For those of you who missed the Super Bowl or just want to watch the Peanuts ad again, here it is (if you’re getting the AAUGH Blog via email, you may need to click through):

It’s more interesting – and fun as a trivia quiz – than funny.

Two things to notice:

• The Peanuts characters never appear on screen with any of the other characters. There has long been a reluctance to allow Peanuts characters to be mixed in with other properties, and that shows here.
• In the large number of characters, we see ones who originated on TV animation, theatrical shorts, comic books, children’s books and even in a stand-up comedy act… but unless I miss somebody, the Peanuts characters are the only ones for whom the newspaper comic strip is home.  Now obviously, this is not a deep study on the history of animation, and there certainly are plenty of strips that have made it into animation, some quite successfully… but it still is a less-common source for popular animation.

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