Italian surprise

Classic finds

I was going to do a brief write-up on Beaglefest, including mentioning the few things I got to add to the AAUGH.com Reference Library… really, just five items, three of which were books in Italian, which were picked up at the Snoopy Gift Shop. Now, normally I wouldn’t pick up three from the same foreign set; Italian is a language I already have in the library, and even if a set is interesting, one volume in a language I don’t read is enough. But the Italian answer to The Complete Peanuts is not a reprint of that two-years-of-strip-per-volume set, but rather uses their own format, with one year of strips in each book. As such, it has many more covers, and with their putting different characters on each front cover, it means they have a wider count of the more obscure characters. How could I resist getting books with Peggy Jean, Molly Volley, and Lydia on the covers?

So in prepping to write up Tutto Peanuts, I reckoned I’d take a photo of these three books. Even took the Molly Volley out of it’s shrink wrap so that I can and everyone could see what they were like inside. Ahhh, color Sundays!

And then, I decided to check if the books had any front matter, and since the Molly Volley one was already out of its shrinkwrap, that’s the one that I checked. And that turned out to be quite lucky, because the Molly Volley book had the strips from 1979, and introductory matter by Alberto Brambilla talking about what was going on with Peanuts in 1979. And if I had used any other year, I would not have seen this:

And I immediately think “gosh, they’re covering the Charlie Brown Career Education Program filmstrips! And they’re mentioning Dolores!! And they have scans from the filmstrips!!!”

My brain paused for a moment before realizing “those are my scans!”

It’s true. There are a couple thousand frames in the filmstrip series, but these three are all ones that I’ve posted here on the blog (You can see one of them here and the other two here.)  And these aren’t just coincidentally the same panels; looking at the little flaws, these are specifically the scans that I made from my copy of the filmstrips.

Let me make clear: this is not a complaint. One, I make no claim to ownership of these images (at least in the US, scanning a flat image does not create a new copyright owned by the scanner, to the best of my not-a-lawyer understanding.) Two is that I want the information about Peanuts that I present to be spread into the general pool of knowledge. I’ll admit to having enough of an ego that from time to time I’d like a bit of credit for it, but this is fine. It makes me happy to see the word go out about Dolores.

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