In the animated adaptations, the characters are always voiced by children who often have no previous experience in (voice) acting or have any notable roles afterward. The only character that has always been played by a working child actor is Charlie Brown, as well as Sally in the '80s (by Stacey Ferguson).
On the other hand, this was normally averted in foreign dubs... at least until The Peanuts Movie, when all foreign dubs started to use child or young voice actors when available, rather than women, since then.
Mr Undiyne: "According to someone I know in the animation trade, Charles Schulz was shown this on video at an animation convention. Jim Reardon and friends supposedly managed to talk Schulz into watching the film to get his opinion. He reportedly sat silent and motionless as he watched it. After it was finished he stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "Very clever, very funny, but just don't do it again, okay?" That was it."
Ascended Fanfic: Soon after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a teacher in Los Angeles wrote to Schulz and suggested that he should add a black kid into the strip, as she believed that having a regular black character in a comic read by millions of people could calm down the heated race relations of the time. Schulz responded to her letter, the two swapped notes, and Franklin made his first appearance not long after.
Based on a Dream: José Peterson debuted after Charles Schulz had a dream about creating a half-Swedish, half-Mexican character. He later admitted that the humor of the idea didn't really translate well from dream to actual strip.
Breakaway Pop Hit: "Just One Person" has become a popular sentimental favorite over the years, often associated with The Muppets (it was even sung at Jim Henson's funeral), to the point that most people aren't aware that it originated in Snoopy! The Musical, the followup to You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.
Starting in 1965 with A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Peanuts TV specials aired exclusively on CBS until 1994, when You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown aired on NBC. CBS still retained the rights to the classic Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas specials until 2001, when they moved to ABC. That lasted until 2020, when all Peanuts filmed productions, outside of The Peanuts Movie (which is still available for streaming on Disney+), moved exclusively to Apple TV+. The first such classic special to be posted was It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the other major ones will be posted when the relevant holidays approach. Furthermore, the Apple service has announced that among other Peanuts adaptations, they will produce specials for other occasions such as Mother's Day, Earth Day and the return to school etc. While at first it appeared that this spelled the end of the specials airing on broadcast TV, PBS and PBS Kids agreed to air A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and A Charlie Brown Christmas in 2020.
Children Voicing Children: The animated productions, which traditionally used actual children to play most of the main characters (a mandate from Schulz himself). Whether those children were actors depended. Charlie Brown was the only character that would always have a working child actor doing his voice. Same would usually go for Linus and Lucy.
An unusual exception is the 2014 animated series. Since it was primarily produced in France, it used a cast of adult American expats living in France (including Barbara Weber-Scaff of Code Lyoko fame as Charlie Brown and Kaycie Chase as Snoopy). When it was broadcast in the US however, it received its own unique dub produced by Outloud Audio, which did use child actors as tradition.
The announcement that MetLife was ending its three-decade-old licensing agreement to use Peanuts characters in its advertising in 2016 attracted a huge amount of "Snoopy gets fired!" headlines that totally misrepresented what was happening. MetLife had a major restructuring, selling its consumer oriented products and converting to a business-to-business model, and as a result elected to adopt all-new corporate branding which didn't need the Peanuts characters to appeal to the general public. A lot of the coverage tried to spin it as "Peanuts doesn't have much enduring popularity," even though the mere fact that MetLife had been using the characters for 31 years would seem to point the other direction. Not to mention quoting marketing experts who implied that younger people wouldn't be as familiar with Peanuts characters as they might be with, for example, characters who starred in an animated film released in the previous 12 months that grossed several hundred million dollars.
A 2018 CBS News story about the 50th anniversary of Franklin's debut showed a clip from There's No Time for Love, Charlie Brown, but the graphic mistakenly gave the title of the special as the much grimmer-sounding There is No Love, Charlie Brown.
When game shows and radio contests ask for the name of Charlie Brown's teacher, the "correct" answer is Miss Othmar, who is actually better known for being Linus' teacher. While a few strips have Charlie Brown show up in Linus' class, others have him in a separate class with a different teacher named Mrs. Donovan. The fact that Miss Othmar was referred to by name way more often than Mrs. Donovan (who was named exactly once in the mid-1960s) probably contributed to the assumption the former was Charlie Brown's teacher.
Schulz didn't think too highly of the first six years or so of Peanuts, outright calling it "bad work", and letting hundreds of strips from that period go un-reprinted in his lifetime, before resurfacing in The Complete Peanuts
It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown, an attempt by Schulz to make his best special ever was a massive regret for just about everyone involved. Bill Melendez even went so far as to call it "the worst film we ever did." It has yet to be released officially on home video beyond Paramount's 1995 VHS release, and the only way to watch it (as mentioned before in Keep Circulating the Tapes) is at the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California.
Schulz grew to dislike the character Pig-Pen over the years, due to his one-joke nature and his difficult character design. What prevented the character from being written out of Peanuts like so many other characters that Schulz had grown bored with was the huge amount of fan-mail that he consistently received for him. It's telling that Pig-Pen's final appearance in the strip shortly before it ended had the usually proud character show embarrassment for his dirty nature.
Schulz deeply regretted the animated special It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown due to the infamous scene where Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown when he is about to score the winning point during a championship game, for which he is blamed by nearly everybody (most notably Peppermint Patty) even though Lucy did it in plain view. Fans considered this to be too cruel even for Charlie Brown, in what is otherwise a well-received special. Schulz recognized the fan outcry and so subsequent reruns by the networks and the home video releases heavily edit the offending scene (mostly by masking P.P.'s lines of her berating Charlie Brown).
In the exact same special, he also regretted allowing the Little Red Haired Girl to physically appear and have a name (Heather), as he rather wanted her to remain The Ghost in order to show Charlie Brown's hopelessness in longing for her.
Bill Melendez said in one interview that Flashbeagle was his least favorite of the Peanuts specials – he did not like the story, the dance craze itself, and how the rotoscoping with Snoopy's dancing was very difficult for him and his crew.
Schulz struggled with poor health, physically and mentally, for most of his life, in addition to a string of marital problems and family-related deaths. The toll this all took on him had a tendency to seep through in the animated Peanuts specials, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas, Snoopy, Come Home, and Why, Charlie Brown, Why?.
Physical example. Following heart surgery in the late 1980s, Schulz's motor skills began to deteriorate, his hand tremors resulting in the "wavy" look of the strip's final years. Despite that, as late as early 1999, Schulz publicly stated he had no intention of stopping the strip any time soon. He wanted to continue into at least 2002, but his rapidly failing health convinced him to retire in November 1999.note Newspaper cartoonists traditionally draw strips in bundles, two to three months in advance of their publication ("eight weeks daily, twelve weeks Sunday" is standard). That's why the strip continued into 2000, and why the daily comic ended over a month before the Sunday strips – usually creators will coordinate that sort of thing and end both at once (like Calvin and Hobbes did), but Schulz didn't have the time left to do so. He died mere hours before his final comic ran in newspapers.
Schulz acknowledged that starting around 1968 and lasting the next few years, the strip seemed to take on a more downbeat tone. This coincided with the troubled last few years of his first marriage.
In a December 1999 interview, Schulz was holding back tears when he was recounting the moment he signed his final comic strip. Realizing that the qualities that defined Charlie Brown (bad luck and misfortune just to name a few) and made him an endearing, pitiable, and relatable underdog were truly a blessing and a curse brought about by his design decisions.
"All of a sudden I thought, 'You know, that poor, poor kid, he never even got to kick the football. What a dirty trick — he never had a chance to kick the football.'"
In the retirement announcement used for both the final daily and Sunday strips, Schulz mentioned Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy by name, and pictures of those four characters are engraved on the marble bench that's part of his burial site (in Sebastopol, California), so they clearly were his favorites.
Schulz noted that Snoopy was the easiest character for him to draw ("I can draw Snoopy in my sleep"). By contrast, Charlie Brown was the toughest, because of the difficulty of getting the roundness of his head correct.
Creator's Favorite Episode: Schulz often stated how much he loved the "Mr. Sack" strip sequence from 1973 (and later adapted as part of the animated special It's an Adventure, Charlie Brown), where Charlie Brown goes to summer camp wearing a sack on his head after developing a strange rash, and, since his fellow campers don't know what he looks like, he becomes the most popular kid there.
Charles Schulz disliked Pig-Pen because he was basically just one joke, but Pig-Pen's popularity forced Schulz to include him in the occasional strip.
Schulz also disliked the short-lived character of Faron, Frieda's pet cat who never walked and was always being carried. This was partially because Schulz couldn't draw cats very well, but also because Snoopy didn't speak in words, so the only way to have him interact with Faron would be to have them think at each other (as Snoopy would later do with his siblings). Schulz's only regret after retiring Faron was naming him after Faron Young, his favorite country singer. In the late 1960s, Schulz would introduce the unseen, (originally) unnamed character known as "The Cat Next Door", and was much more pleased with the results.
In hindsight, Schulz came to regret introducing Snoopy's siblings, as he felt their existence served to take away Snoopy's one-of-a-kind traits. The only one Schulz ever admitted to liking was Spike, as evidenced by his larger prominence in 80s strips.
Peppermint Patty is generally voiced by a girl, starting with Gabrielle "Gai" DeFaria in You're in Love, Charlie Brown, but she's had several boys voice her over the years as well, starting with Gai's brother Christopher.
For This Is America, Charlie Brown in 1988-89, Erin Chase became the first female voice for Charlie Brown. Barbara Weber-Scaff did the role in the European version of the Peanuts by Schulz cartoon and Kelly Jean Badgley in a Teleflora commercial.
Marcie, "Pig-Pen" and Franklin have also been subject to this trope.
Lucy in the 2007 game "It's the Big Game, Charlie Brown!" is voiced by Lucy Consegra.
Dub Name Change: Brazil had a case that tried to equal the title with the protagonist - Charlie Brown's nickname is not "Chuck", but "Minduim", "peanut".
Schulz was never particularly fond of the title Peanuts, an invention of the syndicate. He submitted it as Li'l Folks, the title of his proto-Peanuts strip, but had to change it because it was too close to Little Folks, a defunct 1930s strip whose title was still trademarked (and a strip whose surviving examples interestingly come off as a bit proto-Peanuts-ish). The similarity to Li'l Abner was also deemed problematic. United Features Syndicate production manager Bill Anderson was asked to come up with a title for the strip without having seen it; he came up with a list of 10 suggestions, including "Peanuts", which was inspired by the "peanut gallery" on The Howdy Doody Show. Schulz thought the title would lead to readers asking "Who's Peanuts?", and indeed at first he got letters from fans about "that comic strip with Peanuts and his dog". He tried several times to change the title to Charlie Brown but realized it would be too expensive and time-consuming to get all the licensees to change it, though he managed to avoid using "Peanuts" for the TV specials and the Sunday strips were billed as "Peanuts featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown". Schulz's authorized biographer Rheta Grimsley-Johnson argued that it really wasn't that bad of a name. A generic title works well for a strip with a large cast; and given the direction the strip eventually took, Li'l Folks would have wound up being too awkwardly cutesy.
But it's also worth remembering that the syndicate's request for Schulz to turn his Li'l Folks concept into a daily strip with regular characters, rather than the random collection of gag cartoons he'd submitted, was a positive example that laid the groundwork for Peanuts becoming such a phenomenon. A Li'l Folks-ish Peanuts would've been a pleasant little daily feature, but certainly not as groundbreaking or influential.
According to some of Schulz's autobiographical books made during his lifetime. The reason Hello Kitty and Sanrio characters came into existence was due to a disagreement he had with the company. They also grew tired of paying royalty fees to him. note Sanrio had merchandise rights for Snoopy back in the 60s and early 70s. As a result, Sanrio decided to create their own characters. In later years, the company gained back the merchandise rights to the Snoopy/Peanuts franchise in Japan after Schulz's death.
Executive Veto: Despite being quite verbose in the strip, Schulz expressly forbid Snoopy from talking in any of the animated specials (with the exceptions of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Snoopy! The Musical).
Follow the Leader: Peanuts was influential on comic strips in general, but a few strips took very specific inspiration from it:
The Perishers (1959-2006) was a British strip about a group of kids and a dog. The humor was more British-style and the artwork was more in line with British strips like Andy Capp.
Winthrop (1967-1993). After Peanuts became a cultural phenomenon, Dick Cavalli retooled his strip Morty Meekle to be about… a group of kids and a dog. It also had some slightly altered Expies of Peanuts characters: instead of Pig-Pen, an obsessively clean boy (Spotless McPartland); instead of Lucy, a belligerent boy, and so on. The artwork was reminiscent of early Peanuts as well, but it did feature some adults in the cast.
He Also Did: In the 1950s, Schulz drew numerous religious-themed cartoons for magazines and books published by The Church of God, featuring characters that could be seen as teenage versions of the Peanuts gang.
Schulz also co-created a short-lived late 1950s Sunday comic strip about sports called It's Only a Game, though after a while he let the other co-creator, Jim Sasseville, handle everything.
Then there were the non-Peanuts-related illustrations he did for paperback humor books by Art Linkletter and Bill Adler.
Christopher DeFaria, who voiced Peppermint Patty in the exact same period that Momberger voiced Sally, is now a producer, who's largely worked on animated features, but also has executive producer credits on Sucker Punch, Mad Max: Fury Road and Ready Player One, and has been in the middle of the mess surrounding Warner Bros. shelving Coyote vs. Acme (since he's the film's producer).
Invisible Advertising: In The New '10s, this was employed for the annual one-hour airings of the Peanuts specials on ABC, where they wouldn't be advertised at all in favor of in-house holiday specials and programming, especially those related to Disney. Sometimes, the edited version would be advertised, but this was fairly rare.
The original splash panel for the October 2, 1955 strip has never been recovered. Even the 1955-56 Complete Peanuts anthology had to resort to using a placeholder graphic.
Some specials have still not received a DVD release, notably the live-action/animation blend, It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown. Ironic, the "Girl In the Red Truck" is regularly shown (and in heavy rotation at that!) in the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, which has a mini-theater for visitors to watch all of the various Peanuts specials and documentaries and such.
You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown! is another instance. It was released on VHS in 1993 exclusively at Shell gas stations (then sponsoring the NFL). Warner Home Video owns the rights to the Peanuts catalog, but this will probably never see a DVD release because it features NFL insignia and team logos… and the NFL is known to be extremely aggressive about suing for unauthorized use (or no-longer-authorized use in this case).
Not entire specials themselves, but a handful of the earliest specials had Product Placement from Coca-Cola and Dolly Madison cakes – such as It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown's All-Stars, and, most famously, A Charlie Brown Christmas. These only appeared in the first few airings (i.e. when the sponsorship deals were still in place), and any remnants of these are relegated to ancient filmstrip recordings of the specials when they first aired. Thankfully, several of these have been uploaded to YouTube, albeit in varying qualities.
The obscure educational specials on dental hygiene, Tooth Brushing with Charlie Brown and its sequel It's Dental Flossophy, Charlie Brown.
Most of the Peanuts documentaries are currently lost, although the 1963 Schulz documentary is in the Charles M. Schulz museum.
In 1983, McDonald's released a set of five "Camp Snoopy" glasses. These consisted of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, Woodstock, and Snoopy.
In 1990, McDonald's released a set of four figures of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and Lucy dressed as farmers, each with two interchangeable accessories. Charlie Brown had a push mower and a feed bag, Snoopy had a handcart and a hay bale, Linus had a hand truck and a milk churn, and Lucy had a wheelbarrow and a basket of apples.
Wendy's sold a set of six Snoopy toys in 2000 to celebrate the comic strip's 50th anniversary. These consisted of a clip-on plush, a digital clock, a magnetic spinning top, a two-sided puzzle, a dome with confetti, and a balancing figure of Snoopy resting atop his doghouse.
In early 2008, Burger King sold a set of eight Snoopy toys.
In 2018, McDonald's released a set of toys featuring Snoopy as a baseball player, basketball player, detective, dancer, Beagle Scout, pirate, superhero, astronaut, Sopwith Camel pilot, "Joe Cool", and famous author.
Network to the Rescue: Though their relationship with Schulz grew strained over the years (as noted below), United Feature Syndicate deserves credit for sticking with Peanuts even after a poor start. It debuted in just seven newspapers, two of which dropped it within the first six months.
The first Peanuts book appeared in 1952. It was published mainly because the publishing house's editor-in-chief was an early fan of the strip.note He discovered Peanuts when he happened to notice it in the paper one day after reading a daily column about bridge!
Charles M. Schulz: "I wanted this to be my Citizen Kane, but it's not."
The Other Darrin: Since the specials and movies used actual children to voice the characters, there was of necessity a great deal of cast turnover through the years. Bill Melendez continued to voice Snoopy and Woodstock through the years (and even appeared, posthumously, in 2015's The Peanuts Movie) until 2016 when Daniel Thornton officially took over the role of Snoopy.
Outlived Its Creator: The characters continue to appear in new animated works, commercials, merchandising, etc., more than a decade after Schulz's death.
Poorly Disguised Pilot: A Charlie Brown Celebration and It's an Adventure, Charlie Brown, two hour-long specials consisting of material adapted from the strips, were likely these to The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show. Two segments from the latter special were even re-used in the series.
In the description for his YouTube upload of "The Big Bow-Wow" from Snoopy! The Musical, Cam Clarke, who voiced Snoopy both there and in This Is America, Charlie Brown, stated that he was "infatuated" with Peanuts as a kid and obsessively collected merchandise for the series growing up.
Megumi Hayashibara is a big fan of the comic, to the degree that she got the chance go voice Marcie in the Japanese dubs of some specials.
Publisher-Chosen Title: "Peanuts" was chosen by the publisher, in spite of Schulz's dislike of the name.
Reality Subtext: One Sunday strip where Sally asks why her coat hanger sculpture got a "C" is based on an incident when Schulz asked similar questions in response to his daughter's art project getting the same grade.
Many of the animated specials have gags, dialogue, and even entire storylines lifted from the newspaper strip. To be fair, some of this was at Schulz's insistence.
One worth noting: Schroeder and Charlie Brown discussing pitching signals in A Boy Named Charlie Brown ("One finger will mean the high straight ball, two fingers will mean the low straight ball") actually dates all the way back to a 1948 gag cartoon Schulz drew for The Saturday Evening Post.
Some gags were even animated twice. One example is Schroeder imagining Lucy's face in sheet music while playing his piano with the Aside Comment "Don't tell me I've grown accustomed to that face!", which was used in Play it Again, Charlie Brown and Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown?.
The first two years of Peanuts were chock full of re-used Li'l Folks punchlines.
A few punchlines got re-used in the strip over the years. Some seem accidental, others seem deliberate (especially "Am I buttering too loud for you", as a tribute to Amy Schulz).
Screwed by the Network: Although Charles Schulz became a very rich man from the strip, he was never able to buy the copyright back from the syndicate – the price was always just a bit more than he could afford (the standard contract has changed since 1950; now the copyright for Newspaper Comics automatically reverts to the creator after 20 years).
Syndicates owning rights to the comics they distributed was largely standard practice until the 1980s and Bill Watterson's famous fight to prevent Calvin and Hobbes merchandise. After that happened, Creators' Syndicate was founded and comic strip creators owning their work become more common.
During a late 1970s contract dispute, the syndicate secretly hired DC Comics vet Al Plastino as a possible replacement for Schulz. Plastino drew some spec strips that were shelved after a deal was reached with Schulz. Schulz didn't learn about the situation until long after the fact, and he was understandably ticked off. A couple of Plastino's strips have been leaked, and they're just as cringeworthy as you'd expect.Explanation The two strips linked here show the characters acting much more mean-spirited than Schulz would ever have them. The slapstick is also more brutal and less funny.
Before the rights shifted to Apple TV+ in 2020, ABC had a terrible case of this with the specials. In the later years they had the rights to the specials, they frequently utilized Invisible Advertising for the annual uncut airings of them (the Edited for Syndication airings would at least get some promotion), prefering to promote their in-house specials (especially those based on Disney or Pixar properties) as well as weekly holiday programs like The Great Christmas Light Fight and The Great American Baking Show. And sometimes, the specials would play as late as 9:30PM. This late timeslot treatment was especially prominent with I Want A Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown, to the point where on some years, that special would be skipped over.
Self-Adaptation: The scripts for the Peanuts specials, more often than not, would simply be ripped directly from the comic strips with minimal changes, so Charles Schulz was the lead writer by default. But Schulz had a lot of creative control, often writing any additional material as well, and many of the specials' trademarks—the jazz score, the casting of children, and the simplistic animation style—were his decisions.
Short Run in Peru: Interestingly, two classic Peanuts specials debuted on the CBC in Canada before their American premieres. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown aired on October 26, 1966, one day before its CBS debut. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, however, aired in Canada almost six weeks before its American premiere, on October 6, 1973, in the run-up to Canadian Thanksgiving.
Shrug of God: When talking about his work, Schulz seemed to regard his characters as independent entities, and said that he didn't really have an answer for why Snoopy sleeps on his doghouse, or why Charlie Brown always falls for Lucy pulling away the football, or any of the other questions about the strip.
Sleeper Hit: With the behemoth that it would eventually become, you might not think the strip would qualify as one, but it definitely was a case of this in The '50s. With elaborately-drawn Adventure and Soap Opera strips dominating the newspapers at the time, a humor strip about children with a visual style rooted in Minimalism was an outlier, and Peanuts grew very slowly. Seven newspapers ran the first ever strip on October 2, 1950. By the time the first reprint book was published in 1952, it had grown to 40, mainly in large cities. By 1958, that had only grown to around 300 US papers and a few dozen foreign ones (compared to the 2,000+ worldwide when Schulz retired). A typical example is Salt Lake City, where its longtime local home the Salt Lake Tribune didn't debut it until January of 1956, and even then, just as a Sunday-only strip. It didn't join the daily lineup until April of 1957.
Spin-Off Cookbook: The franchise has Peanuts Cookbook and Peanuts Lunchtime Cookbook, both of which features Peanuts reprint on even pages followed by a recipe on odd pages.
Technology Marches On: The plot of Charlie Brown having to do a book report on the novel War and Peace in Happy New Year, Charlie Brown would be easier nowadays in the Internet age; Charlie Brown could have simply pulled up online study guides and resources for the novel.
Snoopy was based on Charles Schulz's childhood dog, Spike. In the 1970s, we meet Snoopy's brother, who is named Spike.
Snoopy's brother Andy was named (and modeled) after a dog that Schulz had in his later years.
Troubled Production: It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown (1988), a hoped-to-be masterpiece for Schulzcombining live action and animation ended up taking four years to make, went overtime and overbudget (costing "millions of dollars"), and director Walter C. Miller was difficult to work with (Schulz notes that he was strict around Shultz's daughter Jill, allegedly yelling at her on set). The special, originally targeting for a March 1988 airdate, ultimately came out in October (some months after Who Framed Roger Rabbit), calling critics to declare it (despite being a year earlier in starting production) a cheap knock-off.
Jill Schulz: The director told us to be happy. We acted sickeningly happy. I cringe at those parts. That's why I don't watch it often. When we acted more real it went alright. Maybe if we did it the way I wanted to, with a different director, it would've turned out better.
Unspecified Role Credit: With some exceptions, the animated shows usually didn't identify the roles the voice actors played.
John Hughes made a deal to produce a live-action Peanuts film in 1992, but the lukewarm reception for his Dennis the Menace adaptation permanently consigned the Peanuts project to Development Hell.
Originally, Marcie was going to be a boy as a joke for his long feminine hair until Schulz changed his mind and was forever thankful he did considering he almost threw away a great character for a cheap joke.
Applies to cast members who cannot reprise their roles in animated adaptations due to hitting puberty. Peter Robbins was offered to voice Charlie Brown in Play it Again, Charlie Brown but had to be replaced since his voice had changed too much by that time.
Charles Schulz's daughter Amy Schulz Johnson had some interest at a young age in learning how to draw, and even in potentially taking over her father's strip one day. According to a recent biography, Schulz shot her down immediately, saying that if anyone was going to do that, it would be a boy of his. Considering her later troubled life of drug addiction and bad relationships, you are left wondering what would have been different if Charles Schulz had the wisdom just a little ahead of his time to encourage his daughter's dream and give her life a better focus by being her father's unofficial artistic apprentice.
In an interview, Bill Meléndez said he was considering a special where the Peanuts gang visits Scotland based on an idea Schulz had. While it never materialized, their concept was recently adapted into a comic book entitled Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown.
In the early 90s, plans for another Christmas special called I'll Be Home For Christmas were underway, which would be about Snoopy traveling to Hollywood to enter a skating competition, loosely based on a storyline from the comics in 1967. The special was canceled when CBS decided to not air any newly produced Peanuts specials around this time, though storyboards of the project do exist.
Storyboards for another canceled special called It's a Dog's Life, Charlie Brown also exist.
As an early trailer for Snoopy: Flying Ace shows, Snoopy was originally going to be able to exit the plane and travel on foot in certain circumstances (such as when using a turret), including a mission where Snoopy would have to destroy a Zeppelin by sneaking on board and into the control room and activating the self-destruct. The Zeppelin is still used in the final game, but it is for a comepletely different mission.
Write Who You Know: Both of Schulz's major biographies (Good Grief by Rheta Grimsley-Johnson and Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis) agree that, for a man who preferred his privacy, Schulz put much of his personal life subtly in the strip. Grimsley-Johnson pointed to real people and situations that inspired Schulz. Michaelis went much further, arguing that the mean, restless Lucy was based on Schulz's first wife, and after their divorce (represented in the strip as Lucy getting kicked off the baseball team), Lucy became Lighter and Softer to reflect Schulz's happier second marriage, plus that he revealed his affair with another woman during his first marriage through Snoopy falling in love with another beagle and sending love notes and getting scolded for making long-distance phone calls. There has been some debate over how much of that is legitimate and how much is Wild Mass Guessing on the part of Michaelis.
of the Charlie Brown/Peanuts series titled Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown. A comment by Mr Undiyne from a YouTube upload of the short confirms this:Mr Undiyne: "According to someone I know in the animation trade, Charles Schulz was shown this on video at an animation convention. Jim Reardon and friends supposedly managed to talk Schulz into watching the film to get his opinion. He reportedly sat silent and motionless as he watched it. After it was finished he stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "Very clever, very funny, but just don't do it again, okay?" That was it."
