I do at times field questions about Dolores, the Latina Peanuts character. And if some of you out there are saying “Who?!?”, believe me, I don’t blame you. Dolores, you see, isn’t in any of the Peanuts strips. And she isn’t in any of the animated specials. Isn’t in the TV series. Isn’t in the movies.

So how is she a Peanuts character? She’s a star in that long-lost medium, the film strip.

In 1979, the Charlie Brown’s Career Education Venture (which I presume to be a cooperation between the usual Peanuts animation crew and publisher Random House) produced the Charlie Brown’s Career Education System, a series of film strips. For those of you too young to remember film strips, this is what we got to watch in schools before they were equipped for showing video – we’d hear a recorded audio track accompanied by a series of still projected images. In today’s terms, think of it more as a recorded PowerPoint presentation than full-on video. These were created under a contract with the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Now, whether they were contractually obligated to increase diversity or it just seemed a good idea, it seems quite likely the Dolores was included to be more inclusive, to better represent their full audience in the product. Voiced by young Leticia Ortiz (well, young then; one expects she aged considerably in the meantime), Dolores gets a very brief mention in a couple books about Peanuts, but is otherwise unremembered and unknown.

Anyway, ye olde AAAUGH Blogger just got a new film scanner, and can finally show you a couple shots of the character. One thing that I should note is that you cannot judge the skin color (always tricky when introducing a character into a previously racially-homogenous cartoon character group, as there is no need for accuracy or clarity in skin tone before then) from these images. I am dealing with strips of film close to a third of a century old and likely not perfectly stored; I have done my best with computer tools to try to recapture some reasonable color, but it may not be an accurate representation of what it originally looked like.

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