I’ve been looking at some of the past lawsuits over Peanuts. The various owners of Peanuts over the years have been aggressive — generally appropriately so — about protecting their rights to the characters and going after unlicensed use of them. I am not sure if they’re just more aggressive when the use can be seen as vulgar or if that’s just more likely to draw newspaper coverage, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it certainly drew coverage.
In 1979, a Chicago maternity store made the mistake of putting a pregnant Lucy in their ads, and found themselves with a sizable lawsuit on their hands. A couple years later, the pregnant one was Peppermint Patty, showing up in an ad for health services in a college paper, leading to a financial settlement. (They’d gone after another college paper in 1979, for a cartoon with a cursing Lucy.) And in 1981, the syndicate went after a Minneapolis bookseller for publishing a pornographic take on Peanuts that featured such characters as “Snooty”, “Chumby Blow”, and, well, “Lucy”.
I’ve tried to research some of these, always interest in how Peanuts plays out in culture. Images. of pregnant Lucy have been appearing since at least the 1960s. But while researching this, I ran across something I didn’t expect: a short play called Teenage Pregnancy, Good Grief! which features Charlie Brown, Lucy, Snoopy, Woodstock, and a teacher. Where does this show up? In some odd parody magazine? No, it turns up in Impact Home Economics, a text published by the Ohio State Department of Education in 1978. It looks like it’s a student-written item, and I’m pretty sure it’s not based on any official source — it seems unlikely that Schulz would ever have had Woodstock say “You shouldn’t even take aspirin without the doctor’s permission when you’re pregnant.” To the best of my knowledge, the state of Ohio was never sued over this publication. The author, Venus Bailes, wasn’t even an Ohioan, but a Vermonter… and apparently she was a heck of a high school basketball player as well as being very involved in the Future Homemakers of America. Unfortunately, I cannot lay my hands on this book to get a better sense of just what it is. The only copy that I can find a record of is in the hands of The Ohio State University, and that is thousands of miles away.
Do I have any big point to make here? No, not really… just my usual “Peanuts has places in the culture well beyond what was intended,” I suppose.
