WMG / Peanuts

Peanuts is actually set After the End and all the adults are dead/hallucinations/robots of some variety.

Read the Fantagraphics books, especially the mid-1950s through the late 1960s. No adults to be seen (except bizarre outsized creatures in one series of strips Schulz himself regretted drawing), strangely empty and sterile neighborhoods, the older children like Charlie Brown and the aged-up Lucy making disciplinary and judgement calls normally left to parents for their younger siblings, Snoopy growing from a normal-looking beagle puppy into a giant-headed freak (all that nuclear fallout.) Admittedly, this does create some problems with where Rerun came from....

• Cloning, obviously. Why else would they name him Rerun?
• Ooh! Right in the childhood.

All of the kids are being raised by sentient trumpets.

What? Don't look at me like that.

• Only in the TV specials, of course. In the strip, adults often get speech bubbles.
• You mean muted trombones.

Sally will eventually stop trying to get Linus to be her boyfriend

Charlie Brown instigated the hate the other characters often showed toward him.

In the early years of the strip, Charlie Brown was considerably more of a free spirit, and often ticked people off in a childish, mostly innocent kind of way (playing pranks, etc). This resulted in many of the other characters showing contempt for him from then on as a result (losing ball games aside). Then again, that'd be Disproportionate Retribution on the part of the other characters, so they'd still be dicks.

Charlie Brown is being made into a living weapon.

He constantly fails at absolutely everything he tries. He is ridiculed by his peers and treated poorly by his parents. He is frequently cheated out of his money by Lucy and never seems to say anything right. But after everyone quits his baseball team, he gets so mad he kicks their hats - and they all land on his head. He's clearly a talented individual; some mysterious force is trying to make the normally gentle Charlie Brown into a super-soldier capable of incredible feats.

• Hmm. And when his powers begin to manifest themselves, right around puberty or just after, he will learn to speak, read, and write fluent idiomatic Japanese and assume the code name of Shinji Ikari. When he is summoned to Japan by his mysterious estranged father to do battle against cosmic evil, he will meet a certain little red-haired girl named Asuka. He will not wear a yellow plugsuit with a black zigzag around the middle because that would be too obvious.
  • But how did he grow all that hair?
    • He just let it grow out and dyed it black. His platinum blond hair was trimmed extremely short before.
• The scary part is, this has been done.
• Twice.
• His shirt does bear a striking resemblance to the uniform of Ginga Yellow from Seijuu Sentai Gingaman.
• And again.
• I like that theory. It reminds me of Ender's Game.

Alternatively, Charlie Brown is Epic Fail Guy.

• The name is SEAN.

Charlie Brown has already been made into a living weapon.

And then he died. Brown is now in Purgatory, suffering through a million petty torments to make up for his actions as a super-soldier.

Schroeder isn't playing those Beethoven works.

Come on. His piano is a toy covering one octave. It's physically impossible to play Beethoven's works on it. But they're just kids, and his striking random keys sounds just as good and authentic to them.

• Not completely impossible. This Troper works in a bookstore that also sells toy pianos. Occasionally, this one little prodigy will tap out a rather tinny but recognizable version of Fur Elise.
• Charlie Brown did ask him once (which I guess counts as a lampshading). His reply? "Practice."
• It's a player piano. All Schroeder's really practicing is his fingering. His parents either can't afford a real piano or are just too cheap to get one for him.
• Lampshaded here as well.
• On the other hand, Schroeder could be so incredibly badass that he doesn't need a full piano to play Beethoven's works.

All the characters have serious ear infections.

In the strip, no dialogue from adults is written, and the children have a tendency to recite monologues without listening to their audience's replies. Both suggest some kind of hearing problem. In the animated series, the adults make a distorted "waah-waah" noise - similar to how people sound to someone suffering from the infection known as "glue ear".

• Adults do sometimes get dialogue, though.

The guy from Kill Bill that looks like Charlie Brown is Charlie Brown.

Or a relative.

Peppermint Patty and Marcie are lesbians.

Patty is the Butch in training. MAD used this WMG in a parody.

• Family Guy Did It.
  • MAD did it long before Family Guy (or Robot Chicken).
• Patty—speaking to her friend—makes an obliquely-slangy remark which (in effect) compares Marcie to Billie Jean King (Who she does kinda look like). BTW Charles Schulz (a straight among straights) was good friends with King in Real Life. Which is suspicious, because Charles Schulz never had friends.
• It's made clear that they both like Charlie Brown. They even have pet names for him: Marcie calls him "Charles", Peppermint Patty calls him "Chuck".
  • They could be bisexual.
  • What about Marcie always calling Patty "sir"? Is their relationship supposed to have a subtext of...no, I can't say it...
    • It's my firm belief that, six to ten years in their nebulous future, Charlie Brown will wake up one morning and realize that (a) last night wasn't a dream, (b) those really are Peppermint Patty snuggled up to one side of him and Marcie snuggled up to the other, (c) this is pretty much the way it's going to be from now on, and (d) all the suckiness of his preteen years was totally worth it.
    • That's...actually kind of adorable.

Peppermint Patty is the same person as the Patty in the first fifteen years of the comic.

Someone gave her the '60s equivalent of "Feminism for Dummies," and she bought into it. This is when feminism is new and radical, the "fish and bicycle" stage, when females acting feminine was verboten in the movement. Naturally, when she adopts this philosophy, it changes everything. Because she believes in radical feminism in a way she never believed the code that came before, she's more herself as Peppermint Patty.

• Both Pattys have been seen together...or at least during the same time period.
  • It does make a difference which one. If it's "during the same time period," maybe it took a while for her to be able to get away with it consistently.
    • They're both in the strip from February 16, 1973
    • And the old Patty has no freckles.
    • Although the original Patty was also somewhat tomboyish on occasion.

The Peanuts Universe is the Tranquility Lane simulation from Fallout 3

Note the similarity of "Betty" to Lucy. Charlie Brown and the other Peanuts characters are all adults whom Lucy has been torturing for two hundred years in a vault beneath a nuclear wasteland.

• That's an incredibly scary possibility.

Sandy from The Noozles is Charlie Brown's cousin

Think about it. Sandy's last name is Brown. There's a good chance that they're related.

• In the immortal words of Ben Harper from My Family, after telling his wife that the father of their daughter's baby was named Keanu Brown: "With the number of Browns there are in the phone book, it should keep your mother off your back until the baby's first steps. ...Heaven help the boy if there really is a Keanu Brown." It's a common surname, so assuming any Brown is related to any other Brown is pretty chancy.

Lucy did believe, on some level (possibly the outer level), that she wouldn't pull the football away.

Unfortunately, the inner level still remembers the last time Chuck kicked her hand.

Much of the kids' behavior is a result of childhood head injuries

Early strips show people falling on their heads a lot. It can't be healthy for them in the long run.

• Charlie Brown is extremely unlucky because he never stopped falling on his head. It became a vicious cycle.
• Lucy has it even worse. Not only did she fall on her head a lot during her formative toddler years, but she always landed completely head first. This strip is not only a good example but implies this happened every day for awhile. Maybe that's why she has so many mood swings

The Little Red-Haired Girl doesn't exist.

We never see her. Nobody else acknowledges her existence or sees her, as far as we know. If somebody claims to have spoken with her, then he or she is most likely humoring Charlie Brown to set up Yanking The Dogs Chain. We never even learn her name! If you had a crush on somebody, then wouldn't you find out that person's name?

Maybe he's hallucinating. Maybe she's a ghost. Maybe she's a projection from a chip implanted in his brain... Nah, that would be ridiculous. Or brilliant?

• In that case, the Valentine's Day Homecoming special makes Linus into a horrible person. Charlie Brown says he can't remember anything about the night before and Linus says that he danced with the Red Haired Girl all night...that's horrible!
  • Schulz declared that special non-canon. Sure he said that the cartoons in general "don't count", but It's Your First Kiss is the only one that really goes against the strip to the point he had to say something.
• Also in conflict with this theory (or at least contributing to the "Linus is a dick" clause) is a strip in which Linus actually won a baseball game and told Charlie Brown that he got a hug from the Red-Haired Girl.
• There is a strip towards the end of the comic's run where Snoopy is seen dancing with the Little Red-Haired Girl (albeit in silhouette).
• And (linked to on the Heartwarming and Tearjerker pages) Peppermint Patty met her once.
• She's also seen off-stage in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, where Charlie Brown finds one of her pencils and is relieved that it has bite marksr on it because it means she's human.
• Schulz never showed her because he wanted the readers to imagine their ideal girl as the little red-haired girl.
• Charlie Brown not knowing her name isn't actually that unrealistic. He could have forgotten her name, especially possible if he spaces out staring at her in class instead of paying attention to attendance or if they don't share a class, but he's too much of a nervous wreck to ask her. Doesn't really explain why Linus or anyone else who knows her doesn't tell her or seem to know her name themselves. Perhaps, like Pig Pen and Rerun, she simply lacks a "real" name.
• One other possibility involving Charlie Brown not remembering anything about the previous night. Since Charlie Brown - in addition to landing hard on his back each time he kicked - is seen crawling out of a pile twice and clearly was woozy to the point of asking (twice) what happened after being run over during a punt and asking if it was baseball season; most likely Charlie Brown had a pretty serious concussion.

LINUS is the Little Red Haired Girl.

Just to screw with Charlie Brown's head.

• And with us, the readers... The only thing that would be half a mile away from proof would be that Speech he gave. And then again, motives ARE important.
  • Yeah, unfortunately for this theory, there was that series of strips in 1977 where Peppermint Patty met the Little Red Haired Girl face-to-face and recounted the story to Linus.

The Great Pumpkin is real.

Or, at least, WAS real. It was the gigantic pumpkin that Lucy and Linus carved up at the beginning of the special.

• Actually, it is real. At least one comic has Charlie Brown informing Linus that the Great Pumpkin rose out of a pumpkin patch in New Jersey that year.
  • That was likely Charlie Brown trolling/humoring Linus.
  • Or maybe there are other people who believe in the Great Pumpkin.

Charlie Brown would have still flown up in the air and landed on his back even if he DID kick the football.

Let's face it: the amount of momentum necessary to give yourself that kind of pratfall won't be slowed down by a measly little football.

The strip takes place through the eyes of Author Avatar Snoopy.

This explains the mild Flanderization, as well as the fact that the children don't age; they're actually ten or eleven when the strip ends, but Snoopy thinks of them as perpetually the age at which they were nicest to Snoopy. He dies at the end of the strip, after composing the letter to his fans, at peace.

Lucy keeps Charlie Brown miserable to drum up business.

Charlie Brown is the only one pathetic enough to keep going to her for psychiatric advice, so she makes sure he stays miserable so he won't stop going to her stand. With all the nickels she makes from just Charlie Brown she could easily bribe other people, even adults, into keeping him miserable.

• Was the lemonade ever any good?

Charlie Brown is the alternate universe counterpart of/will be reincarnated as Eddy.

The main hint would be the shirts. They're both the Butt Monkey of their respective universes, even at the times when they're not doing anything particularly bad. They also both never seem to get what they want, no matter how close they get. When they do, it's either a rare case of Throw The Dog A Bone, or the much more common Yank The Dogs Chain (Charlie: Kicking the football, Eddy: Jawbreakers.)

• Except Charlie Brown is a lovable loser. Eddy is a jerkass.
  • There's more to Eddy than that though especially considering the Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy movie, where Eddy's Jerkass tendencies are just a front for a Butt Monkey who's actually nice. So this fits, actually.

Schroeder is a "racially pure" neo-Nazi baby bred in South America shortly after World War II.

I mean, how many six-year-olds use hair dye? That's the only way one can account for his hair being so unnaturally blond. It also would explain his great love for German music.

• Okay... but can you explain Sally's unnaturally blond hair?
  • Eugenics Genetics, just like her older brother.
• Schroeder is Sally & Charlie Brown's cousin. They're the only blond kids in the group, and Charlie seems to hang with Schroeder most after Linus.
  • Eh, technically Patty (the original) has blonde hair too; it's just a sort of strawberry-blonde.
• Schulz was born in the Twin Cities, which like the rest of that region is known for... people of Germanic ancestry, including himself. This is why most surnames in Peanuts are either German or Dutch.
• Have you ever seen naturally-true-blond (i.e. with no other colours mixed in) kids when they're little? Before they hit puberty, their hair is just a couple shades off of albino. There's even a name for it: "Towhead". Now as these kids get older, their hair almost always darkens to some degree or another depending on genetics.
  • Fun Fact: Northern Europeans are by far the most likely (as in, pretty much the ONLY) racial group to have blond hair. In a place like the upper-Midwest and Northern Great Plains, which is made up chiefly of descendents of immigrants from that part of the world, kids with hair like the Browns' or Schroeder's is not uncommon… and was probably standard back in the 20's-30's when Schulz grew up there (before people from different ethnic/racial backgrounds moved in and diversified the gene pool).

The Kite-Eating Tree is a literal epileptic tree.

It eats kites as part of its epileptic fits.

Rerun is a clone of Linus

Lucy was actually an evil genius who made a clone of her brother so said clone could become her evil henchman and help her torture Linus and Charlie Brown. That's the only way Rerun's abnormal physical similarities to Linus could be explained. That also explains why EVERY CHARACTER calls him Rerun, which is supposedly his nickname, because his real name is, well, non-existent. Lastly, explains why Lucy is so much nicer to him than to Linus.

• One problem: Mrs. Van Pelt went to the hospital and Lucy was shocked when she got a phone call saying she had a new brother.
• Also worth noting: in the final Charlie brown-tries-to-kick-the-football strip, Rerun tortures Lucy by not telling her if he pulled the football away or not.

The Great Pumpkin is just a huge jerk.

It very carefully manifests as quietly as possible right behind Linus, every Halloween, then flies off to give candy to everyone but Chuck and Linus, on the condition that nobody tells. Not as a metaphor for faith, or because Gods Need Prayer Badly and the fideists are right about proof canceling out belief, but just because it feels like it.

• But one year, Sally and her friend Eudora waited for the Great Pumpkin (they didn't see him) and Linus and Charlie Brown didn't. Does that mean that Linus and Charlie Brown actually saw the Great Pumpkin, then?

The great pumpkin is Slender Man

When Linus was a baby he had an encounter with Slender man in a pumpkin patch and was fascinated by him. And now he waits out in the Pumpkin patch ever since waiting for him.

Frieda is the little red-haired girl

Frieda, for those of you who don't know, was a quickly dropped minor character who was very proud of her naturally curly red hair. It could be that, after she was introduced, Charlie Brown developed a crush on her, and wanted to tell everyone about how Love Hurts and etc., but he didn't want to say the name of the girl he liked to avoid embarrassment. So, to subtly hint that it was Frieda, he refered to her as "The Little Red-Haired Girl", since referring to her as the "Naturally Curly-Haired Girl" would be way too obvious. That also explains why Charlie Brown seems to be almost 100% sure that she doesn't like him back, because a few strips have shown that Frieda has a crush on Schroeder.

• Except CB has no problem talking to Frieda. If she really was the LRHG he wouldn't be able to get within ten feet of her without freaking out.
• Officially Jossed by the LRHG's silhouette, which looks nothing like Frieda.
• Which is rather unfortunate because the dramatic irony's just too much to not let it be my headcanon. She's pretty much the only one on the baseball team who doesn't berate him—suggesting at the very least that she's legitimate friend alongside Linus. And there's an arc in the '70s where the Little Red-Haired Girl moves away, and Frieda stops appearing around the same time.
  • They could be sisters, half-siblings, or similar-looking cousins. Like Yosemite Sam and Blacque Jacque Shellacque were revealed to be in The Looney Tunes Show...

Schroeder is gay

Not like I truly believe the above statement, but you never know...

• I'd sooner believe he's gay than Peppermint Patty or Marcie.
  • What, because he's impervious to Lucy's advances?
    • Times change. For those of us who grew up with Peanuts in the '50-through-early-'70s, you remember – being a boy who was friendly to girls made you (at least) sissy, and probably queer. Also: see next entry.
  • well then... you should see this...

The whole Peanuts universe is Hell, and Lucy is the Devil

That's the only way everybody's lives could be so miserable. And who causes most of this misery? Lucy. And her name sounds like the name Lucifer.

The Great Pumpkin will not appear to anyone who makes Jack-O-Lanterns

This is a Lighter and Softer version of The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" short a few years ago, where the Great Pumpkin Expy becomes enraged at the idea of Jack-O-Lanterns, pumpkin bread, and roasted pumpkin seeds. It also explains why he never shows up.

• It also explains why Linus was so upset when Lucy "killed" the pumpkin.

On Halloween, Charlie Brown dressed up as Rorschach

Here's the proof. Exactly why Charlie Brown would dress up as Rorschach has yet to be explained, however.

• But in that picture at least, Rorshach is wearing a hat. (I've never read Watchmen either though.)
• If Charlie Brown admires Rorschach, then Lucy had better watch her back.
• Hm. Tonight, a kite-eating tree was cut in New York. Somebody knows why. Somebody knows.

The entirety of Peanuts is a magical working on the part of Charles Schulz.

You may recall Grant Morrison and his claim that in his book The Invisibles, his author avatar got lucky as part of a magical working to bring him similar... luck. The entirety of Peanuts is a reversal of that working.

• Charles Schulz grew more famous, wealthy, and beloved in exact proportion to the degree that Charlie Brown suffered.
• Charlie Brown was his Author Avatar.
• In interviews, he admitted guilt over the constant need to make Charlie Brown the goat, and all his life he suffered from depression over the disconnect between his fame and his self-loathing — and then from the difficulty of making his avatar's life suck when his really didn't anymore.
• And the day the last strip ran — the day he stopped tormenting Charlie Brown — he died.
  • Actually, Charlie Brown's life got a bit better by the end of the strip. Charlie Brown had a girlfriend named Peggy Jean for part of the 1990's (but they eventually broke up), and he also beat a bully in a game of marbles in 1995.
  • That's because the guilt got to be too much for Charles Schulz, and he had to Throw the Dog a Bone, resulting in his failing health. He finally had Charlie Brown break up with Peggy Jean because he grew scared that if their relationship got too permanent, Charlie Brown would become secure and he'd lose everything he had.

Dogbert is the Red Baron.

Think about it. Snoopy and Dogbert are both extremely intelligent and imaginative dogs from popular Newspaper Comics, and both are the type to pretend to be a World War I flying ace. Dogbert, however, is much more cynical and generally evil than Snoopy, making him more suited to the antagonist role of the Red Baron.

• And both have the ability to interface with other dimensions, creating a mental world that enables them to interact. One wonders what part the Dilbert characters play...

The Great Pumpkin is Jack Skellington…

...wearing his pumpkin-head disguise. Jack has tons of names in the real world, after all. The Great Pumpkin is probably one of them. Linus heard rumors of Jack's Halloween appearances and of his ill-fated Christmas scheme. From these, he concocted a theory that "The Great Pumpkin" is Halloween's equivalent of Santa Claus. If that's the case, then it's probably a good thing that Linus has never seen him...

Charlie Brown's life his one giant Freudian Excuse (or a deconstruction of one).

Charlie Brown fails at everything, everyone makes fun of him, and his life generally sucks. That will probably cause him to eventually become a jerk. The comic strip of Peanuts, however, shows his life as a decent guy slowly suffering and turning into a jerk, rather than him actually being one.

Marcie grew up to be Honey from Doonesbury.

Marcie was born in China and given the name Hua Ni. When her parents immigrated to America, her name was changed to Marcie so she'd have an easier time fitting in. She was smart and friendly and good at learning languages. (She learned English, Mandarin, and French fluently before age 10) It would explain why her family never celebrated Easter and why she made egg drop soup when Peppermint Patty told her to cook the eggs. In adolescence, Marcie was bitterly disappointed in her unreturned love for Charlie Brown. She moved back to China and went back to her birth name and got a job as a translator. She met Uncle Duke, who pronounced her name as "Honey". Honey looks like an adult Marcie with dark, jaw length hair and thick glasses. She is unfailingly polite, calling Duke "sir" constantly, but having occasional outbursts when her sense of right and wrong is challenged. Unfortunately for her, her love for Uncle Duke will end as tragically as it did for Charlie Brown, if not more so.

• I always thought that Marcie might be Chinese for some odd reason, too (but I don't read Doonesbury).
  • I thought of the Marcie/Honey connection decades ago — it doesn't hurt that both Marcie's and Honey's cohorts are Cloudcuckoolanders, and both character pairs resided in locales removed from their strips' main settings. (And of course, the "sir" bit clinches it!)

Unless introduced later, characters aged normally before the strip started and since it ended.

Self-explanatory. Charlie Brown, of course, would be the only one inconvenienced by being an 18-year-old in 2010 with a 1942 birth certificate.

• Why 1942? It's pretty clear the kids were a bit younger in the early 50's (Charlie Brown could barely read, for one), so it's more likely they'd have been born in 1945 or 1946.

Linus and Sally eventually got married, and Calvin is their son.

Sally dyed her hair by the time Calvin and Hobbes started, Calvin's clothing is a hand-me-down from Linus, Calvin got his blond hair from Sally, and he is extremely attached to an inanimate object like his father was.

• And Linus was wearing glasses for a while.
  • Sally may not have dyed her hair dark; it may have just darkened naturally as she aged.
• This may be the best WMG ever written.
• In the same vein, Rerun's real name is Max.

The Great Pumpkin and Linus are: Godot and Vladimir/Estragon, writ small.

One day Charlie Brown will Earn His Happy Ending.

But he still won't ever kick that football.

• Both parts of this Wild Mass Guess were confirmed in The Peanuts Movie

Schroeder is a high-functioning autistic.

He gets along fine with some; others, not so much. Obsessed with Beethoven and his piano. Likes being around all the dancing fun, but doesn't dance, just plays DJ. Possible savant. Plus, Schulz has already recognized mental irregularity (Lucy's psychiatry stand), which was pretty advanced for its time. In Schroeder, he's shown children that differently-abled citizens can be fun, productive, highly-skilled pals.

Charlie Brown grows up to be Al Bundy.

Things look up for him during his high school years. He ends up being a football star and ends up married with the Red Haired Girl of his dreams. Then things start to go downhill.

Schroeder is a well-known child prodigy in his universe.

Early strips have mentions of him playing at Carnegie Hall, appearing with the philharmonic and getting cast as "Beethoven, the boy" in a movie about Beethoven. His parents want him to have a normal childhood, so he lives in the neighborhood. Despite his celebrity status among grown-ups, most of the little kids treat him as one of them, since they hardly comprehend his fame. The exception is Lucy, who's a golddigger.

The doghouse is a TARDIS

With the amount of junk Snoopy drags out of it it has to be bigger on the inside. It can fly. I propose the doghouse is in fact a TARDIS. Woodstock makes a fine companion.

• Considering that Snoopy is a non-human who behaves like a human, has lived in several different eras, knows a number of historically-noteworthy people, is far more intelligent than he appears, has a constant Companion, and lives in a shelter that's bigger inside than outside...Holy Rassilon, Snoopy is the Fourteenth Doctor!
  • When bird-galars were stealing Snoopy's Van Gogh in 1966, he mentioned that they were "coming up the stairway" to exit — indicating that the doghouse sits atop an underground complex. I imagine that at ground level inside it has "floor-doors", which, when closed, allow it to appear and function like a normal doghouse — like, say, when Peppermint Patty went to sleep in the "guest cottage". (With all this, I suppose the underground facility could be used as a fallout shelter.)

Lucy is a Time Lord and her psychiatry booth is her TARDIS

• Come on! Why else would it say The Doctor is in?

The doghouse is just a doghouse

We never actually see the interior, except in animation. Only once, in a very early strip, do we see several kids going in/coming out. Later, Peppermint Patty's head sticks out the door. The exceptional size and elaborate furnishings of the doghouse's interior could easily be part of Snoopy's fantasies that somehow get the kids involved.

Linus is an unsung hero of 1960s Counterculture.

The strip hit the peak of its popularity in the sixties. Linus was very deep, intelligent, poetic, wise beyond his years, and even a bit "out there" at times. He was almost always relaxed and at peace with himself. He believed in an imaginary pumpkin. He even briefly wore John Lennon-style glasses as early as 1962. Not to mention that the specials produced during this period tend to feature psychedelic imagery.

• Well, in MAD, a horny teenage Linus tells a suggestive Violet, "Well, what do you think I kept this blanket around for?"
• Peak of its popularity from a critical standpoint in hindsight, perhaps, but the actual peak of the series' popularity was almost certainly in the 70's or 80's when the vast majority of the films and TV specials were made.

Linus used/uses marijuana and LSD, and the psychedelic imagery in the sixties cartoon specials are from his imagination.

See above.

Linus is highly intelligent and was skipped up to Charlie Brown's grade.

• The canon on this one is extremely muddled, a rarity for this series. It's plausible, though. Ms. Othmar could just be a different teacher in Charlie Brown's grade. This, of course, ignores the (not-canon) cartoons that put all of the gang in the same class.
• Fun Fact: As a kid, Charles Schulz was deemed 'gifted' by his school and skipped ahead two grades… without his consent. Having to constantly be around kids who were much bigger and more emotionally developed than him pretty much destroyed his psychological well-being and gave him the inferiority complex that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
• They could also be in a split class.

The kids (or some of them, at least) have superpowers.

Lucy somehow manages to get Charlie Brown to kick the football every year, even though she's never let him actually kick it. Her power: Charm Person.

• I disagree. She can't charm Schroeder.
  • Schroeder counteracts her power with his power (mentioned below) to control sound. She's tried to wear him down simply because she can't stand the idea that she isn't all-powerful.

Linus sometimes used his blanket as a bullwhip. His power: Using a blanket as a bullwhip.

• Alternately: His two powers are super intelligence and limited telekinesis. The construction of a frakkin' huge house of cards and other seemingly impossible structures, as well as the weaponized blanket are the result of telekinesis.

Schroeder can play Beethoven on a toy piano. His power: The ability to control sound.

Charlie Brown: When he kicks a stack of hats, they all land on his head. When Lucy pulls the football away, he goes flying, implying an awful lot of force. His power: Super Kick. …Alternatively, he emits a failure aura. This is why his team loses if he's there, but wins if he isn't – they're actually a good team, but they must lose because of Charlie Brown's aura. Obviously, it diminishes with distance, and affects Charlie Brown most, which is why he is the one who fails.

• More coherent version of the second theory: His superpower is that he fails at anything he tries. This can be canceled out by using an alias, such as "Mr. Sack" or "Cool Thumb" Brown.

Pig Pen: I'd bet money that he can manipulate dust, dirt and filth just by thinking.

• Also unconsciously. In You're in Love, Charlie Brown when he walks through a sandbox, the entire contents go with him!

Sally: She's an analogue of Babydoll from Sucker Punch except she can use her powers in reality...the reason I think this is because she looks like a younger version of her.

Peppermint Patty: an adolescent, female Spiderman analogue.

• What does that mean, exactly? Here's my idea: She has the ability to make people fall asleep, and instinctively uses it on herself when she gets very bored. Like in school.
• Actually I think super speed would fit her better.
• I could see her with Super-Strength.

Marcie: She's super intelligent.

Frieda: She's got Prehensile hair.

Snoopy: Some of his impressions are downright impossible. His power: Low-level Voluntary Shapeshifting. This may be related to his doghouse's impossibly large interior, but I guess that's another WMG.

• It also could be that his doghouse is a TARDIS (he got it from his Dad.)

Schroeder's dad is a significant stockholder for Casio.

Part of his job is beta-testing, so he supplies Schroeder with prototype electronic keyboards, which Schroeder disguises as toy pianos.

Good grief! is the English version of Yare yare.

• Lucy is God and Charlie Brown's main job is to keep this detail from her.
• Schroeder is an esper.
• The mysterious red haired girl is a time traveler who disappears back to the future.
• And Marcie is a Humanoid Interface.

Linus has the entire Bible memorized.

Knowing the stories of the birth and passion of Christ are one thing; knowing who Jezebel was at his age is quite another, and indicates he knows a lot more Scripture than that, possibly all of it.

• This is actually implied. There's a strip in which he heads to the Christmas Pageant, not having prepared, and starts reciting the Gospel of Matthew from the beginning ("The book of the generation of Jesus Christ..."), continuing with the Nativity narrative. As they walk out, Lucy bitterly says, "Why didn't you just start with the Book of Genesis while you were at it?" and he tells her not to be so negative. Oddly enough, a few earlier strips had him angsting over having to memorize Scripture for the pageant, only to learn it at the last possible second. My guess is that, fearing he'd one day slip up and not memorize his lines until too late, he just learned the entire Bible.
  • All of this is aided by Schulz being a real-life Sunday School Teacher
    • The Biblical imagery was strong enough that there was a 1968 book,The Gospel According to Peanuts, by theologian Robert Short.

Charlie Brown is Charles Schulz.

Similar first names. Also, A magazine article stated that Charlie Brown's father is a barber just like Schulz's father. Also confirmed in the comic strips.◊

• Although they may be similar in personality, Charlie Brown was actually named after one of Schulz's coworkers at the Art Instruction School (with permission). Ironically, the real Charlie Brown was, according to Schulz, the life of any party. That "Charles Brown" is about as everyman a name as you can get doesn't hurt either.

Charlie Brown is an alternate version of Shinji Ikari.

Even when born into a better family he still can't avoid the shit end of the stick.

• Lucy is quite clearly Asuka then.

The strip takes place in an alternate dimension where your aging slows down the older you get.

• Reading the strip from beginning to end, it's pretty clear that the characters do age, but not at the same rate, and the older they get, the less they grow.
  • Charlie Brown is the one character we can state a specific age for at different points in the strip's history. In one of the earliest strips from 1950 he's four years old. Seven years later, in 1957, he's aged to six. Twenty-two years after that, in 1979 he's eight-and-a-half, which seems to be his approximate age for the rest of the comic's run.
  • Shermy and Patty, the two kids who originally starred in the strip alongside Charlie Brown, are clearly older than him in the beginning (they are old enough to know how to read and he isn't), but over the strip's first few years he catches up to them in age and is shown to be at the same grade as them in school.
  • There's also the cases of Lucy and Schroeder. When they're introduced, both of them are toddlers whom the older Charlie Brown tries to take care of sometimes. They age rapidly until they are about Charlie Brown's age, and once again are in his grade at school.
  • Now, compare this to Sally, who is born in 1959 (two years after Charlie Brown's age has been stated as six). For the first three or four years of her life she ages pretty much in real time, though after that she spends a long time in kindergarten. By 1979 (when Charlie Brown is confirmed to be eight) she's in her first or second grade at school, which means she has to be five or six at the time. The age gap between the two has lessened, meaning that Sally is aging faster than Charlie Brown.
  • When we bring Linus in on the comparison, it gets even clearer. Linus is introduced in 1952 as a baby, but like Sally after him, he ages faster than the older kids like Charlie Brown. In 1959 he's about five — which we know because this strip from shortly after Sally's birth. Since Charlie Brown is about four when Linus is born and about six when Sally is born, the only way Linus can be five years older than Sally is if he's been aging faster than Charlie Brown.
    • In conclusion: In the Peanuts universe, aging slows down the older you get, and as a result ages soon become meaningless. The only way in which age matters after a certain point is in the case of family members and especially siblings — hence Linus is always Lucy's younger brother, and Sally is always Charlie Brown's little sister.

Pig Pen is, or at least at one point was, abused

Probably Child Neglect. He says he has no name, says people call him bad things, and is notoriously dirty

Woodstock was secretly the Red Baron

Mostly for Rule of Drama. Poor Snoopy never knew that his best friend was also the Flying Ace's Arch-Enemy.

• Woodstock occasionally appeared as a mechanic in the Flying Ace fantasies. Does this disprove the WMG, or ramp up the drama that the Flying Ace's archnemesis is secretly part of his own crew?

Charlie Brown's father, a barber, gives him a perpetual very short buzz cut

That's why he looks almost bald.

• This is confirmed. Charlie Brown has mentioned several times that his father is a barber, and Word of God has stated that he's not bald, but instead has very light, very short, blonde hair.

The Great Pumpkin is real, but very rarely delivers anything.

Linus freaks out because he said "if" instead of "when he comes", then continues to worry that the Great Pumpkin will skip over him even after he loudly corrects himself. And this is during being so devoted that he sits in a pumpkin patch all night and misses trick or treating. Judging by this, the Great Pumpkin has ridiculously tight criteria about who he delivers to, and kids very rarely live up to it. Linus was one of the few kids that managed to fit the criteria one year, which is why he believes in him.

The Peanuts universe is the future of the Hyborian Age

The Great Pumpkin is Crom, who will not be moved by your offer of worship or pleas for reward; in fact, he relishes in your suffering. Which is why Linus shivers in the pumpkin patch; Peppermint Patty must always fail in school; Charlie must forever miss the football, lose his baseball games, and never ever get the Joe Shlabotnik trading card; Lucy and Schroeder will never get together; and Snoopy will always be shot down by the Red Baron.

Lucy has a secret crush on Charlie Brown

Often, when a little girl is mean to a little boy, it means she has a crush on him. And look at the times where Lucy is actually nice to Charlie Brown, she just doesn't know her true feelings for him yet.

• Schulz of course never confirmed this – his characters are around eight years old after all, even if they don't talk like it – but it's at least plausible. After all, whenever something truly bad (as in life-threatening) happens to Charlie Brown, Lucy becomes a nervous wreck.
• While not canon, the reverse could be true, at least in some ads. A MetLife ad showed Charlie Brown holding hands with Lucy and Snoopy as they walked down the path of life. And this PSA/solicitation has Charlie Brown saying "I love her", looking at Lucy...at least sort of.

Violet's parents fight a lot

In her early appearances, one of the most common gags was for her to yell at Charlie Brown to leave and never come back, but then invite him in/to stay as if she hadn't said anything. Since she identified as Charlie Brown's girl-friend at the time, she was imitating her mother yelling at her father to leave, since she thought that's what you were supposed to say to somebody you love.

Charlie Brown will kill Linus someday

It will be after moving to Sin City, growing up, and losing his neverending optimism in the process.

Sounds crazy? See here◊ and here◊!

Alternatively, Charlie Brown is Kevin

See here!

Yosemite Sam is the father of Linus, Lucy, and Rerun

Lucy obviously takes after him. Linus and Rerun, not so much.

Charlie Brown is a reformed bully

Charlie Brown in the early comics is very different from the insecure and wishy-washy round-headed kid we would come to know. He teased the other characters regularly and at times could be downright arrogant. Is it any wonder so many of the other kids didn't like him?

Sally will eventually stop trying to get Linus to be her boyfriend

It's a given.

Linus will turn his blanket into an article of clothing....

....Like a sportcoat, so he can have all his security needs without looking infantile (since the blanket is worse than heroin in regards to addictions). He apparently washes it and cares for it regularly so it can look good for when he grows up (rather than become a filthy, kiddie slobber/booger/mud/hole-ridden mess like those things usually become).

Lucy will grow up to become Nurse Ratched

She has a psychiatry booth but is more interested in keeping her patients down than curing them, is very cruel to her patients while still keeping up a nice front, and thinks nothing of sabotaging others to keep them under her thumb.

Charlie Brown grows up to be really, really unhinged.

How unhinged? Let's just say he changed his name to Trevor Philips and leave it at that.

Rerun let Charlie Brown kick the football in the last strip.

He's clearly not as mean as Lucy.

Snoopy secretly has really bad low self esteem

He’s pretty much the ace, but in his fantasy world, he always loses.

The Red Baron always shoots him down, he doesn’t catch any chicks as Joe Cool, his novels are never accepted, and never wins a case in court.

He may be talented compared to his owner, but his imagination shows he may have a very bad opinion of himself.

Thibault is The Bully and a He-Man Woman Hater due to a Napoleon Complex and shame over excessive hair growth.

The boy is a tiny little shrimp and he has freakin' sideburns. Small children shouldn't have awesome Killer Sideburns like that. He obviously is miserable about his looks so he bullies to compensate.

Thibault is related to Moe from Calvin and Hobbes

Thibault is a small child with Killer Sideburns and Moe is "A six-year-old who shaves" and both are bullies.

Snoopy's solo stories were going to be a separate strip.

Given how the strips about Snoopy, his dog relatives and Woodstock differ so greatly from the general mood of the ones featuring the kids, it's possible Schultz, maybe feeling out of ideas to write about Charlie Brown and the gang, wanted to try new ideas with a new strip about funny animals doing crazy things. However, fearing it couldn't be as well received, he decided to tie it to the "Peanuts" universe, this way being able to return to it when inspiration hit him back.

Charlie Brown and the Red-Haired Girl grow up to become supervillains

Namely, Kite Man and Poison Ivy◊.

Why, Charlie Brown, Why? was made as a giant middle finger to those who believe Charlie Brown is a chemo patient due to his baldness.

The Take That! is that Janice was the one with leukemia and not Charlie Brown.

Linus grows up to be a minister.

It'd be the perfect career for him! He's already surprisingly knowledgeable about scripture for his age, and I could totally see him getting into high school and college and studying theology more, either for his major or out of his own interest, getting deeper into it and all its complexities. It'd also be a good fit for his thoughtfulness and compassion; tell me you couldn't see Linus Van Pelt growing up to be a Good Shepherd.

As a nice bonus, his security blanket (assuming he still has it, which come on, of course he does) could be made into a stole.

Pig-Pen's real name is Charlie.

All the kids refer to Charlie Brown by his full name to differentiate the two.

Rerun's real name is Leland.

Not only would it match the alliteration with Linus and Lucy, it sounds similar enough to "Rerun" that Lucy could have been subconsciously incorporating it when she created the nickname.

Lucy grows up to become a professional and renown psychiatrist.

I feel all these ideas that Lucy becomes an absolute horrid person are very unlikely, I feel the only reason she acts the way she is may be an inferiority superiority complex that she would grow out of when she becomes older.

The Cat Next Door is Garfield.

Hey, someone would've posted this theory eventually.

Linus has undiagnosed autism.

I think this one is self-explanatory.