The First Thanksgiving.
It’s common knowledge that A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving first aired on November 20, 1973. You can find that fact on the show’s IMDb page, or its Wikipedia page… at least if you check right now, before I get it fixed. You see, like much common knowledge, it appears to be wrong. …
Errors Live Forever
Charles Schulz was a stickler about language in his strip. You could see it in the way he included accurate shorthand or transcribed musical notes, the written language of music. He paid close attention to his punctuation. But all of that does not mean that he didn’t make mistakes. For …
An age-old problem
In the US, one typically starts kindergarten at the age of 5. Charlie Brown was attending school before we first saw Linus, who was a baby at the time. Linus was attending school before Sally was born. Sally was attending school before Rerun was born. Rerun started school before the …
Trivial invasion
What is the latest craze for unlicensed print-on-demand and Kindle Peanuts books? Let’s take a look! All eight of these trivia books came out in the past 5 weeks. And all of them are pretty clearly unlicensed. Not that they don’t take copyright seriously, mind you. Copyright is a very …
I’m not sure if this proves the strength or weakness of communism
Some of you will remember my fascination with (and love of) the set of badly traced bootleg Peanuts from communist-era Poland. It was while chasing after more on this that I came upon something that might be even more amazing. Something I have instant love for, from the same …
that girl, that ball, that quality
I was walking through the early morning, getting my exercise and listening to the most recent episode of Amicus, my first sampling the podcast of the great journalist Dahlia Lithwick, This episode (and it looks like a few episodes in a row before) was focused on the various ways in which …
Peaaaaanutttts Booookss innnnnn SPAAAAAAACE!
So you do want to have astronaut Chris Cassidy on the International Space Station read you Peanuts books, right? Well, here’s two of them! Snoopy, First Beagle on the Moon! Shoot for the Moon, Snoopy!
It’s a song of a parody, not a parody of a song
I had never really looked into The Mad Show, a 1960s off-broadway musical hit based on Mad, the satirical comics magazine, but I happened to look at its Wikipedia page for some reason, and there I saw, in the song listings, “Misery Is…” Now, this isn’t the song that anyone talks about …
Happiness is a Warm _______
Coming out next May (on May 4th, actually, which is Star Wars Day – a fact that is utterly irrelevant in this context) is Happiness Is Having a Friend, which is, we are told, a Peanuts “fill-in book”. What precisely is that? It’s a book that you’re not meant to …
Translating Schulz into English
AAUGH Blog reader David wrote me to ask about some odd lettering in a few of the strips that were reprinted in Charles M. Schulz: 40 Years of Life and Art, a big slipcased book that came out for the fortieth anniversary of Peanuts, so three decades ago. It’s just …