Upon seeing my post yesterday about a possible kids board book at the Wendy’s fast food chain, AAUGH Blog reader Joanne dropped me a note to let me know that indeed, Wendy’s had a board book. She’d gotten one a couple weeks back, entitled World Famous Snoopy, showcasing Snoopy in his various character roles. So I reckoned I just had to head to a different Wendy’s, one where the clerk was not convinced the book was an illusion, and get one.

I go into the Wendy’s this morning, a few minutes after it opens, and ask the clerk if he has the kids’ meal toy for the under 3-year olds, and if it’s a Snoopy book. “Yes”, and “I guess so, yes.” So I tell him I’ll buy two. He asks if I want the meal, or just the “toy”, and I opt for the latter (many fast food joints will indeed sell the toy separately, so these cost me just 99 cents apiece.

I pay, take them, and walk away. And as I’m walking, I look at them… and see no Snoopy. After Joanne had told me her tale, I had used the Internet to learn that the book looked like this in the packaging:

But that’s not what I got… but I still got a Peanuts book! Instead, I got this:

So what does these mean? It means that I am now missing at least as many Peanuts books as I thought I was missing yesterday! For now, not only do I still not have World Famous Snoopy, but the existence of two such books suggests the possibility of a whole series of such books; it wouldn’t be going too far to suspect that there’s a different book each week for the month.

But things may be more complicated than that. In the text on the wrapper of the World Famous Snoopy, you can see a line attributing copyright to United Feature Syndicate. Now, UFS sold off the Peanuts copyright last year, but certainly there were projects in the hopper with the old language that had already been approved but hadn’t hit the shelves. (I have no idea what the lead time is on Kids’ Meals toys, but I imagine that they are crafted well in advance, so they can take the slow boat from China and reach the US long enough in advance of release that the company has time to generate a replacement if something goes wrong.) But…. the wrapper for Favorite Things has the copyright credit in the name of the new owner, Peanuts Worldwide LLC! The same rights message is on the back of the book itself (hey, Joanne, what does the back of your book say?) So, is this a case where they somehow designed the wrappers for two books in the same promotion long enough apart that one bears the UFS copyright and one bears Peanuts Worldwide? Did someone in the design department just slip up? Or is the book Joanne got just left over from some older promotion? I don’t know – but if you do, slip me a note at questions -at- AAUGH.com and fill me in!

For those who want more details on the book – it’s about 4 inches square, has 10 numbered interior pages. Each page has an image and a word or two of text explaining what the favorite thing is (Snoopy stacking cookies, with the word “cookie”); some of the images take up the whole spread. This is not deathless prose and a must read, but it’s perfectly good at what it’s supposed to be… a colorful board book for the wee ones. Which is why I’m glad I bought two copies – my under-3-year-old is certainly allowed to get his grubby fingers all over one of them

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