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YMMV / Peanuts

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YMMV tropes for The Peanuts Movie go here.

  • Accidental Innuendo: In one strip, Lucy tells Linus to get her some ice cream, only for him to ask her "What would you do if I told you to go get it yourself?" Her response? "I'd pound you until the sun went down, and I'd keep on pounding you until the sun came up and then I'd pound you until the sun went down again."
  • Adorkable:
    • Charlie Brown is insecure and awkward, but kind-hearted and almost always tries his best.
    • Linus is an adorable, highly intelligent, shy little boy who carries a baby blue security blanket with him wherever he goes.
    • Marcie is a soft-spoken, bookish Bespectacled Cutie with a shy crush on Charlie Brown. She's even branded as such in her character poster◊ for the 2015 movie.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • There are some who consider Lucy's cruelty toward Charlie Brown as a mask for her own romantic feelings for him. Since Lucy's kindness towards Charlie Brown (or in general) is a strong case of Depending on the Writer some specials/strips give this theory a lot more credibility than others.
    • In the foreword to the 1975-76 Complete Peanuts collection, Robert Smigel (a Saturday Night Live writer and the guy behind Triumph The Insult Comic Dog) argues against the popular view of Charlie Brown as a Determinator - see that entry elsewhere.
      "Charlie Brown didn't keep trying to kick Lucy's football out of some inner strength and Horatio Alger resolve we were supposed to admire. He did it because he was weak. He was flawed, and he couldn't help himself. But that's exactly why we love him."
    • The reason Violet constantly says My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad is that she doesn't want anyone to know that she wishes he'd spend more time with her — or so some people claim.
      • This appears to be backed up in one strip where Charlie Brown interrupts one her usual boasts and takes her down to his dad's barbershop to tell her about the friendly, loving relationship they have. It ends with an on-the-verge-of-tears Violet walking away and quietly saying "Happy father's day, Charlie Brown".
    • Some even argue that Charlie Brown's life is not quite as horrible as we think it is as he is not quite the loser is often made out to be. Charlie Brown normally gets along with the boys in his class (particularly Linus and Schroeder) and he has a surprisingly good love life as the Launcher of a Thousand Ships entry below has pointed out well enough.
    • How much of Marcie's polite, studious behavior is her actual personality and how much of it is imposed on her by her strict parents?
  • Archive Panic: A half-century's worth of daily comic strips, dozens of animated TV specials, five full-length animated films. Be prepared to spend a lot of time with these characters.
  • Audience-Alienating Era:
  • Audience-Coloring Adaptation: Even those who are familiar with the comic strip tend to be shocked that Snoopy has dialogue in the strips (via Thought Bubble Speech), since in the far more widely known animated works, Snoopy usually doesn't have dialogue at all (outside of Snoopy the Musical and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which, even then, only gave him dialogue out of necessity since they're based on Broadway musicals that had songs sung by Snoopy).
  • Base-Breaking Character:
    • Lucy. People either love her for her personality and her Running Gags, most famously her swiping the football away from Charlie Brown at the last millisecond, or they hate her for the very same reasons. In the 25th anniversary compilation book, Peanuts Jubilee (1975), Schulz even reproduced a letter from an irate fan about one of the football strips. The fan had gone on an epic fire-and-brimstone rant about liars and deceivers.
    • Violet is also divisive for similar reasons to Lucy, albeit a bit more tepid in the vitriol. She sometimes has the strength to Throw the Dog a Bone, such as inviting Charlie Brown to her Halloween party and requesting that he "model", but she's often seen, especially in the early strips and specials, partaking in the same tirades that Lucy's engaged in. In addition, while Violet isn't as equal-opportunity of a sadist as Lucy is, she displays a notable Lack of Empathy, displayed at full force in I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown, where she describes Spike as "part-beagle and part-disaster".
      Violet: I think I would rather take one of the coyotes!
    • Lydia. Either you really like her for her humor and quick witted remarks or cannot stand her for her constant exasperation towards Linus.
    • Rerun. Around 1994 he suddenly became a main character, developing a more well-rounded personality (a mix of youthful naïveté and brash overconfidence), and Schulz centered much of the strip's last few years around Rerun. Either you considered this a case of Rescued from the Scrappy Heap and found him funny and a welcome shot in the arm after years of Peanuts retreading the same ground, or viewed him as a Creator's Pet, pushing aside every character not named Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and maybe Sally.
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Cant Unhear It:
    • If you were introduced to the animated shows first, it's hard to read the strips without assigning the voice acting from the shows to them. It helps that they did a pretty good job recasting the voices to sound close to the original children who played each character, so each character has a basic recognizable sound. MetLife even used the animated voice cast to do TV and radio commercials featuring the gang.
    • Depending on if you've seen You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown or Snoopy: The Musical first, you may start hearing Robert Towers or Cam Clarke for Snoopy's thought bubbles.
  • Cargo Ship: If taken to the extreme, Schroeder/Toy Piano and Linus/Security Blanket. Unfortunately, those two pairings might be the only two requited relationships.
  • Catharsis Factor: In one story arc, Charlie Brown is so sick he goes to the hospital. Lucy tells him that she won't pull the ball away. She doesn't... but Charlie misses and kicks her hand instead. Intended to be Epic Fail, but many people had wanted Charlie to do just that. He also finally kicks the ball in the animated "It's Magic, Charlie Brown!" special.
  • Common Knowledge:
    • The Coasters' 1959 hit song "Charlie Brown" has nothing to do with Peanuts (despite the growing popularity of the comic strip at that time and the signature line "Why is everybody always pickin' on me?" being something the Peanuts character likely would have wondered or said). Songwriter Jerry Leiber said he just chose the name "Charlie Brown" because of its simplicity.
    • Snoopy pretends to fight the Red Baron, not to be the Red Baron (the official name of the persona is the World War I Flying Ace).
  • Contested Sequel: The Peanuts Movie and the Apple TV+/Wildbrain specials are this to the original TV specials by Bill Melendez. Some love them for their tighter pacing, Animation and Art Evolution, and a greater focus on character development. Others, however, feel they're too polished, generic, and saccharine, lacking the cynicism, Black Comedy, and realism that defined the comic strips and the original TV specials.
  • Creator's Pet:
    • Rerun, in the eyes of fans who weren't thrilled by his prominence in the strip's final years.
    • Spike, Snoopy's older brother, started off as an amusing one-joke character (skinny desert dweller who talks to cacti and hangs out with coyotes), but he was featured incessantly in the 80s, long after the joke started wearing thin.
  • Creator Worship: Schulz is credited with bringing a greater degree of substance to the world of cartooning, with his characters boasting complex, three-dimensional personalities and suffering the same insecurities as real people, as well as providing thoughtful insights on the topics of human nature and, in some cases, spirituality. Small wonder, then, that so many contemporary cartoonists cite him as one of their influences, and that the saga of Charlie Brown and Co. continues to endure, even over 20 years after Schulz's passing.
  • Designated Villain: Mr. Hennessey, the hardware store owner from Charlie Brown's All-Stars, who offers to sponsor Charlie Brown's team. He received some (justified) hatred for telling Charlie that in order to receive the uniforms, the girls and Snoopy must be kicked off the team. It's made worse since he's forced to adhere to the league's sponsorship rules.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse:
    • Schulz himself noted the discrepancy between Pig-Pen's popularity and his rare appearances in the strip.
    • Peggy Jean is surprisingly popular in fanfiction - maybe because she's the only girl that treats Charlie Brown with nothing but kindness.
    • Joe Agate, the titular bully from He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, is pretty well-liked for two reasons. One, he knocks Rerun down a peg, which for those who don't like Rerun, can be seen as a Take That, Scrappy! moment. Second, he's an extremely Graceful Loser, who ends up giving Charlie Brown one of his very few earned victories.
    • For as divisive as It Was My Best Birthday Ever, Charlie Brown! is, Mimi is seen as the best thing to come out of the special for how courteous she is to Linus, her Child Prodigy status as a skilled botanist, and of course, her singing voice.
    • There are plenty of fans who would've liked to see Janice from Why, Charlie Brown, Why? make a comeback, as not only was she a great source of insight into The Topic of Cancer, but she had a wonderful dynamic with Linus that could've been explored further, had she not been relegated to just a one-off.
  • Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Some fans prefer the idea that Linus's belief in the Great Pumpkin is supposedly a metaphor for religious faith. Though it is a metaphor for believing in Santa Claus, Schulz claimed that he thought the idea of a kid confusing Christmas and Halloween (well, Santa Claus and trick-or-treating, anyway) would be a funny plotline, but did not intend to place any deeper meaning or message behind it. However, some fans feel that the Great Pumpkin ended up as a commentary on the nature of faith anyway. Sequences like Marcie going to a cult deprogrammer after hanging out with Linus on Halloween, or his Knocking on Heathens' Door promotion of the Great Pumpkin in later years sure seem like intentional examples of it.
  • Fair for Its Day:
    • Franklin was considered radical for the time just for being a black kid who joined the otherwise all-white cast, especially because he had been included at the suggestion of a schoolteacher who wrote to Charles Schulz to urge him to include one (for context, this happened eleven days after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination). His inclusion caused controversy at the time; a reader complained when he was drawn sitting behind Peppermint Patty in school, and several southern papers dropped the strip after his debut. Nowadays, though, he tends to be used as an example of a Token Minority character who lacks a distinct personality or trait outside of their race.
    • Peppermint Patty was - originally rather gender-nonconforming because she was the first female character in the strip to not wear a dress, yet her hair is still somewhat feminine. These days, this aspect of her character is often lost on younger audiences.
  • Fanon:
    • Several elements of the strip, including the Little Red-Haired Girl's actual name and Marcie's last name. You're in the Super Bowl called her Marcie Johnson, but Schulz has said that he never considered the animated specials canon. Another special gave the Little Red-Haired Girl's name as "Heather". Again, not canon, but fanfiction uses it anyway, usually on the grounds that they have to call her something.
    • Many fans have interpreted Marcie as Asian-American, due to her black hair, studious personality, extreme politeness and strict parents. This is probably at least partly fueled by Honey Huan of Doonesbury fame being an explicitly Asian expy of Marcie.
  • Fandom-Specific Plot: Those Darker and Edgier fics about the grown-up gang. From Peppermint Patty and Marcie being lesbians, Linus being a pot addict, to Schroeder being a closet gay.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: Fans of the newspaper strip versus fans of the animated cartoons, as far as whether or not character details that are expanded upon in the latter (such as Marcie's last name, the number and names of Snoopy's siblings, and what the Little Red-Headed Girl looks like) should count as canon.
  • Franchise Original Sin: The major part of the strip's humor is Charlie Brown being a woobie Failure Hero. However, while such jokes of Charlie Brown misfortunes are funny when kept to the concise storytelling form of the comic strip, Charles Schulz's original plots for the animated specials eventually lost all proportion for the stories' tone. This led to specials with excruciating levels of sustained and illogical cruelty against our hero that tended to anger viewers, sometimes to the point of writing letters of protest. Of the specials, It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown, Someday You'll Find Her, Charlie Brown, and Happy New Year, Charlie Brown are particularly grievous offenders (the first features Charlie Brown being blamed for losing the homecoming football game when it was really Lucy repeatedly yanking the ball out of his way through force of habit, while the other two end with Linus romancing girls on whom he knows Charlie Brown has a huge crush as well as the senselessness of a grade school student being assigned to write a book report on War and Peace).
  • Genius Bonus:
    • Schulz was a big classical music fan,note  and though his ability to read music was limited, he meticulously copied passages from various piano pieces for strips featuring Schroeder at the piano (mostly Beethoven piano sonatas, but works by Haydn, Clementi, Chopin, and Rachmaninoffnote  among others also showed up), and his pianistic "career" includes some bonuses for fans of classical music.
      • In one of the very first strips to feature Schroeder at the piano from September 1951, Charlie Brown tells Patty that Schroeder has a contract with the "New York Philip Harmonic" to play Johannes Brahms' first piano concerto. "Why doesn't he play Brahms' second concerto?" Patty asks. "Well, after all, he's only a baby!" says Charlie Brown. Brahms' second piano concerto is widely regarded as a leading candidate for the most technically difficult piano concerto in the standard repertoire (the first concerto isn't much easier, but the Rule of Funny is in effect here).
      • Several early 1950s strips feature Schroeder going through a rigorous exercise routine or launching himself off the end of a slide before playing a particular musical passage. The passage in question is the first measure of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No.29 in B-flat, nicknamed the Hammerklavier, and widely agreed to be one of the most technically demanding piano sonatas by any composer, so Schroeder may well need to limber up before practice!
      • One strip has Lucy attempt to convince her teacher that the school should celebrate Beethoven's birthday by having the day off, ending by declaring that "Beethoven never supported Hitler!" There's more truth to this than the obvious fact that Beethoven died before Hitler was born: Beethoven was a firm believer in democratic principles and strongly supported equality and unity among human beings. Had he lived long enough, he would have despised Hitler and what he stood for.
    • The Bunny Wunny books that Snoopy loves? According to Scott McGuire in section 4.11 of the Peanuts FAQ, Schulz meant those as a Shout-Out to the Happy Hollisters books based on two clues. First, there are six Bunny Wunnies and there are six Hollister children. Second, each series has a character named Pam.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
    • At least two translations of the strip (the French one and the Swedish one) were renamed after Snoopy. He's also very popular in Japan, thanks in part to being a cute dog who happens to be marketed by Sanrio. Unfortunately, most Japanese seem unaware that the main character of the series is his owner, despite the strip's long-running and faithful translation, which gets printed daily in Japanese newspapers and has numerous compilation books in both English and Japanese. He has also gotten everything from his own café to special donuts at Mr. Donut Japan. Because of how popular Snoopy is there, the 2015 movie in the franchise was retitled "I Love Snoopy", was released a week after the American release and was shown in 4D, which is rare to happen to any Western animated film. It would be interesting to note that, if you look at Yoshi from the Super Mario series' look and personality, it's very similar to Snoopy. Even similar enough to think Yoshi might be an Affectionate Parody in tribute to Snoopy.
    • A peculiar example (almost a form of Covered Up) is that in the USA the animated specials are better known than the original strips, whereas in other countries it's usually the other way around.
    • A similar situation happens in South America. The strip goes either by the name Carlitos (literally "Charlie") or... Snoopy. (Brazil goes both ways: "Minduim", a mangling of the Portuguese word for "peanut" that became Charlie Brown's nickname, or "Snoopy")
  • Growing the Beard: The late 1950s, when the characterizations of Charlie Brown (Butt-Monkey Determinator) and Snoopy (Anthropomorphic Shift to an Intellectual Animal) finally crystallized. Or it can also be argued as when Lucy is introduced in 1952, followed later in the 1950s by Linus and Sally to complete what remained the strip's core cast for most of its run. It arguably grew an even bigger beard in the early 70s after Franklin, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, and Marcie were introduced.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The name of Snoopy's birthplace, the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, doesn't sound quite so charming now that the disgraceful conditions of many "puppy mill" dog-breeding facilities are better known.
    • The 1966 storyline of Snoopy's doghouse burning to the ground becomes harder to read with the news of Schulz's home being destroyed in a California wildfire.
    • Peter Robbins was Charlie Brown's original voice actor from 1963-1969, and all the animated scenes of Charlie Brown talking about being depressed and visiting Lucy's psychiatric booth might come across as this now, knowing that Robbins would struggle with bipolar disorder in later life, and would ultimately take his own life in January 2022.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight:
    • Patrick McDonnell, who grew up during Peanuts' run, wrote a letter asking Schulz to create a cat sidekick for Snoopy. Schulz simply responded with an autographed picture of the Peanuts gang. McDonnell, with approval and assistance from Schulz, would then create his own comic strip, Mutts in 1994, which shares some of the same values as Peanuts and is still running in newspapers today. In the comic's first collection, Schulz wrote the foreword, commenting that Mutts is "exactly what a comic strip should be."
    • In the January 28, 1999 strip, Rerun is looking at a painting of Mutts' Earl at a museum. Later, to celebrate what would have been Schulz's 100th birthday in 2022, Mutts featured Earl at the same museum, looking at a painting of Snoopy.
    • In the same strip, after Doozy adopts Guard Dog, a tethered dog, she renames him to Sparky, the exact same nickname Schultz had growing up. McDonnell later claimed in a blog post that this was done as a tribute to his childhood idol, saying that Mutts nor Guard Dog would've been possible without Schultz's inspiration.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In baseball-related strips, the characters would often use "goat" as an epithet for the player who messes up at a critical moment and loses the game for the team (usually Charlie Brown). Since then, the term has taken on a polar opposite meaning; in the context of sports, it's often used as an acronym for Greatest Of All Time.
    • A gag from The '50s actually used the pun "Quicksand Box" before Calvin and Hobbes also used the joke and before it became the basis for the Quicksand Box trope.
    • The first football gag in the strip had Violet pull it away, though out of fear Charlie Brown would kick her hand instead. It would seem her fears were founded as the one subversion of the gag when Lucy took over had Charlie Brown kick her hand.
    • The September 30th, 1971 strip has Linus find a discarded pair of disposable anaglyph 3D glasses and give them to Snoopy, who is happy because now he’ll be ready if “3D comes back.” 3D would indeed return (and subsequently disappear again) several times over the following years for movies and television, albeit using glasses more sophisticated than disposable anaglyphs.
    • You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown would become quickly and oddly prophetic, having aired alongside Super Bowl XXVIII. The special depicts Snoopy's team defeating a team of small buffalo, while the winner of the Pass and Punt competition, Melody Melody, was adorned in a Dallas Cowboys helmet and jersey. The Cowboys would go on to win that very Super Bowl, with the opponent they defeated being the Buffalo Bills.
    • In 2021, a graphic novel titled Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown would be released, based upon the concept for a scrapped special decades prior. Charlie Brown and the gang travel to Scotland, and Charlie Brown gets to meet his pen pal - a girl named Morag. The trip also involved a tour of several Scottish landmarks, one of which was Loch Ness. Just a few months later, another round-headed kid, one who happens to be based on good ol' Chuck himself, would go on a Scottish adventure of his own, where both a Loch and a woman named Morag would play major roles.
  • I Am Not Shazam: When the strip first came out, people naturally assumed that Charlie Brown's name was "Peanuts". This frustrated Charles Schulz, who had predicted that this would happen. From 1966 until 1987, the Sunday strips carried the subtitle "Featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown" to help avoid this.
  • Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: Ironically enough, once the strip became popular many people wound up forgetting the actual title and thinking it was called "Charlie Brown" or "Snoopy".
    • Snoopy was so iconic that that, in some countries (like Sweden), the comic strip is named after him. The official name of the strip's website was "snoopy.com" for much of the internet era.
    • Most of the animated specials and book collections include "Charlie Brown" in the title, but the title panels on the Sunday strips for many years said Peanuts featuring GOOD OL' CHARLIE BROWN.
    • In Italy it was known as "Linus" back in the day by most readers, mostly because the comic strip was published in a magazine named after him.
    • In Brazil there is an attempt to equal character and title by making Charlie Brown nicknamed "Minduim" (from amendoim, "Peanut").
    • The title Peanuts was the idea of Schulz's bosses, and Schulz himself was never crazy about it, pointing out that it's not as if kids have ever been "peanuts" or anything.
  • Iron Woobie: Charlie Brown stopped being too bothered by things that don't turn out well for him as he's come to expect it. It doesn't stop him from continuing to run his baseball team or participating in competitions of all sorts, however, in hopes that he will one day get his big break.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Believe or not, Charlie Brown. In Peanuts fanfiction (yes, there is Peanuts fanfiction), he's been paired up with Peppermint Patty, The Little Red-Haired Girl, Lucy and Frieda. In the strip, there's also Marcie, who has a huge crush on Charlie Brown, and he also had a short-lived romance with a girl named Peggy Jean. And in the early days, Patty and Violet sometimes showed romantic interest in him.
  • LGBT Fanbase: Despite being straight in canonnote , and never having shown attraction towards each other or other girls, Peppermint Patty and Marcie have garnered a large lesbian following. Peppermint Patty due to her tomboyish looks and personality resonating with many lesbians, and Marcie due to her closeness with Peppermint Patty and tendency to call her "sir". Unsurprisingly, it is very common to see them portrayed as a lesbian couple in parodies and fanworks. Peppermint Patty has also attracted some non-binary fans as well due to her dislike of being referred to as sir or ma'am.
  • Mandela Effect: Some people remember Snoopy's tail being a thin black line rather than a white tail with a little black dot on it.
  • Memetic Loser:
    • Charlie Brown both in and out of universe. As Chris Rock once said, "He didn't even star in his own Halloween special."
    • Linus, to a lesser extent, also is this, namely in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the first Valentine's Day special and especially in Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown. Plus having Lucy as a sister doesn't do his reputation/well-being/self-confidence any favors.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Snoopy's Happy Dance.
    • Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown has become a popular analogy. Political pundits especially seem to love it.
    • "I got a rock" is so memorable that it still gets referenced/parodied even today.
    • There's 3eanuts, a Garfield Minus Garfield-style attempt to recontextualize Peanuts by leaving off the final panel, which often ends up making the strip seem cruel and depressing (or more cruel and depressing than it is already).
    • The Volumetric Mouth when characters scream sometimes with the Written Roar of "AAUGH!" has been widely parodied in pop culture references. Since the age of the Internet, it has also been circulated as a reaction image.
    • "Curse you, Red Baron!"
    • Linusposting / Ratio + Linusnote 
    • In 2020, the Twitter account "@matrixreloaded_" posted "People on here will tweet anything. 'Charlie Brown had hoes.' No he didn’t. That isn’t true." Since then, "Charlie Brown had hoes" has entered Twitter parlance as shorthand for a situation where someone posts something very obviously incorrect, often as a case of wishful thinking. Ironically, this also led to a big debate in some internet circles about how Charlie Brown could be linked with several girls throughout the strip's history, so the line really could be true after all.
  • Misaimed Fandom: It's very common to hear Vince Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy" played on the radio around Christmas, as it's very much attributed towards A Charlie Brown Christmas. But it's not really a Christmas song. It was composed for the 1963 documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and was even released on its soundtrack album before A Charlie Brown Christmas ever made it to airwaves, and had been a regular part of Guaraldi's live set lists well before he did the Christmas show's soundtrack. What's stranger, aside from "Christmas Time Is Here" and occasionally "O Tannenbaum", none of the other songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas tend to get radio play, giving most of the attention to "Linus and Lucy", and the song itself is never played around Halloween or Thanksgiving, where it got its own set of special renditions for those holidays.
  • Narm Charm: The animated specials, particularly the very early ones, have a great deal of this. The animation is crude and often off model, and some of the child actors, particularly very young ones like Kathy Steinberg (the original Sally) and Jimmy Ahrens (the original Marcie), give very awkward readings of their lines (which are often audibly spliced together from multiple takes), but the art and the vocal performances are part of what makes the stories and especially the characters so endearing in many viewers' eyes.
  • Nausea Fuel: An early 1970s Sunday strip has Lucy drink some soda with a straw that Snoopy used without her knowledge. The disgusted expressions that Charlie Brown makes because of this distract Lucy from their conversation.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • One story arc has Linus's blanket come to life and start stalking and attacking Lucy at every opportunity to the point where she stays outside all night hiding from it. At one point it lunges out of Linus's hands at her, and it has a mouth.
    • In one strip, Charlie Brown, not having a kite to fly, attaches some string to Snoopy's collar and uses him as a kite, who uses his ears to create the lift needed to fly. But it doesn't work for long, and Snoopy plummets to the ground and SHATTERS into a hundred pieces!! Luckily it was just Snoopy having a nightmare from eating too much pizza before sleeping, but still, that image of him shattering in front of his master must've upset a LOT of kids at the time!
    • There was a series of strips where Snoopy woke up (in his doghouse unlike usual) to find an enormous icicle had formed right above him. He was worried it was so unstable, the slightest movement would cause it to crash. As Charlie Brown and Lucy used a pizza to attract Snoopy, it was shown he was right and was extremely close to grave injury at best.
    • In It's a Mystery Charlie Brown!, Snoopy and Woodstock sneak into the school's science fair to reclaim Woodstock's nest but also play around with some of the exhibits. One of them gives Snoopy an electrical shock, and he briefly turns into a screaming skeleton.
  • Older Than They Think:
    • The gag of a youngster playing a difficult classical piece on a toy piano had been used in the Bugs Bunny cartoon What's Up, Doc?, released a few months before the strip's debut in 1950, and a year before Schroeder's debut. There had been a proto-Schroeder musician character in Li'l Folks, but he played a regular piano.
    • Violet was the first one to pull the football away from Charlie Brown when he tried to kick it, in the November 14, 1951 strip (a few months before Lucy's debut), but only because she was worried that he'd kick her hand. She also beat Marcie and Eudora to the punch by calling Charlie Brown "Charles" once around the same time.
    • While Schulz proudly took credit for popularizing the term "security blanket" in regards to Linus, it had already existed for a long time. It originally referred to a baby blanket that could be fastened over the child so they couldn't kick the sheet off if they got restless. Then it became a common military term in the first part of the Cold War to describe measures taken to keep things like missile tests secret. What Peanuts did was play with the meaning of "security" so that it had to do with mental security, and it also involved a literal blanket.
    • A San Francisco Bay Area-based cartoonist draws a comic strip about a group of kids that becomes popular enough to jump to other mediums and have its characters used for advertisements. That would be Tack Knight, whose strip Little Folks ran in newspapers from 1930-33, then jumped to comic books for a few more years. Little Folks is now best known for being the reason Peanuts got its name; Knight kept the title Little Folks under trademark, so Schulz couldn't re-use the name of his local Minnesota feature Li'l Folks for his new national strip in 1950.
  • Once Original, Now Common: The strip sometimes suffers from this, due both to its own cultural ubiquity and to the influence it's had on countless other comics over the last half-century. Consider this: Schulz's characters were considered dysfunctional in the 1950s and '60s. After comics like Calvin and Hobbes or Zits, it can be hard to believe this considering any parent would dream to have kids as intelligent and introspective as the Peanuts Gang are.
    • As Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson once put it in an interview:
      "Every now and then I hear that Peanuts isn't as funny as it was or it's gotten old or something like that. I think what's really happened is that Schulz, in Peanuts, changed the entire face of comic strips, and everybody has now caught up to him. I don't think he's five years ahead of everybody else like he used to be, so that's taken some of the edge off it. I think it's still a wonderful strip in terms of solid construction, character development, the fantasy element...Things that we now take for granted—reading the thoughts of an animal for example—there's not a cartoonist who's done anything since 1960 who doesn't owe Schulz a tremendous debt."
  • One True Threesome: Quite a few people ship Charlie Brown/Peppermint Patty/Marcie
  • Retroactive Recognition:
    • In It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown, Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown, and Series 2 of The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, Sally was voiced by Stacy Ferguson, now better known as The Black Eyed Peas lead singer/solo artist Fergie. Ironically, when Sally sings at Snoopy's wedding in Snoopy's Getting Married, that's not Fergie doing the singing!note 
    • In Snoopy's Reunion Linus is voiced by a young Josh Keaton, under his birth name of Joshua Wiener, who has been a prominent voice actor in the 2000s and 2010s.
    • In He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, Taylor Lautner voiced the main antagonist Joe Agate.
    • A young Nicole Eggert of Baywatch fame had a small voice role in Someday You'll Find Her, Charlie Brown.
    • Likewise Jenny Lewis in It's An Adventure, Charlie Brown.
    • In Peanuts Motion Comics, Lucy and Sally are voiced by Michelle Creber and Claire Corlett, who would later become known as Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle respectively.
  • The Scrappy:
    • Snoopy's family, especially Spike, from the late 70s onward, due to them all being a massive Spotlight-Stealing Squad, reducing Snoopy's uniqueness, and causing the comic to be less charmingly melancholy.
    • Violet and Patty, due to them being huge Rich Bitches a la Muffy Crosswire from Arthur. Thankfully, they both disappeared in the mid-to-late 60s.
    • Charlotte Braun was a character who appeared in the early years of the comic. However, many readers at the time hated her and found her to be obnoxious and unlikable, on top of lacking the memorability, warmth, and humor the other characters had. Infamously, one fan in particular hated her so much, she actually sent a letter to Charles M. Schulz to get rid of her, which resulted in him effectively killing her off after only appearing in 10 strips, with his response letter featuring a doodle◊ of her looking sad with an axe cutting her head. Notably, she has never reappeared in any Peanuts media since, not even through cameos like the other early Peanuts characters have.note 
  • Sequel Displacement: The strip is far more famous than its predecessor, Li'l Folks.
  • Squick: The Running Gag of binders causing physical pain. From Snoopy in You're (Not) Elected, Charlie Brown getting his paw's finger stuck in a binder, then having it clamp down on his nose, to Peppermint Patty in It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown falling asleep into her binder and having it clamp onto her nose, followed by it clamping onto her scalp before Marcie pulls it off. Snoopy's paw finger and Peppermint Patty's nose are especially squicky, as they result in Cartoon Throbbing, and Snoopy even cries.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many characters in the comic strip such as Violet or Frieda had a lot of appearances before barely appearing near the end of the strips run, marking some fans wish they were used more.
  • Title Confusion: The iconic instrumental theme song isn't called "Peanuts" or "Charlie Brown". It's actually called "Linus and Lucy".
  • Toy Ship: Many of the strip's male/female relationships would qualify as this.
  • Ugly Cute: Spike, a disheveled stray dog who is as thin as a twig, looks cute because of the art style and has a certain charm to his character.
  • Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Lucy's early appearances had her depicted with pupils and irises rather than the simple dots that were shown in the time. This made her look like a total Creepy Child, especially when she smiled.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Charlie Brown is treated like dirt by almost everyone, from major to one-shot characters - even his friends are not above tearing into him for his perceived failings - yet he remains beloved by many readers, partly because of his perennial underdog status and the fact that it never stops him from trying.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: Schulz by his own admission thought Charlie Brown's mopey and bothersome habits evened out his trademark bad luck a lot more than many fans did. By the time he ended the strip, he did seem to catch on to their point, and regretted not getting the time to close it more satisfyingly with some Throw the Dog a Bone moments.
  • Unintentional Period Piece:
    • Some of the animated specials come off as this.
      • A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), Lucy comments on Beethoven never being featured on bubblegum cards. Said cards are usually referred to as "trading cards" nowadays, as the majority of them stopped being packaged with bubblegum in the early '90s.
      • In Charlie Brown's All-Stars (1966), Charlie Brown wants his team to play on an organized league only to learn that teams with girls on them can't be sponsored. At the time, Little League actually was off-limits to girls.
      • In It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), the kids refer to trick-or-treating as "tricks or treats", which was used interchangeably with the singular version during the decade before falling out of use in the 1970s.
      • In There's No Time For Love, Charlie Brown (1973), Peppermint Patty comments that the metric system will probably be official by the time she reaches high school.note 
      • In It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown (1974), Sally wants to buy platform shoes which were all the rage in The '70s.
      • You're the Greatest, Charlie Brown (1979) has Charlie Brown thinking that people will "treat [him] like Bruce Jenner" who is known as Caitlyn now.
      • In the decades since Life Is a Circus, Charlie Brown (1980), the popularity of the traditional traveling circus fell into steep decline. Most notably, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus closed in 2017.
      • There's also It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown (1984), which could not more obviously be tied to the 1983 film Flashdance.
    • Many strips refer to real world events, but these were rarely reprinted (precisely because they were dated) until The Complete Peanuts. Occasionally some slipped through when the reference was sufficiently obscure: for example, a series of strips in which Snoopy observes birds having furious (but unintelligible) political arguments while holding signs depicting different punctuation marks. This accompanied the bitter polarized political discourse in the US in the run-up to the 1964 election.
    • One strip from 1954 has Lucy ask a dumb question, only for Charlie Brown to offer an obvious fact as a sarcastic reply. That fact? "I know there are forty-eight states in the union". That's right, Peanuts is so old it was around before Alaska and Hawaii were admitted as states.
    • The comic for July 19, 1997 has Lucy reading a list of players on a baseball team: "Clay, Blake, Morgan, Travis, Trent, Hunter, Bailey, Madison, Taylor, and Justin." The punchline is that these are meant to be "weird" names, but in the present day, they've become quite common. Of these names, Clay, Travis, and Trent are the only ones to not have been in a yearly "top 100 names" list.
    • The 90s strips were full of this, with references from from Forrest Gump to Barney to the Walkman. In one of the last daily strips, Sally is writing a letter to Harry Potter. Not as obvious as Flashbeagle, but this was written around the time the books were becoming popular.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • While in the strip Franklin's treatment is ahead of its times, some of the animated adaptations treat him as the Token Minority; he is shown acting differently from the other kids and is given stereotypically black mannerisms which at the times were acceptable. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah did a segment on this.
    • Shortly after the film 10 came out, there was a sequence in a special in which Peppermint Patty wore her hair in cornrows. In the aftermath of concerns about appropriation of black hair styles, this sequence has perhaps not aged well, at least as far as American or English-speaking viewers in concerned, anyways.
    • Peppermint Patty's debut comic has her mention that she "Indian wrestles" her friend Roy. This expression was acceptable in 1966, but not very acceptable now.
    • The regular use of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male can come across as this now. Lucy's bullying is often portrayed as negative but tends toward Black Comedy rather than anything serious. Even Peppermint Patty and Marcie have been shown hitting boys in a way that was portrayed sympathetically. Audiences nowadays tend to be much more critical over this sort of thing.
  • Values Resonance:
    • A Charlie Brown Christmas' denouncement of commercialism (which carries over into A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown as well) and presentation of the True Meaning of Christmas. Which makes later handling of the show even more ironic; due to the fact that networks generally push in more and more commercials into episodes, for several years the special aired heavily truncated. Fan backlash ultimately made them back away from it, giving the special a full hour and tossing in a short from a Christmas anthology special to pad things out so they can air it uncut. Of course, that does mean that ABC gets to have a reliably high rated special they can rerun in an hour timeslot.
    • There's also a bunch of still-relevant political humor in You're (Not) Elected, Charlie Brown and the strips on which it was based. The fact that they haven't dated is probably due to Schulz lampooning the overall election process rather than a current election or event of his day.
    • The bullying can fall into this and Dissonance as well - the characters do bully each other, and it's Played for Laughs, but many of the actual instances bullying rarely veers into Troubling Unchildlike Behavior, and when it does (such as Lucy throwing Schroeder's piano to the kite-eating tree), it's not shrugged off.
    • Save for a few controversial instances, Franklin's skin tone is barely commented on.
    • Charlie Brown having girls play on his baseball team, even before Little League started letting girls play. This becomes a major plot point in Charlie Brown's All-Stars where Charlie Brown refuses to sacrifice his female teammates (and Snoopy) for sponsorship.
    • From a modern perspective Peppermint Patty's trouble with schoolwork reads a lot like someone suffering from undiagnosed ADD or ADHD. She is clearly intelligent, but her main problem is her inability to concentrate on things she has no interest in. In turn, her teacher(s) seem resigned to her just being a poor student and they never try to figure out if there is something that might be done to help Patty's school performance.
    • An arc in the 70s dealt with the school enacting a dress code and Peppermint Patty not being happy about being forced to wear a dress, and doing everything she could to get the dress code removed. Despite some jokes, this is largely played sympathetically, and that a person shouldn't be forced to wear something they're not comfortable in. Considering there are still a lot of schools that force gender conforming dress codes even today, it's a message that's still just as relevant now as it was back then.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: It can be easy to mistake Peppermint Patty for an actual boy. She's one of the few girls to be consistently drawn with shorts instead of skirts and, in the last two decades of the strip’s run, it became more socially acceptable for young males to have longer hair. It doesn't help that in some of the animated adaptations, she is voiced by a boy. And of course, there's her best friend Marcie constantly referring to her as "sir". This was actually lampshaded in the strip itself. For example, in the strips constituting She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, where Peppermint Patty goes to get her hair cut by CB's father, a barber, she comes running out, her hair all but scalped, and screams at him, "You didn't tell him I'm a GIRL!"
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite being adapted into animation for kids, the original strip wasn't meant for kids; hence its serious and dark tone. But it's pretty clean, so anyone can read it.
  • The Woobie:
    • Charlie Brown. 'Nuff said.
    • Linus, whenever the Great Pumpkin fails to appear.
    • Peppermint Patty gets her moment when she sees the Little Red Haired Girl and how pretty she is, and realizes why Charlie Brown always loved her. It's enough to drive her to tears, and anyone who's ever had an unrequited crush probably knew exactly how she felt. Thank God Linus was there to listen and cheer her up.

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