We’re less than a month away from the new Peanuts special Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical (debuts on AppleTV+ July 18) and I just saw some promotional images I hadn’t seen before… including this shot from a very brief video.

Now look closely at the girl crowdsurfing. See who that is?

That appears to be… really appears to be… Dolores.

Now for those of you who haven’t hung around here long, you may not recognize that name. It never shows up in the comic strip. It’s not been in the animated specials. Dolores is a Latina character who appeared exclusively in the “Charlie Brown’s Career Education Program” filmstrips that were issued in 1979. It’s a character that as best as I can tell had been entirely forgotten from then until I started covering her on this blog. Since I brought attention to her, she’s shown up in a Peanuts mobile app game, and there have been characters in crowd scene that kinda looked like maybe they were her in the recent animated specials, but…

Introducing her in a summer camp makes sense; they can put her in Charlie Brown’s world without adding her to his well-defined neighborhood. (She was in the neighborhood in the filmstrips, having recently moved there from Mexico.)

It’s great to see this bit of representation that’s been just laying around unused finally taken advantage of. And it makes me feel good to think that I likely had a part in making this happen, by rediscovering her and discussing her on my blog, my podcast, and at my convention appearances.

(Hat tip to Danna, who mentioned something about Dolores appearing and set me to looking things up.)

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