital), Peppermint Patty essentially admitted her feelings for Charlie Brown and, in the same strip, Marcie admitted loving "Chuck," so far as to affirming her willingness to marry Charlie Brown. Even this strip ended in a denial of sorts; Patty brought Marcie up to the front desk of the hospital and tried to have her admitted as a patient, saying, "I think she's sicker than he is!" Peppermint Patty often tries to talk to Charlie Brown about matters of the heart (often depicted with both characters sitting under a tree) and even calls him often on the phone (usually taking up the majority of the conversation), but Charlie Brown usually manages to somehow evade the issue, often by simply playing dumb. Patty often grumbles, "I hate talking to you, Chuck!" whenever she tries to confide in him and he does not tell her what she wants to hear. Peppermint Patty also developed a crush on Pig-Pen for a while in 1980, after Charlie Brown set them up on a date for a Valentine's Day dance. Also, in the movie Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don't Come Back!!), both she and Marcie were shown as being attracted to Pierre, the son of their host family in Paris, France. MARCIE Marcie, (unofficially surnamed Johnson and Carlin), is a studious girl who is sometimes depicted as being terrible at sports. She has befriended the tomboyish, athletic Peppermint Patty, and she has a mostly-unrequited crush on the underdog Charlie Brown. Marcie made her first appearance in the daily strip from July 20th, 1971, but her name wasn't mentioned until the strip from October 11th. She first appeared on television in the 1973 special There's No Time for Love, Charlie Brown. A forerunner of Marcie's character, a girl named Clara, made an appearance in a sequence at a girl's camp in June 1968. As Marcie became a part of the regular cast, she appeared in the same class as Peppermint Patty, sitting in the desk behind her. In the animated special You're In the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, Marcie's surname is given as "Johnson", but Schulz never gave her a surname in the comic strip; therefore, Johnson is not considered to be her official name. In the 2015 The Peanuts Movie, for which Schulz's son, Craig Schulz, and Schulz's grandson, Bryan Schulz, were included among the film's writers and producers, both had decided to include for the first time the full name of the character "Marcie Carlin," which appears on a bulletin board at the kids' school. Marcie is best friends with Peppermint Patty, constantly addressing her as "sir" (she called her "sir" in her first line in the strip). Initially, Peppermint Patty addressed Marcie as "dorky" and, when talking to others, referred to her as"my weird friend from camp". Because of the close friendship between Marcie and Peppermint Patty, some have inferred a romantic relationship between them. Marcie was a soft-spoken voice of reason to Peppermint Patty and though Marcie is usually slow to anger, she can occasionally lose her temper when provoked. Marcie is also portrayed as an overachiever (she once quipped that she had already chosen her college and enrolled her three children in preschool) and academically the brightest of the Peanuts cast. Even so, she is possibly the most credulous and naïve of the gang. She apparently is under a great deal of pressure from her parents to excel in school, and, in a story in 1990, sought refuge from her demanding parents at Charlie Brown's house and fell asleep on his couch. Marcie is essentially the complete opposite of Peppermint Patty: where Peppermint Patty is more comfortable playing sports, the well-read Marcie prefers a quieter, more studious existence. Although Marcie repeatedly professes her dislike of sports, particularly baseball, she will occasionally take part in whatever sport Peppermint Patty is involved in at the time, though more often than not, Marcie, upon showing her lack of athletic prowess and lack of knowledge of the game, usually only succeeds in frustrating Peppermint Patty. Her ineptitude at sports was not consistently carried over in the prime-time animated TV specials in which the Peanuts cast was featured. In the special You're the Greatest, Charlie Brown, she proved quite capable on the athletic field, even winning the decathlon for the school. However, Schulz did not consider these to be canonical. Like Peppermint Patty, Marcie also has an unrequited crush on Charlie Brown (whom she usually calls "Charles", or occasionally "Chuck", as Peppermint Patty does); she once confessed a fondness for Charlie Brown and would be willing to marry him if he asked her. While Peppermint Patty is more likely to flirt with Charlie Brown and play mind games with him, Marcie is more frank in her admissions of her feelings, and often asks Charlie Brown in plain language if he likes her. As he does with Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown often responds to Marcie's inquiries by trying to evade the issue. PIG PEN "Pig-Pen" is the boy in the Peanuts who is, except on very rare occasions, very dirty. "Pig-Pen" is a nickname, invariably written in quotation marks in the strip. In the character's first appearance on July 13th, 1954, in a strip directly parodying the first chapter of Lord of the Flies, he declares, "I haven't got a name... people just call me things... real insulting things." If he does have a real name, it is never mentioned. In a 2000 Gallup Poll "Pig-Pen" was found to be the fifth most popular Peanuts character. "Pig-Pen" is known for his perpetually filthy overalls and the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes. When he takes a deep breath (to sing, for example), the dust rises briefly around him. He sometimes refers to the cloud that surrounds him with pride as the dust of ancient civilizations. He cannot seem to rid himself of the dust for more than the briefest of periods, indeed, in spite of his best efforts, it appears that he cannot stay clean. He is referred to in an early strip as the only person who can get dirty while walking in a snowstorm. Nevertheless, on rare occasions he has very briefly appeared clean, and hence unrecognizable. Once this was in order to impress Violet. Once, after bathing and dressing in clean clothes, "Pig-Pen" stepped outside his house, and instantaneously became dirty and disheveled, whereupon he declared to Charlie Brown, "You know what I am? I'm a dust magnet!" On another occasion, "Pig-Pen" decided it was important to have clean hands, but after failing to wash them, realized that he had "reached a point of no return." One notable exception is an earlier strip where he gets caught in a brief but heavy rainfall, and while trying to seek shelter, the storm ends, revealing him to be clean. He responds with disdain, stating that "in one minute the rain has washed away what took me all day to accomplish". Though "Pig-Pen" is proud of his uncleanliness, Charlie Brown is the only other Peanuts character to unconditionally accept "Pig-Pen" for who he is, even defending "Pig-Pen's" uncleanliness in one strip (which was re-used in A Charlie Brown Christmas): "Don't think of it as dust. Just think of it as the dirt and dust of far-off lands blowing over here and settling on "Pig-Pen!" It staggers the imagination! He may be carrying the soil that was trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan!" Charles Schulz admitted that he came to regret "Pig-Pen's" popularity, given the character's essentially one-joke nature; he utilized the character very rarely in the later years of the strip's run (though still appearing commonly in the TV specials and movies of the franchise). Like most of Schulz's characters, "Pig-Pen" has (both with and without lines) appeared in many of the animated Peanuts television specials beginning in the 1960s, as well as all five movies. One time his clean self was shown in a miniseries titled This Is America, Charlie Brown, where he is an astronaut aboard a futuristic space station, demonstrating how personal hygiene would apply in zero gravity. True to form, the clean "Pig-Pen" is immediately dirtied again when dirt is attracted to him magnetically. In the 1990s, he appeared (in an animated overlay against a live-action backdrop) in a series of television commercials for Regina vacuum cleaners where all the dirt is sucked off his body and filthy trousers by one of the company's products, arguably one of the few times where "Pig-Pen" remains clean. In 2015, "Pig-Pen" appeared in a commercial for All laundry detergent for a tie-in with The Peanuts Movie. In the commercial, Snoopy, dressed as a magician, puts a cloth over "Pig-Pen" and instantly makes him clean, causing Snoopy to get dirty. "Pig-Pen" is very good at playing the drums, as shown in the special Play It Again, Charlie Brown. He is also shown playing the double bass, notably in "A Charlie Brown Christmas", as well as in Happy New Year, Charlie Brown!. He plays third base on the Peanuts baseball team. His last appeared in the Peanuts comic strip on September 8th, 1999. That strip was very uncharacteristic of him in that it showed him embarrassed to the point of shame in his dirtiness, with none of the pride or sense of destiny that he expressed in earlier strips. FRIEDA Frieda's character was inspired by Charles Schulzs' longtime friend Frieda Rich, a local artist whom he met while taking classes at the Art Instruction Schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was a regular in Peanuts throughout the 1960s, but as newer characters were phased in towards the end of the decade, she began appearing less often, and she ceased to be a featured character after 1985, making only cameo appearances since then in various television specials. She is known for having naturally curly hair, of which she is extremely proud. Her full name was revealed in the 2015 film The Peanuts Movie as 'Frieda Rich', where she places 12th in the test results. Frieda made her debut on March 6th, 1961, when Linus introduced her to Charlie Brown. She was the eleventh permanent character to join the cast, and the first since Sally was born in 1959. She was initially presented, in both the advance press release and the first few strips, as Linus' schoolmate. She sat behind him in class, and although he considered her a friend, he also confessed that because she was such a chatterbox, he hadn't heard a word their teacher said the whole semester. Her most prominent feature is her "naturally" curly hair, which she manages to work into every conversation, to the dismay of those around her. This self-love of her hair leads people to believe that she is rather vain. In turn, Frieda herself believes that the other girls are jealous of her hair (and often becomes disappointed or depressed when the other girls tell her that they're not jealous of her hair), and also that "people expect more of her" because she has it. Journalist Christopher Caldwell described her as, "A fetching, kind and charming girl, who throws her deeper goodness away because she wants to be admired for such superficialities as 'being a good conversationalist." She admitted that she used to be an avid reader until she started getting too busy. Frieda Rich, the character's namesake, was once asked whether she bore any character resemblances to her cartoon counterpart. She replied, "I recognize myself," adding as an example that while talking to Schulz once about Universalists and Congregationalists, she had jokingly called herself a "conversationalist," and Schulz borrowed that for the strip. Frieda was usually nicer to Charlie Brown than most of the other girls in the neighborhood. Unlike Lucy, Patty, and Violet, she seemed to be mindful of his feelings and never teased him or put him down to his face (except for rare moments in the Peanuts specials), though she did get mad at him a few times. She eventually joined Charlie Brown's baseball team as an outfielder, but refused to wear a baseball cap because it would hide her "naturally" curly hair. She seemed to be one of the few characters that Charlie Brown felt confident enough to stand up to, as he did once when she was badgering Snoopy about chasing rabbits and he told her to mind her own business. Linus was the first character in the series that Frieda met. She sat behind him in school, and after they became friends he took her around and introduced her to some of the other kids in the neighborhood. Not much is shown of their friendship beyond those strips that introduce her, but even that early in their relationship they seemed to look out for each other. Linus tried to protect her the first time she unintentionally upset Lucy, and she in turn was one of the few kids who didn't see his need for a security blanket as a bad thing. Frieda's relationship with Lucy got off to a rocky start when Frieda, as usual, brought up her naturally curly hair almost as soon as they were introduced. Lucy became visibly offended by this, to the point where Linus (performing the introductions) felt it necessary to beg Lucy not to slug her. Despite Frieda's faux pas the two girls eventually became friends, and when they played baseball for Charlie Brown's team they often spent their time in the outfield chatting instead of paying attention to the game. But Frieda has made Lucy jealous by leaning on Schroeder's piano, who seemed to dislike her as much as he disliked Lucy. Out of all the characters, Frieda has the most trouble getting along with Snoopy, whom she frequently accuses of being "lazy" and "useless." She has strong pre-conceived notions of what a beagle should be doing with its time; she wants Snoopy to be a working dog and a hunter (especially a hunter of rabbits), and not spend so much time sleeping on top of his doghouse. She often comes over and tries to goad Snoopy into chasing rabbits with her, either by threat or persuasion, which he is always reluctant to do. If he does consent to "hunt," he'll either sandbag it and only pretend to look for the rabbits, or if he does find rabbits he'll frolic and play with them once he's out of Frieda's sight. Faron is a male cat that Frieda's mother bought for her. Frieda believed Snoopy was too smug for his own good, and decided that having a cat in the neighborhood would take him down a few notches. Her choice of cat ended up being more comical than intimidating; Faron is seemingly boneless, and she carries him everywhere, draped over her arms. He seemed to be as unpopular with the other neighborhood kids as he was with Snoopy; Frieda tried to find someone to hold Faron for her whenever she needed to go somewhere like the library that wouldn't allow cats inside, but she usually had a lot of trouble finding a willing volunteer. A running gag included Charlie Brown, Linus, and even Snoopy getting trapped into holding Faron while Frieda ran her errands. Faron was named for country music singer Faron Young, whom Schulz "admired very much," but he only made a few appearances in the strip. Schulz was not satisfied with his own drawing of a cat; also, he wanted to continue exploring Snoopy's fantasy life, and felt like having a cat in the strip brought Snoopy back to being too much of a real dog. Schulz didn't even show Faron for his last appearance, in which the cat got stuck in a tree. Faron once spoke English to Snoopy in a thought balloon, making him one of the few non-human or non-dog animals to do so. Although Frieda was a regular character from 1961 to the late 1960s, her appearances gradually began dwindling. According to Charles Schulz, "I realized that Frieda added relatively little to the strip and had few character traits beyond bragging about her hair and her obsession with getting Snoopy to chase rabbits." Frieda's last speaking role for many years was in the March 20th, 1975 strip, although she would sometimes appear as a background character into the 1980s. Frieda also continued to make appearances in the animated Peanuts specials and the Saturday morning series The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, even being mentioned in the lyrics of the latter's theme song. She is also featured as an unseen character in the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, being mentioned several times, and yelled to at one point after Lucy heard one of Charlie Brown's secrets. Also in this show, her characteristic fondness for hunting rabbits is assumed by Sally. Frieda appeared in 150 strips and appeared for the last time on November 22nd, 1985. Frieda appears in The Peanuts Movie and also makes multiple appearances in the Peanuts TV series. Frieda has a brother Leland in the TV special It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown. The comic strip itself never revealed whether or not Frieda has any siblings. FRANKLIN Franklin made his first appearance in the Peanuts comic strip of July 31st 1968. At the time, the United States was struggling with desegregation, and while the country had taken several steps to integrate the population, issues about having black and white people attend the same schools, use the same bathrooms, or appear in the same comic strips were still matters of substantial controversy. Schulz decided to add Franklin to the Peanuts gang after he began corresponding with Harriet Glickman, a retired schoolteacher from Los Angeles, who was concerned about race relations in America and wrote him in 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated about adding black characters to the strip. Though Schulz feared that adding a black character would be seen as patronizing to the African-American community, Glickman convinced him that the addition of black characters could help normalize the idea of friendships between children of different ethnicities. Glickman also wrote to a number of other cartoonists and Schulz was not the only one who responded. Allen Saunders, who along with Dale Connor produced the long-running Mary Worth comic strip, responded with a "very thoughtful" letter that they were considering including a black character in their strip but ultimately demurred over fears that they would be dropped by their syndicator. Franklin made his debut less than two months later, but as a full-fledged friend of Charlie Brown’s rather than as the suggested background character appearing in a trio of strips set at a beach (above). This was no small thing for a nationally syndicated comic strip, especially at the peak of the United States’ race-related civil unrest of 1968 and 1969. However, Schulz’s decision to add a black character to Peanuts did meet with resistance from some quarters. The comic book artist said in a 1988 interview that his editors continually wanted to change the comics in which Franklin appeared: "I finally put Franklin in, and there was one strip where Charlie Brown and Franklin had been playing on the beach, and Franklin said, “Well, it’s been nice being with you, come on over to my house some time.” Again, they didn’t like that. Another editor protested once when Franklin was sitting in the same row of school desks with Peppermint Patty, and said, “We have enough trouble here in the South without you showing the kids together in school.” But I never paid any attention to those things, and I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin — he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?” So that’s the way that ended." But for some Franklin is too perfect, devoid of the quirks and idiosyncrasies that define the rest of the cast, he is also, from a character-based perspective, the least Peanuts-y character in the strip. Franklin ultimately joined the cast as a peripheral character, usually playing the foil to other characters and their problems. He didn’t live in the Peanuts universe’s "main" neighborhood; he lived across town with Peppermint Patty, Marcie, and Roy, which affected the number of times he could interact with Charlie Brown. But he did sit in front of Peppermint Patty at school, a subtle endorsement of integration. PATTY Patty is a former major character that turned into a cameo part (due to her supposedly lacking the distinguishing characteristics of characters like Lucy, Linus, or Sally), she is often confused with Peppermint Patty, a different and later character from the same strip. Patty is best known as a girl who thinks highly of herself, and because of her self-opinion, she often torments the hapless Charlie Brown. She often accompanies her best friend Violet and sometimes the abrasive Lucy. The character has appeared in numerous Peanuts television specials, cinematic films, theatrical plays, and video games and her last name was revealed to be "Swanson" in the 2015 film The Peanuts Movie, where her full name appears 10th on the list of test scores. An early conception of the character was created by Schulz for his comic strip Li'l Folks (which is like an embryonic stage of Peanuts). Schulz then reused the character for Peanuts, and there, he named her Patty. The first published strip in which Patty was featured was in the very first Peanuts comic strip, on October 2nd, 1950. Since her first published appearance, Patty's character developed and appeared frequently until the character began to suffer a decrease in usage. She became less and less prominent until her succeeding appearances are reduced to mere cameos. Both before and after she sank into the background, Patty usually appeared either with her best friend Violet or with the rest of Charlie Brown's baseball team, where she plays in the outfield. On an early occasion she was seen as catcher on the team before Schroeder was introduced. It was Patty who first introduced Charlie Brown to Schroeder, claiming he lived next-door to her. As the only female character in the strip's very earliest days, Patty often acted as a sort of hen, looking out for the younger characters; however, she also set the tone for the strong female characters in the Peanuts universe. In her (and the strip's) second appearance, Patty is shown walking down the sidewalk reciting "Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice." She then punches Charlie Brown in the face and, without missing a beat, continues, "That's what little girls are made of!" Patty's name was first mentioned on October 26th, 1950, 24 days after her first appearance. She was apparently the oldest child in the strip (possibly along with Violet and Shermy), as she attended school when Charlie Brown did not. Eventually, she, along with Violet, became best known for their social snobbery and combined cruelty to Charlie Brown, although Violet was generally the more dominant of the two (thus Patty's role, in her later appearances, was reduced to that of a yes-girl). Patty is also known for asking "Pig-Pen" why he is constantly so dirty. Patty's hair color is light brown (sometimes red, black, or blonde) and she customarily wears a checked dress with a matching bow in her hair, usually colored orange (colored light green in The Peanuts Movie), and Mary Janes shoes. Patty had a major part in the original version of the stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and made her television debut in the 1965 classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, and appeared in many of the succeeding specials and theatrical animated films. By 1966, Schulz had recycled the "Patty" moniker for a new character, "Peppermint Patty". Although the original Patty, or at least unnamed girls who bear a strong resemblance to her, would make cameo appearances throughout the run of Peanuts, she had disappeared as a featured character by the mid-1970s, but she continued making cameo appearances as late as the 90's. Her last appearance was a rerun of a 1992 strip which was republished on November 27th, 1997. Schulz claimed he drew Patty in the March 2th, 1994 strip in which she wants Snoopy to chase rabbits with her (a role previously usually taken by Frieda), although some fans have stated that the girl in the strip in question does not resemble Patty. VIOLET GRAY Violet Gray (her surname Gray was mentioned only once, on April 4, 1953) was initially a major character, until she began to fade into the background. Violet is best known as a jealous girl who likes bragging and, along with her friends Patty (her best friend) and Lucy (the ringleader of the trio), often teases and torments Charlie Brown. In addition to the comic strip, Violet has appeared alongside other Peanuts characters in numerous Peanuts television specials, cinematic movies, theatrical plays, and video games. Violet was first featured in the February 7th, 1951 Peanuts strip. From there on, Violet's character changed and developed until she began to become less prominent than the other major characters, with her forthcoming appearances reduced to mere cameos. Her last comic strip appearance, discounting the reruns of the strip, was on the November 27th, 1997 Peanuts strip. As Violet's character developed over the years, her appearance changed as well. On the early strips, Violet has her shoulder-length dark hair kept in either pigtails, a bun, or, sometimes, a ponytail. Later on, Schulz dropped the braids and kept Violet's hair only in ponytails. Violet also wears front bangs and often wears dresses which are originally depicted as purple; later they were depicted as green, as well as black Mary Janes shoes. During the winter (and during other seasons on the strip's later years), Violet switches to pants. Violet wears a purple dress in The Peanuts Movie. Violet is smart, popular, and a snob. She makes her opinions known to everyone, and her haughtiness causes her to often torment other people, whom she views as beneath her. Violet is supposedly of upper-class upbringing, and she likes to brag about how her father possessing something her friends' fathers don't; it is also implied, however, that Violet's father is largely absent from her life, which her peers use against her when she gets too obnoxious. For example, in a Father's Day strip, her boasts are quelled by Charlie Brown when he takes her to his dad's barber shop. After telling her about how his dad would always smile at him no matter how bad a workday he was having, a humbled Violet walked away, but not before quietly wishing Charlie Brown a Happy Father's Day. In the early strips, Violet often acted like a preschool-age Suzy Homemaker: making mud pies, playing "house," and being linked to romantic scenarios involving Charlie Brown. She also collects stamps as a hobby. On some occasions, Violet was shown walking and keeping company with Shermy. Violet never really developed a strong personality, especially compared to the next three characters who would be introduced after her (Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus). She tended to be used mostly as a straight woman to set up the punchline. Schulz admitted as much in a 1988 interview. "Some characters just don't seem to have enough personality to carry out ideas," he said, referring to Violet, Patty, and Shermy. "They're just almost born straight men." Violet's appearances were eventually reduced to mere cameos in the background. In early strips, she was linked to romantic scenarios involving Charlie Brown. She also feels bad for him when he doesn't get a Valentine's Day card in Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, which hints that she cares about him deep down (this caring is inconsistent; when he doesn't receive a Christmas card in A Charlie Brown Christmas, Violet responds in her usual mocking tone). SHERMY When Peanuts made its debut on October 2nd, 1950, Shermy had the first lines of dialogue in the series, ending with "Good ol' Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!" As Peanuts matured, however, Shermy became an extraneous character who was used less and less frequently, until his final appearance in 1969. Shermy's name was first mentioned on December 18th, 1950, making him the last of the original characters to have the name revealed. In Schulz's Peanuts-precursor strip Li'l Folks, a character resembling Shermy went by the name "Charlie Brown". Shermy was often portrayed as Charlie Brown's superior at the things that mattered to Charlie Brown, especially athletics. The relationship between Shermy and Charlie Brown became more neutral, and often even friendly, as the strip progressed and Shermy's role declined in prominence; Shermy, by default, served as Charlie Brown's closest friend until Linus grew old enough to fill that role. Shermy's major physical characteristic was his short, dark hair, which he had styled in a crew cut. Apparently Schulz himself was not a big fan of this look, as he once commented that he "disliked" the way he drew Shermy's hair, a possible reason for the character being removed. Shermy was sometimes said to play the position of first base on Charlie Brown's baseball team. In at least one early strip (September 29th, 1951), Shermy is implied to be the original owner of Snoopy, several years before Charlie Brown was established as the dog's owner in 1958. Shermy's disappearance from the strip was even faster and more complete than those of Patty and Violet, who were also mostly gone from the series by the late 1960s; as early as late 1952 his appearances were becoming noticeably rare because of the success of newly introduced characters Lucy and Linus. In 1968, his remaining role as straight man was effectively overtaken by Franklin. Shermy appears in multiple animated Peanuts TV specials (although he becomes more of a minor character after the 1960s), beginning with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, where he has one line of dialogue. Upon being cast as a shepherd in the gang's Christmas pageant, he laments, "Every Christmas it's the same: I always end up playing a shepherd." His appearances also include (sometimes with dialogue and sometimes without) Charlie Brown's All-Stars, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, You're in Love, Charlie Brown, It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown, You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown, Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown?, Why, Charlie Brown, Why?, It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown, It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown, and I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown with many of the latter being produced several years after he had already disappeared from the comic strip. Shermy is mentioned briefly in the musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, in the song "The Doctor Is In," but does not appear or have a speaking part; and he also makes appearances in three feature films including A Boy Named Charlie Brown, as well as a cameo appearance in Snoopy Come Home. Shermy is also seen several times in The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Shermy returned to the animated specials in the 2011 Direct-to-DVD Happiness Is A Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown, which includes a scene based on the very first Peanuts strip, where Shermy notes how much he hates Charlie Brown. He also plays a supporting role in the 2015 computer-animated film The Peanuts Movie, where his last name is revealed to be "Plepler". It is also shown in the same movie that he has a younger sister, though this is not considered canonical. RERUN VAN PELT Rerun van Pelt is Linus' and Lucy's younger brother who started as a minor character in the Peanuts universe, only becoming a main character in the last decade of the comic strip. Rerun was first mentioned in the strip on May 23rd, 1972, during a storyline in which Lucy threw Linus out of the house only to learn that yet another little brother had just been born. Upon learning the news, Lucy exclaimed "A new baby brother?!! But I just got rid of the old one!!!" With that, she let Linus back in, uttering in misery, "You can't shovel water with a pitchfork." The irony of the situation was not lost on Linus, who laughed himself silly over his sister's scheme being defeated, thus causing her to lose her temper and tie his blanket over his mouth. Lucy, who always wanted to be an only child (or to have a younger sister), is less than thrilled at the prospect of having a second younger brother, and comments that getting one was like watching reruns on television; thus, Linus comes up with the idea of calling the family's new addition "Rerun". "Rerun van Pelt! Good Grief!" mutters Lucy with a less-than-thrilled look on her face. Rerun's first appearance was on March 26th, 1973, depicted as a nearly identical but smaller version of Linus. Over time, Lucy warmed up to Rerun and became something of a mentor to him, more kind with him than she had ever been with Linus. Linus also took Rerun under his wing in later years, unsuccessfully attempting to "convert" Rerun to his belief in "The Great Pumpkin", and taking his skeptical and embarrassed little brother along on door-to-door "missions" to spread the word of the Great Pumpkin. The first storyline in which Rerun is featured involves a still pre-verbal Rerun becoming a player on Charlie Brown's baseball team and being involved in a gambling scandal (he bet a nickel with Snoopy that Charlie Brown's team would win) that ends in the team having to forfeit one of their rare victories. Occasional appearances in the 1970s and 1980s have him verbalizing in thought balloons and feature him as a nervous passenger on the back of his mother's bicycle. Rerun was rarely used in the 1980s; by that time, Schulz had run out of ideas about how to use him. However, in the early 1990s, he resurfaces, having grown to where he is almost equal in height to his siblings and the other kids. To distinguish him from his almost identical brother, Linus, Schulz added overalls and a flattened hair style. Re-introduced through a number of appearances in 1993 and 1994, Rerun is shown being taught how to tie his shoes by Lucy, being introduced to basketball by Linus, and playing cards with Snoopy. Beginning in 1994, Rerun is regularly shown on Charlie Brown's doorstep, asking to borrow Snoopy. Schulz made Rerun into a main character in the strip's final years, and much of the focus during this time is from Rerun's perspective; Schulz admitted in a 1997 interview with Gary Groth that the character virtually "took over" the comic. In the 2009 documentary, "Sibling Rivalry: Growing Up Van Pelt", included on the I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown DVD, Schulz's widow, Jean Schulz, speculated that Rerun's expanded presence in the comic strip may have resulted from the presence of grandchildren in Schulz's life. Most of his story lines involve his anxieties and struggles with being a "little kid" among big kids, and his desire to play with Snoopy and have a dog of his own. As the other Peanuts kids were older than Rerun, he was usually excluded from their squabbles and rivalries, and several of them were shown as protective or mentoring towards him. On different occasions, Charlie Brown was shown teaching Rerun how to deliver newspapers, and winning back Rerun's marbles from the bully, Joe Agate. Even Sally Brown, herself younger than the other children, was shown giving Rerun a tour of the bus stop and school just weeks before he started kindergarten. After having his age advanced to five years old in 1996, a running gag in the strip has Rerun hiding under his bed in an attempt to get out of going to school, a ploy that usually does not work. Though intelligent, Rerun displays a rebellious streak in school, always drawing "underground comics" (usually referring to them as "basement comics") instead of painting flowers, as his teacher instructs, and suggesting that the teacher read Anna Karenina instead of children's books. Rerun is also often shown flirting with an unnamed pigtailed girl in his kindergarten class. In a series of strips that ran from January 13th, 1997, to January 18th, 1997, he jokes about taking her away to Paris, and is suspended from school for harassment (long term suspension for one day). But he thinks he got fired. Rerun's animated debut is in the animated television special It's Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, and his first major appearance in the strip was adapted in the first produced episode of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Rerun only made one other appearance in a television special before 2000, Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! from 1986, where his attempts to blow up balloons for the New Year's party ended in failure, as he blew them up as cubes rather than spheres (a scenario adapted from a comic strip story involving Linus from December 1954, when Linus was roughly the same age). Rerun was mentioned, but not seen, in the 1985 special "Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown" when Charlie Brown informed Snoopy that he could not back out of his wedding because Rerun had already been chosen as ring-bearer. Rerun briefly appeared in Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales, and the 2003 animated television special I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown. This episode uses Rerun as its primary character. Rerun's most recent television appearance is in the 2006 television special He's a Bully, Charlie Brown. PEGGY JEAN Peggy Jean was the girlfriend of Charlie Brown during the 1990s. Charlie Brown first met her at summer camp in 1990, and she appeared intermittently in the strip until mid-1999, a few months before the strip ended. Because of Charlie Brown's extreme nervousness upon meeting her, he mistakenly gave his name as "Brownie Charles," which she continued to use thereafter. Peggy Jean and Charlie Brown's relationship hit a brief snag almost immediately after it began, however. At summer camp, Peggy Jean once held the football down for Charlie Brown, who apparently declined, worried that she would pull it away like Lucy did. The fact that he took so long to make up his mind led Peggy to think that he did not trust her and she allegedly went home enraged. She later came back and made up, kissing Charlie Brown in the process. Charlie Brown went so far as to call Linus on the phone and tell him that she kissed him. But the phone was actually answered by Lucy who asked "What is this, an obscene phone call??!!" Later, Charlie Brown wanted to buy her some gloves for Christmas but didn't have the money for them (Linus suggested he send her a card advising her to keep her hands in her pockets). Charlie Brown sold his entire comic collection in order to buy the gloves, only to meet Peggy Jean in the shop and her telling him that her mother had bought her the same sort of gloves; in the end, Charlie Brown gives the gloves he bought to Snoopy. This storyline was adapted as a portion of the animated special It's Christmastime Again. Curiously, Peggy was depicted there as a redhead instead of having brown hair as she did in the strip, which may have led to viewers confusing her with the Little Red-Haired Girl (the original VHS release of the special even mistakenly referred to her as the latter character). On July 11th, 1999, the last strip Peggy Jean appeared in, it is revealed that she had found a new boyfriend, leaving Charlie Brown heartbroken. THE LITTLE RED-HAIRED GIRL The Little Red-Haired Girl is an unseen character in the Peanuts comic strip who serves as the object of Charlie Brown's affection, and a symbol of unrequited love. While never seen in the strip, she appears onscreen in several television specials, in which her name has been revealed as Heather Wold. Charlie Brown most often notices her while eating lunch outdoors, always failing to muster the courage to speak to her. She figures prominently in Valentine's Day strips, several of which focus on Charlie Brown's hope of getting a valentine from her. Charlie Brown typically attempts to give her a valentine but panics at the last minute. Charlie Brown first catches sight of her in the November 19th, 1961 strip, saying he would "give anything in the world if that little girl with the red hair would come over and sit with me." In July 1969, a story arc ran depicting the Little Red-Haired Girl moving away. Charlie Brown despaired that he would never see her again. He saw her from a distance later that year while skiing. Peppermint Patty and Marcie encountered her at summer camp a few years later in 1972, where it is stated that she is aware of Charlie Brown (despite his belief that she does not know he exists) and is talking about him to the other girls at camp, although what she says of him and how she feels about him are not stated. Eventually, the Little Red-Haired Girl moved back to Charlie Brown's neighborhood, with no further mention of her ever having been away. The 1967 Peanuts animated TV special You're in Love, Charlie Brown revolved entirely around Charlie Brown's obsession with the Little Red-Haired Girl. After several failed attempts at making conversation with her on the last two days of school, she stuffs a note into Charlie Brown's hands as students rush past him to board the school bus. Thinking he has ruined his final chance at meeting her, he reads the letter, which affectionately states, "I like you, Charlie Brown. Signed, the Little Red-Haired Girl." Ecstatic, Charlie Brown skips his way home, realizing he has triumphed against what he considers all odds. Throughout the entirety of You're in Love, Charlie Brown, the Little Red-Haired Girl is not seen once. The Little Red-Haired Girl returned in the 1977 special It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, making her first ever onscreen appearance. Linus tells Charlie Brown that her name is "Heather", and that she is the Homecoming Queen. Charlie Brown becomes a wreck, trying desperately to impress her once he learns that he has been chosen to escort her to the dance after the football game. After spending nearly the entire duration of the special stressing about meeting her, he eventually musters up the courage to give her a kiss. Heather appeared onscreen again in the 1985 special Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! She did not have a speaking role in either of the aforementioned specials. Schulz did not consider these animated appearances to be canonical, although he wrote the screenplay himself. The Little Red-Haired Girl was once seen in the comics in silhouette on May 25th, 1998, dancing with Snoopy. When the storyline was adapted as part of the 2002 special A Charlie Brown Valentine, she was seen unshadowed but had a different design than suggested by the silhouette, and completely different from her two previous appearances in It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown and Happy New Year, Charlie Brown! A third animated version of the Little Red-Haired Girl is briefly seen in the introduction sequence used in the second season of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, in which she again looks different from her other appearances. Another appearance includes the 1988 special Snoopy!!! The Musical (albeit a brief cameo). She also appears in A Charlie Brown Valentine. In The Peanuts Movie, she has a much different design based on the earlier mentioned silhouette, and on the test score sheet, it is revealed her name is Heather Wold, after her name in the specials and the last name of Donna Wold, the real-life inspiration behind the character. The film marked the first time the Little Red-Haired Girl spoke in all Peanuts-related media, with Charlie Brown finally succeeding in talking to her. A former co-worker, Donna Mae Wold (born Donna Mae Johnson January 3rd, 1929 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, died August 8th, 2016 in Richfield, Minnesota), was Schulz's inspiration for the character. A 1947 high school graduate, Johnson was working in the accounting department of the Art Instruction, Inc., a correspondence school where Schulz worked. Johnson and Schulz eventually became romantically involved and dated for three years, but in 1950 when Schulz proposed to her, she turned him down, saying she was already engaged. Schulz was devastated, but he and Donna remained friends for the rest of his life. Said Schulz of the relationship, "I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much. A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is." Only one known Schulz drawing (aside from the aforementioned silhouette) of the little red-haired girl exists. It was drawn in 1950, long before she was mentioned in Peanuts. The girl in the drawing strongly resembles Patty (not to be confused with the later character Peppermint Patty), a character who was prominent in the early days of the strip. A book containing the sketch also has a photo of Johnson with Schulz. "I'd like to see Charlie Brown kick that football, and if he gets the little red-haired girl, that's fine with me," Donna said around the time Schulz announced his retirement in 1999. On Valentine's Day 2011, the Schulz Museum gave free admission to all redheaded girls and boys in honor of the Little Red-Haired Girl. ENDORA Eudora is a female Peanuts character with long, straight black hair and usually wears a knitted hat. Eudora moved to Charlie Brown's neighborhood from another state, though which state was never specified. The first other Peanuts character Eudora met was Sally, on the bus to summer camp on June 13th, 1978. Eudora then showed up in Sally's class at the school that fall. The two girls quickly became friends, and became even better friends when Eudora moved into Sally's neighborhood. However, Sally gets angry at Eudora when she shows feelings toward Linus and is able to charm him into giving her his blanket, since she has a crush on Linus herself. Eudora gives the blanket to Snoopy's nemesis, the "stupid cat who lives next door," and it takes the combined forces of Linus, Snoopy and Woodstock to get the blanket back. In some strips Eudora appears to be even more ditzy than Sally, such as when she tries to give a book report on the TV Guide and coming to school on Saturdays without realizing what day it is. Eudora is shown playing on Charlie Brown's baseball team in some strips, taking the outfield spot next to Lucy that had once been held by Frieda before the latter disappeared from the strip. She was also one of the girls who was nicer to Charlie Brown often hanging out with him and playing board games. Eudora would eventually disappear as well, with her swan song coming on June 13th, 1987, exactly nine years to the day after her introduction. Eudora was the last new character to join the Peanuts world who could arguably be classified as a major character. Any new characters introduced after her only made limited appearances as part of specific storylines. Eudora only appeared in A Charlie Brown Celebration (1982), The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show episodes "Snoopy's Cat Fight" and "Sally's Sweet Babboo", and had a quick cameo in A Charlie Brown Valentine, where she is seen walking with Sally. Eudora is also featured in the whole episode of "A New Best Friend," part of the new Peanuts cartoon on Boomerang. CHARLOTTE BRAUN Charlotte Braun first appeared on November 30th, 1954 and was originally intended as a female counterpart of the strip's protagonist, Charlie Brown (hence her self-applied nickname "Good Ol' Charlotte Braun"). In the few comic strips that she appeared in, Charlotte Braun had the trait of speaking too loudly, a trait uncomfortably similar to Lucy van Pelt, although the two characters never appeared together (Charlotte did appear with Linus). Schulz decided to abandon Charlotte Braun after only ten appearances because "he had run out of ideas" for her, didn't think that the character's personality was very developed, and realized that fans were not particularly liking this character, the latter thanks to a letter from Elizabeth Swaim, a fan who wrote to him to complain about Charlotte Braun. On January 5th, 1955, he sent a letter back to Miss Swaim, saying in reply, "I am taking your suggestion regarding Charlotte Braun, & will eventually discard her... Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?" The letter ended with a sketch of Charlotte Braun standing with an axe in her head (an original drawning that would be worth a fortune on ebay we suspect). The last time she appeared was on February 1st, 1955. CLARA An unnamed girl was an antagonist in the 1972 movie Snoopy, Come Home but was identified as Clara (below left) in the film's theatrical release poster. Clara briefly kidnapped Snoopy (and later Woodstock), renamed him "Rex", and gave him a forced and painful bath. In her last scene of the film, Snoopy and Woodstock escape in a wild chase. This character, like Lila, had appeared only one time in the comic strip before the release of the film. She kidnapped Snoopy in a similar way in the strip of November 12th, 1970 (above center), when Snoopy was helping Woodstock to travel south for winter (Charlie Brown rescued him a few days later). A similarly behaving girl, presumably the same character, made another brief appearance in the comic strip in August 1997 as part of a year-long story arc about Snoopy's brothers, Andy and Olaf, who are on their way to meet Spike, Snoopy's other brother. She takes Andy, puts him into a baby pram and ties him onto a tree until Olaf breaks him out two days later. The character was not given any name in either of her appearances in the strip. In 1968, Peppermint Patty becomes tent monitor for a trio of little girls, during a summer camp session (above right). The girls are introduced on June 18th as Sophie, Clara and Shirley. The Clara here bears a strong resemblance to the character we would later know as Marcie, with two key distinctions: she's shorter, younger, and her eyes show through the lenses of her glasses. LILA Lila is a female character in Peanuts and is Snoopy's previous owner. She got him from the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm and they loved each other very much, but her family couldn't keep him because the apartment they moved to did not allow dogs. In a daily strip sequence from June 3rd to 8th, 1968, Lila comes to visit Snoopy, although she's never actually seen during this episode. That August, Snoopy visits Lila in the hospital, wherein she makes her only appearance in the strip, on August 24th. Snoopy's hospital visit is also depicted in the second Peanuts movie, Snoopy Come Home, where it leads to his decision to return to her; but he goes back to Charlie Brown after reading the No Dogs Allowed sign where she lives. MISS OTHMAR Miss Othmar served as Linus's teacher starting in 1959. As with most adults in the strip, Miss Othmar was never seen. In the strip she is never heard even though the children have conversations with her. She was given an unintelligible speaking voice in TV specials in the form of trombone sounding "wah-wahs" (recorded by trombonist Dean Hubbard. In The Peanuts Movie, her "talking" is provided by New Orleans trombonist Trombone Shorty). This became her trademark and all other voices of adult characters off camera in the cartoons and is sometimes parodied in other programs. Miss Othmar talks briefly to Sally in the TV special You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown. Linus developed a long-lasting crush on her. As a result, Linus held her in unreasonable esteem, which made his discovery that she earned a salary for her profession a crushing disillusionment he tried to rationalize away. When Lucy tells Linus that it is wrong to worship a teacher, Linus denies worshipping Miss Othmar, but he does admit to being "very fond of the ground on which she walks." Eventually, Miss Othmar married, assuming her married name of Mrs. Hagemeyer; Linus, however, continued to call her Miss Othmar, and other characters in the strip began referring to her as Miss Othmar again as well. (As Linus said, "In real life she's still Miss Othmar!") Although Miss Othmar quit teaching after she got engaged, she returned to teaching a few years later, much to Linus' delight. However, in 1969, Miss Othmar was fired following a teacher's strike, and Linus was devastated. Miss Othmar's replacement was Miss Halverson ("Halverson" being the maiden name of Charles M. Schulz's first wife, Joyce), whom Linus initially refused to accept as his new teacher, although he eventually seemed to learn to live with it. Marcie mentions that she is taking organ lessons from a "Mrs. Hagemeyer" in a 1979 strip, but it is unclear whether this Mrs. Hagemeyer and Miss Othmar are one and the same. Aside from Miss Othmar and Miss Halverson, few other teachers were mentioned by name in Peanuts (and none were ever drawn), with the children most often addressing their teacher as "Ma'am" (only once was a male teacher mentioned, in the infamous "GEORGE WASHINGTON!!!" storyline from 1967 featuring Sally and Charlie Brown). In the 1966 strip storyline about Charlie Brown's competing in the class spelling bee (later adapted into the movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown), Charlie Brown mentions that his teacher's name is Mrs. Donovan, but he was later shown in Miss Othmar's class with Linus. Peppermint Patty and Marcie's teacher was named Miss Swanson in the early 1970s, but had changed to Miss Tenure by 1978, in a storyline in which Peppermint Patty disguised herself as a janitor to investigate the theft of Miss Tenure's box of gold star stickers and to clear her name of said theft. On August 24th, 1993, in conversation with Marcie, Peppermint Patty refers to her book report as being written for Miss Davis. Marcie reveals to her that Miss Davis quit two years previous to have a baby. After some early anomalies, adult figures never again appeared in the strip. Peanuts had several other recurring characters who were similarly absent from view. Some, such as the Great Pumpkin or the Red Baron, may or may not have been figments of the cast's imaginations. Others, such as the Little Red-Haired Girl (Charlie Brown's perennial dream girl), Joe Shlabotnik (Charlie Brown's baseball hero), World War II (the vicious cat who lives next door to Snoopy), and Charlie Brown's unnamed pen pal, were real. In a strip series in 1994, the Pen Pal was revealed to be a girl in Scotland named Morag. Peanuts also saw several secondary characters come and go throughout the strip's fifty-year run. Lydia is the presumed name of the girl that sits behind Linus in school. She is two months younger than Linus but always asks "Aren't you kind of old for me?" She also goes by a different name every day, leading an exasperated Linus to stick with the name Lydia. Her antics drive Linus crazy, but at the same time he finds her fascinating. In Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales, he once tried to send her a Christmas card, but she never gave him her correct address. Her feelings towards Linus remain ambiguous. Mary Jo was another of Charlie Brown's "true loves" in Someday You'll Find Her, Charlie Brown. He first saw her during the broadcast of Super Bowl XVI; she was in the audience and the TV camera zoomed in on her face. The only difference between her and any other of his loves is that, while he is extremely nervous about the others (so nervous, in fact, that he cannot even bring himself to speak to some of them), he sought after her in a wild-goose chase attempt to find her and win her heart. Maynard was Marcie's cousin, who appeared in the strip July 21st, 1986, when Peppermint Patty's father hired him as her tutor to help her in school. Maynard's condescending attitude was apparent from the start when he asked her, "Hi, are you the dumb one?" upon first meeting her, and when he said, "Well, there were these numbers on the houses, see..." when she asked him how he had found her house. In turn, Maynard couldn't stand Peppermint Patty's own condescending attitude, when she kept calling him "Captain Tutor" and he kept having to remind her that his name was Maynard. When Marcie revealed to Peppermint Patty that her cousin was getting paid to tutor Peppermint Patty, she threw Maynard out of the house, because she thought he was tutoring her "out of the kindness of his heart." However, Maynard justified his recompense with a Biblical passage: "The laborer is worthy of his hire" (Luke 10:7, mistakenly attributed by Maynard as Luke 10:4). Having been fired as Peppermint Patty's tutor, Maynard never appeared again in the strip. Mimi is a female character in the animated TV special It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown (below left). Poochie (below second from the left) was a female character who made her first and only appearance on January 7th, 1973, though she had been mentioned by name in previous strips. She was almost the first person to adopt Snoopy but was distracted by an English sheepdog while Snoopy was fetching a stick Poochie threw; Snoopy held a grudge against Poochie for this for years afterward. Clara (below second from the right) was a female character who first appeared in June 18th, 1968. The first Clara, a prototype of the later character, Marcie, was one of the three little girls that included Shirley and Sophie who were under the tutelage of Peppermint Patty during one of her Summer Camp adventures. Roy (above right) was a male character who first appeared on June 11th, 1965. Roy first meets Charlie Brown in camp, where Charlie Brown quickly befriends him. He meets Linus van Pelt at camp the following summer. He later introduces Peppermint Patty to Charlie Brown and his friends. Though still a minor character, Roy was apparently Peppermint Patty's closest friend until Marcie came into the picture. Roy appeared in the television specials He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968), It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown (1969), Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown? (1983), Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown (1985), and He's A Bully, Charlie Brown, (2006) and the films Snoopy, Come Home! (1972) and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977). He disappeared in the comic strip in 1975 but he was shown once more in 1984. Molly Volley (above left) was a female character who first appeared on May 9th, 1977, and was often Snoopy's doubles partner in tennis. A hyperaggressive tennis player, she did not suffer fools gladly, and had a bad temper, a great aversion to losing and a reputation for beating up others (including other doubles partners). She also had a tendency to be highly sensitive about her weight: when one of her opponents, a bully called "Bad-Call" Benny (above right panel), called her "Fat Legs", she hit him in the mouth. She measured all her ground-calls in centimeters. She did get along well with Charlie Brown; in fact, he and Linus were the only ones who usually watched Molly Volley and Snoopy play. Her most constant opponent was a loudmouthed girl named "Crybaby" Boobie (above right panel), who joined the strip in 1978. "Crybaby" had a tendency to cry and complain about absolutely everything. This trait, as well as the car horn honking antics of her stage-door mother, always tended to drive Molly crazy. Tired of always losing while playing doubles with Snoopy, she eventually refused to be his doubles partner and then she disappeared from the strip. Royanne Hobbs was a female character who first appeared on April 1st, 1993. Royanne, who claimed to be "Roy Hobbs' great-granddaughter", and was a pitcher on the opposing team when Charlie Brown hit a game-winning home run. Showing up later that summer, she is again pitching when Charlie Brown hits one of her pitches for an inside-the-park home run. Later that summer, Royanne confesses that she let Charlie Brown hit those home runs because she liked him; Charlie Brown retaliates by informing her that "Roy Hobbs" is a fictional character. Shortly afterwards, Royanne appears in a story arc where she tries to sell "the bat used by Roy Hobbs", despite her revelation that Roy Hobbs is a fictional character Lucy purchases this bat and lashes out at her upon being informed by Charlie Brown that Roy Hobbs is fictional. Royanne then admits that she wanted to play on Charlie Brown's team, but utterly refuses to play with Lucy. After she refused to play with Lucy, Royanne sold the bat and she never appeared in the strip again. Royanne resembles Eudora but with longer hair covering her eyes and usually wears a baseball cap. Russell Anderson (above left) is a boy with blonde hair. He appeared in the television special You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown, as Linus' rival for school president. Russell eventually ended up voting for Linus, because Russell thought Linus could do a better job as school president than he, Russell, could. Emily (above center) was a female character who was Charlie Brown's partner in a school dance. She first appeared on February 11th, 1995. It was revealed that Emily was merely a figment of Charlie Brown's imagination as the teacher said that there was no one in the class named Emily. However, in her later appearances, Emily was never mentioned to be an imaginary character and Snoopy was also able to see her as well. The question of whether Emily was an imaginary character or not was never resolved. Ethan (above right) was Charlie Brown's bunk mate. He first appeared on July 14th, 1993. He made an Indian arrow in art class, but it was not a weapon. The next day, he says that when he grows up, he wants to be a newspaper columnist, because he has strong opinions about everything. As an example, he says that the shirt Charlie Brown is wearing is stupid. "Shut Up and Leave Me Alone" was all this nameless, faceless kid ever said whenever Charlie Brown tried to be friendly with him. He was Charlie's bunkmate at the summer camp where Marcie was introduced in 1971. He did nothing but sit on his bed and look at the wall so we could see only the back of his head. He even said those words to Peppermint Patty when she visited their cabin and was about to introduce herself and Marcie, making Peppermint Patty angry at Charlie Brown. Those were even his parting words to Charlie when camp was over. After camp, Charlie wrote him a letter, but the response was, of course, "Shut up and leave me alone." Finally, later, during the following school year, out of the blue, Charlie Brown received an unexpected letter from his old bunkmate. He tells Charlie Brown in the letter response to "shut up and leave me alone." Floyd (above left) appeared July 26th, 1976, at a summer camp Peppermint Patty and Marcie were attending, flagging Marcie's attention by calling her "Lambcake" as an expression of his immediate infatuation with her. But whenever he called her "Lambcake," Marcie retaliated by pushing Floyd off the dock or into poison oak, or hitting him with a first-aid kit and landing him in the infirmary. But he kept stalking her with that same pet name until Marcie and Peppermint Patty left camp, leaving him heartbroken that he never even knew his heartthrob's name. Floyd never surfaced again in the strip. Austin, Leland, Milo, and Ruby (above right) appeared in 17 strips of a 1977 storyline in which Charlie Brown ran away from home to flee the United States Environmental Protection Agency after taking revenge on the Kite-Eating Tree. He soon found himself coaching a baseball team of diminutive toddlers: Milo and Leland, half Charlie Brown's height, were two years old, while "the two biggest" on the team, Austin and Ruby, might have been three. They always addressed Charlie Brown as "Charles" and respected him as a wise elder, something he was completely unused to. The team was named the "Goose Eggs" after the baseball term for a zero score. The story ended when the visiting team turned out to be Charlie Brown's original team from home (Lucy: "We can't play them! They're too little! We'd step on them!") and it was revealed that the evidence against him was destroyed in a storm. Janice Emmons is a girl who only appears on the 1990 TV special Why, Charlie Brown, Why?. She has blonde hair, goes to the same school that Charlie Brown and Linus go, and has a particularly close friendship with the latter. She also loves playing in the swings with Linus. Unfortunately one day, she gets hospitalized and diagnosed with a kind of cancer called leukemia, leaving Linus sad and shocked. After some time, Janice manages to recover and returns to school. Janice shares some similarities with character Lila. Joe Agate (above) was a male character who first appeared on April 7th, 1995. He usually wore an orange sweater and a green hat. He bullied Rerun Van Pelt by stealing his marbles. He was the adversary in the animated TV special He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, voiced by Taylor Lautner. José Peterson (left) was introduced in 1967 as a friend of Peppermint Patty's whom she recommended to Charlie Brown to be on his baseball team. José Peterson was a very good hitter, but Peppermint Patty was disappointed in the quality of the rest of Charlie Brown's team, so she and José Peterson decided to start a team in their own neighborhood. José Peterson is notable in that his mixed ancestry - a Swedish-American father and Mexican-American mother - made him one of the first characters of Hispanic descent in U.S. comics. His mother apparently combined her and her husband's ethnicities in cooking, serving tortillas with Swedish meatballs. Before moving to Peppermint Patty's neighborhood, José Peterson had lived in New Mexico and North Dakota. After his initial appearance, José Petersen was only ever seen again as a bystander in one panel on September 24th, 1969, and in the back cover illustration for the 1975 book Peanuts Jubilee. He was briefly visible in the Peanuts animated movie released in 2015. In that book, Schulz noted that the character's name came to him in a dream, and he found the combination of a Mexican given name and a Swedish family name hilarious. Tapioca Pudding (right) first appeared on September 4th, 1986. Tapioca is Linus's classmate and has a small crush on him, which annoys Sally. Sally is jealous of the friendship. Tapioca is also keen on licensing of brand names. Tapioca Pudding once had what was "planned" by Snoopy (who was portraying a Hollywood agent for Tapioca) an appearance at the Olympics in L.A. (only for her to find out from Linus that the Olympics were two years ago). Tapioca's last appearance was December 1, 1986. Her dessert-based name and association with merchandise may peg her as a parody of Strawberry Shortcake. Thibault was a male character who first appeared on June 4th, 1970. Thibault is a bully on Peppermint Patty's baseball team. He borrowed Charlie Brown's baseball glove (as a favor for Peppermint Patty), and after the game refused to give the glove back, telling Charlie Brown "I know your kind. You come around thinking you're better than us." Charlie Brown, thrilled that anyone would think of him as superior in any way, let Thibault keep the glove. Thibault (left top) also ran afoul of Peppermint Patty and Marcie in 1973 after he chauvinistically told the latter that she should not be playing baseball simply because she was a girl. After insulting Marcie one too many times, she told Thibault that if he said one word, she would slug him. When he said, "Oh?", Marcie made good on her threat. Thibault's role as troublemaker is reflected in his name, a variation of "Tybalt", the hostile troublemaker in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Thibault made an animated appearance on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Truffles (left bottom) was a female character who first appeared on March 31st, 1975. She has a larger nose and eyes than other Peanuts characters. Named by her grandfather after the fungus that grows underground, she was the second girl who caught Linus's heart (his slight crush on Sally Brown being the first). However, Linus's blossoming relationship with Truffles would be thwarted twice; first in 1975 by Snoopy as he and Linus go on a truffle hunt. Two years later, when Linus found her again while on a school field trip in 1977, Sally, who would call him her "Sweet Babboo" for the first of many times to his annoyance, saw to it that his reunion with Truffles was short-lived with Snoopy's help. She made two appearances in A Charlie Brown Celebration and The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Truffles may be based on a young French girl in a family Charles Schulz met and befriended after the liberation of France during the Second World War. 555 95472, or 5 for short, debuted in the September 30th, 1963, strip, and appeared occasionally until the 1980s. A boy close in age to Charlie Brown and Linus van Pelt, 5 had brown spiky hair, and he wore an orange shirt with the number 5 on it. 5 was given a numerical name by his father, who was upset over the preponderance of numbers in people's lives; when questioned, 5 clarified that this was not his father's way of protesting, it was his way of "giving in." His last name, 95472 (the accent is on the 4), was taken from the family's ZIP code; it is also the zip code for Sebastopol, California, where Schulz lived at the time. 5 had twin (presumably older) sisters, dark-haired girls named 3 and 4. 5 was largely phased out of the strip by the late 1960s, except as a background extra. Despite this, he appears in multiple animated Peanuts television specials, mainly as a background character, and is also briefly seen in the films A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Snoopy Come Home, and Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown. 5 and his twin sisters also appear in the famous dance sequence in A Charlie Brown Christmas. In his animated appearances during the 1960s, the number 5 on his shirt was generally absent, though he was still distinguished by his thin, spiky hair and orange T-shirt, which remains the color orange throughout the majority of his appearances. Despite having few speaking appearances, 5 is seen much more frequently in the television specials and movies than any other minor character from the Peanuts comic strip and was considered a regular character until the 1980s, after which his animated appearances ceased. However, he did make a cameo appearance in Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown along with Frieda, Faron, and his twin sisters 3 and 4. His name also appears on the test scores sheet in The Peanuts Movie, and he also has a cameo appearance in the film's dance sequence. Schulz added some additional fantastic elements, sometimes imbuing inanimate objects with sparks of life. Charlie Brown's nemesis, the Kite-Eating Tree, is one example. Sally Brown's school building, that expressed thoughts and feelings about the students (and the general business of being a brick building), is another. Linus' famous "security blanket" also displayed occasional signs of anthropomorphism. Schulz continued with the strip for nearly 50 years, with no assistants, even in the lettering and coloring process and over the years tackled everything from the Vietnam War to school dress codes to the "new math" and lampooned Little Leagues and "organized" play, when all the neighborhood kids join snowman-building leagues and Charlie Brown insists on building his own snowmen without leagues or coaches. Peanuts reached its peak in American pop-culture awareness between 1965 and 1980. During the 1980s some other strips surpassed Peanuts in popularity, most notably Doonesbury, Garfield, The Far Side, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes, however, Schulz still had one of the highest circulations in daily newspapers, and still remains popular with licensing and marketing products to this day. slideshow