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A Peanuts-y stroll

If you’re in Philadelphia, out by the enjoyable Franklin Institute Science Museum, you can in about six minutes stroll from Van Pelt Street to Woodstock Street and on to a gilded bronze statue in Aviator Park memorializing the fighter pilots of World War I! (It’s all coincidental, of course. The street names …

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Limited T’s of limited legality

What’s bugging me today is that the number of unlicensed Peanuts t-shirts that are showing up in paid Facebook placement is increasing. You may know the ones, they come from “fan clubs” you’ve never heard of before and don’t otherwise exist, they’re “limited editions” or “limited time”. They’re some folks …

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David Liverett

Word has come out that David Liverett died on Friday at the age of 72. His contribution to Schulz scholarship was his book They Called Him Sparky, an oral history book on Schulz’s involvement in the Church of God. This was a book that I reviewed favorably when it came out, …

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Free Comic Book Day: no Peanuts, but a crackerjack event nonetheless

Coming up this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day. Now, usually when I wax rhapsodic about this annual event, I’ve had some free Peanuts-inclusive comic book to steer you toward at your local comic shop, but not this year. With the KaBoom Peanuts series about to draw to a close, they’re …

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Not the anniversary of Woodstock

Various sources will tell you that the April 4, 1967 strip was the first appearance of Woodstock in Peanuts. I’m here to tell you, that ain’t accurate. Yes, there was a bird who came to visit Snoopy on that date, unnamed at the time (as was every Woodstock appearance until …

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Passages

Yesterday’s death of Joe Garagiola has me thinking about the ways in which Peanuts is designed for longevity, and the ways in which it’s not. The Peanuts strip was made in and for its time, and while the strip did not flow through current events the way that, say, Doonesbury …

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What happiness is, for the record

Once Schulz had established that “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”, many other folks decided to put down their own descriptors. The Beatles famously indicated that “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, and as we’ve covered here before, Johnny Carson opined that “Happiness is a Dry Martini”. But it wasn’t until just …

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To Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and especially Lucy

I just ran into a Peanuts reference that I had not remembered in a favorite piece of pop culture, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s a second season episode, “The Care and Feeding of Parents”. Bess, the daughter of Phylis, Mary’s downstairs neighbor, is writing a book, and she proposes to dedicate …

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Scholastic Snoopy

During this Season of Nigh-Infinite Peanuts Books, I’ve been keeping my eye on the Scholastic Book catalogs, those book order forms that kids bring home from school. After all, they’ve carried Peanuts books in the past, and they frequently have books that tie in with the latest kid films, so …

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It’s like Sparky returned to his old gig

Charles Schulz’s lettering style was distinct. I’m used to seeing the work of a lot of professional comic book letterers (from the old days of hand lettering; most of it is done by computer now), but I’m used to seeing each letterer’s work being placed over a range of different …