Some of you may have noticed that I have a bit of an obsession with Dolores, a Latina character who did not appear in any of the Peanuts strips, nor in the animated Peanuts, but was seen in a series of Peanuts educational filmstrips circa 1980, and who has since been revived in a video game app. I assumed that she was designed by a member of the filmstrip team (which seems to have been the animation team of the time.)

Only, I may have gotten a couple things wrong there. Today I was looking through some Peanuts strips from about a decade before the filmstrips were done, and I find this August 1970 panel:

This was from a sequence where the Head Beagle had sent Snoopy to handle matters at the playground. At the very least, this one panel appearance of the girl at left is notable as one of the infrequent non-Franklin person-of-color appearances in the strip. But with the combination of the dark skin and the curly side-curls, it’s hard not to see this as a proto-Dolores, suggesting the Schulz himself had a hand in designing the character for the film strips… and if anyone wants to say that this is an appearance of Dolores in the strip, I can’t say they’re wrong.

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