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Buy Me Some Peanuts and Charlie Brown

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D. D. Degg April 28, 2024 2 minutes 2 comments

A collection of some Peanuts/Snoopy/Charles Schulz items from April 2024.

The 2024 Major League Baseball season brings with it Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Woodstock bobbleheads in in team colors and names. Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Dodgers, Baltimore Orioles, and St. Louis Cardinals have promoted their flavor of Peanuts bobbleheads.

The images I chose are from teams Charles Schulz would cheer for – The San Francisco Giants and the Minnesota Twins. These, and different teams and sports, bobbleheads are available at FOCO.

As Samantha Connell and Pop Insider report non-sports limited edition Peanuts bobbleheads are also available:

If you’re obsessed with the ever-relatable Peanuts gang, you might be looking to update your collection. If that’s true, you have better luck than Charlie Brown — FOCO just released a new Peanuts Mini Bighead Bobbleheads line!

There are 18 Mini Bighead Bobbleheads in the collection, so you can display your favorite character from the Peanuts TV Show series. Each collectible ($40 each) is 4.5-inches. Fans of these characters should act fast — it’s a limited-edition collection, so there are only 150 pieces available for each mini bighead.

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Searching for Snoopy: What happened to all the ‘Peanuts’ statues in St. Paul?

Over five summers[ in the early 2000s], the “Peanuts on Parade” public art campaign peppered the beloved comic strip characters throughout creator Charles Schulz’s hometown. Hundreds of 5-foot-tall statues, each painted and decorated by a local artist, drew more than 2 million visitors to St. Paul, according to the city’s visitors bureau.

After spotting part of the “Peanuts” gang on University Avenue recently, a Star Tribune reader wanted to know what happened to these statues that were once ubiquitous in Minnesota’s capital city.

The short answer? At the end of each summer, many statues were sold in auctions at the Mall of America and whisked away to private collections. The proceeds were used to fund art scholarships and the bronze “Peanuts” sculptures in downtown St. Paul’s Landmark Plaza.

They’re not all gone, though.

Katie Galioto for The Minneapolis Star Tribune recounts the history of St. Paul’s Peanuts statues and where 100+ still remain.

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… every Tuesday evening for the past 40 years, Alex Young, now 91, has left himself enough time to drive down and around and then up and again down, and arrive rinkside before 6 p.m.

“I come out and keep score for the guys and enjoy the camaraderie,” said the sole Honorary Member of Sparky’s Skate Hockey Club.

Until he quit playing a decade ago, Young was one of the finest competitors in the club — and in Schulz’s annual Senior World Hockey Tournament.

Chris Smith for The Santa Rosa Press Democrat profiles former player Alex Young now scorekeeper.

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That time DC’s The Joker kidnapped an ersatz Charles Schulz.

Brian Cronin at CBR relates the events from a 1975 comic book.

For whatever reason, the parody of Schulz (Sandy Saturn) was drawn to look like then-DC editor Archie Goodwin (I can imagine not wanting him to look like Schulz, but why Goodwin? No idea). Here, Schulz has been driven mad by drawing a cute comic strip for so many years…

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Only one astronaut has landed on the moon, traveled to the International Space Station, and blasted into orbit on the space shuttle. On top of that, in 2022, he hitched a ride aboard the record-breaking flight of Artemis I, which traveled an astronomical 1.4 million miles. 

The astronaut? Snoopy. The beloved beagle from the Peanuts comic strip has a career in space that began more than 55 years ago and shows no sign of slowing down. 

Dave Kindy for Smithsonian Magazine entertains with the history of the Snoopy-NASA relationship.

One of the courageous beagle’s most visible contributions has been the Silver Snoopy Award, which began in 1968. “The Silver Snoopy pin is really unique in that an astronaut presents the award,” says Maureen O’Brien, manager of strategic alliances at NASA. “This is a way for them to recognize members of the NASA workforce and contractors who have made valuable contributions to safety and mission assurance programs.”

“The high esteem of a Silver Snoopy award comes from its stringent requirements,” says Weitekamp. “A person can be recognized with a Silver Snoopy only once. It cannot be awarded in recognition of a retirement or other such cause. A Silver Snoopy is only awarded in recognition of specific tasks or achievements that supported and improved a spaceflight. Those who have them are justifiably proud of them.”

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How Charlotte Braun met her gruesome end.

In November 1954 [link added], readers of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts—by that point just four years into what would become a 50-year run—were greeted with a new agitator in the life of Charlie Brown. Her name was Charlotte Braun, and her defining character trait was being incredibly loud.

Charlotte made just 10 appearances in Peanuts before vanishing entirely, never to be mentioned again. It would be decades before fans had a better idea of where she had gone and why.

Charlotte pestered Charlie Brown and the gang only through February 1955, at which point Schulz realized there wasn’t anywhere for the character to go…

For most newspaper readers, Charlotte’s absence went unexplained. Only one fan was privileged to know what happened to Charlotte—or at least, what Schulz depicted happening to Charlotte.

Jake Rossen at Mental Floss divulges the tragic fate of Charlotte Braun.

Apparently too ghastly for Mental Floss, we turn to Letters of Note for the letter and the scene.

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The Complete Daily Peanuts

Nat Gertler shares the good news:

Collectors love sets of things. What they hate is incomplete sets. For Peanuts book collectors, this has been the most true with the The Big Book of Peanuts. This huge hardcovers, each collecting a full decades worth of Peanuts daily strips (i.e., not Sundays) were issued annually from 2013 through 2016. Now, even if you don’t know this book set, you can see the problem if you know Peanuts and a little math. Peanuts was around for five decades, and there are only four annually-released volumes.

Through the years, I’ve repeatedly faced queries about whether we would ever see that final volume. Given the years that had passed, I did not hold out hope.

But I should have, for today I find a solicitation for The Big Book of Peanuts: All the Daily Strips from the 1990s coming in October. And the solicitation even promises that it will have all the dailies from the 2000s as well (no big deal, as that’s less than a page.)

The Andrews McMeel Publishing page for The Big Books of Peanuts: All the Daily Strips from the 1990s shows a few pages of notes about the comic strips presented as part of AMP’s preview.

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20 minutes of Charles Schulz drawing Peanuts

[A] collection of video clips of Charles Schulz drawing his iconic Peanuts comic strip — “everything I could find of Charles Schulz drawing his Peanuts characters” in the words of the compiler.

Jason Kottke shows us 20 minutes of Charles Schulz drawing Peanuts through the decades.

_{Peanuts and characters © Peanuts Worldwide}