We just finished one year, and already there’s another one!
Welcome to 2023, AAUGH Blog readers! I hope that everyone has been having fantastic holidays. Here, we had two new pieces of Peanuts statuary enter the house during the holidays. One of them, a gift from Dr. Mrs. The AAUGH Blogger, was a Japanese piece that I had praised in …
I’m dreaming of a Hallmark Christmas
AAUGH Blog reader Michael sent me some pictures from his collection of early Hallmark Peanuts items, which he uses to decorate each Christmas. There are some lovely items in his collection, and the limited pallet they relied on in the early days really does lend itself to a nice display. …
Brownout
I’ve written before about how there is a modern method of commercial caricaturing that quite often works. Just as Al Hirschfeld could with some sweeping lines capture the key parts of a Broadway actor to make them instantly recognizable while utterly stylized, so too can a Funko Pop version of …
a Peanuts BOOK item I want
When I was a kid I collected trading cards. I wasn’t big into sports, so I mainly went with Star Wars cards, and things of that ilk. But now, as an adult, there is no joy in that inefficiency of purchasing, buying many, many duplicates en route to getting whatever …
Peanuts things to put together
My family gave me two Peanuts gifts for the holidays, both from Japan. One is this glow-in-the-dark jigsaw puzzle, That will be assembled on some Sunday morning at a breakfast table with bagels. The other was a full set of six blind-box weather-themed Peanuts dioramas, the Snoopy Weather Terrarium set. …
Sallying forth into licensing
It has often been discussed that Schulz was reluctant to start licensing Peanuts characters out (in rather stark contrast to what ended up happening.) However, it should be noted that once the licensing had started, there was some coordinated effort. For a blatant example: while Sally had been mentioned in …
The Constitution has you vote on a Peanuts character
In 1959, the Constitution called upon Americans to vote for a Peanuts character. Now I should note that this isn’t the United States Constitution. Rather, it was the Atlanta Constitution, a popular newspaper. They wanted 25-words-or-less essays on who your favorite Peanuts character was and why. The winning character would get, …
Happiness should be shared
Here is a never-reprinted Peanuts strip we somehow left out of The Complete Peanuts! That Schulz, what a genius! (The invocation of capitalized “Happiness” in a 1959 ad, well before “Happiness is a warm puppy” was said in the strip and thus linked Peanuts to the happiness theme, may seem …
Now, these four figures would be worth three figures.
I stumbled across the 1959 Baltimore newspaper ad for some of the Hungerford figurines, the original Peanuts toys. Don’t let what looks like a low price fool you– in today’s dollars, the four of them would cost you about $70. (Which, to be fair, is about what you would pay …
Fine figures
I don’t collect Peanuts action figures. I have accumulated a few over the years, but I make a point that the only thing I actually collect is Peanuts books; that is a sufficiently large and expensive hobby on its own. Which is not to say that I cannot appreciate the fact …