History Trivia / Peanuts

* SimilarlyNamedWorks: Two different video games were released as ''Snoopy Tennis'': one on UsefulNotes/GameAndWatch and another for the UsefulNotes/GameBoyColor.

* AmateurCast: In the animated adaptations, the characters are [[ChildrenVoicingChildren 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 [[Music/{{Fergie}} Stacey Ferguson]]).

** Schulz struggled with poor health, physically and mentally, for most of his life, in addition to a string of martial 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?''.

* ApprovalOfGod: [[ZigZaggingTrope Zig-zagged]] with [[Creator/CharlesMSchulz Schulz's]] reaction to the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A15v4tTab0Y 1986 animated parody]] of the Charlie Brown/Peanuts series titled ''WesternAnimation/BringMeTheHeadOfCharlieBrown''. According to a Youtube comment by Mr Undiyne from a Youtube upload of the short. He knew somebody in the animation trade that managed to get Schulz to watch the short. Schulz watched the short in complete silence and told the crew that while he found it amusing, he wished to never see the Peanuts characters depicted like that again.

** 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 heavily edit the offending scene (mostly by masking P.P.'s lines). 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 TheGhost in order to show Charlie Brown's hopelessness in longing for her.

* BeamMeUpScotty: "Good grief, Charlie Brown!" is like [[Franchise/StarTrek "Beam me up, Scotty!"]] or [[Literature/SherlockHolmes "Elementary, my dear Watson!"]], in that it's made up of two elements that were said frequently, but hardly ever said together, but people still think it's a trademark {{Catchphrase}}. It was the title of a 1960s era Peanuts collection.

** Peppermint Patty was voiced by a young boy in several of the cartoons.

** 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 heavily edit the offending scene (mostly by masking P.P.'s lines). 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.

* SleeperHit: 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 TheFifties. With elaborately-drawn {{Adventure}} and SoapOpera 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. When the first reprint book was published in 1952, it was in just 40 newspapers, 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 [[UsefulNotes/{{Utah}} 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.

* OldShame:
** 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'', [[MagnumOpusDissonance 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 KeepCirculatingTheTapes) is at the Charles Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California.

** Averted by [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Dryer Sally Dryer]], who in the first few years of the animated shows voiced Violet, Lucy and Patty at various times...but never Sally.

** Averted with Franklin- the newspapers tried to talk Schulz into making Franklin white to avoid inflaming racial tensions among some readers. Schulz put his foot down & told them they either ran the strip the way he drew it or he would quit. The executives backed down.

* TheOtherDarrin: 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. Averted with Bill Melendez, who continued to voice Snoopy and Woodstock through the years (and even appeared, posthumously, in 2015's ''WesternAnimation/ThePeanutsMovie'') until 2016 when Daniel Thornton took over the role of Snoopy.
* OutlivedItsCreator: While this was famously (and thankfully) averted with the strip itself, the characters continue to appear in new animated works, commercials, merchandising, etc., more than a decade after Schulz's death.

* TorchTheFranchiseAndRun: Averted. Charles M. Schulz just retired, died a day later, and his final strip just said goodbye. No artist or writer in their right mind would ever dream of a Peanuts comic without Schulz. Regardless, since there was 50 years' worth of strips, newspapers were content with re-runs. That doesn't extend to films or TV specials, since Bill Melendez was mostly responsible for those. However, The Peanuts Movie still felt the need to have Schulz involved to lend it legitimacy.

* TroubledProduction: ''It's the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown'' (1988), [[MagnumOpusDissonance a hoped-to-be masterpiece for Schulz]] [[RogerRabbitEffect combining 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 his daughter Jill, yelling at her, for example). The special, originally targeting for a March 1988 airdate, ultimately came out in October (some months after ''Film/WhoFramedRogerRabbit''), calling critics to declare it (despite being a year earlier in starting production) a cheap knock-off.

** Charles Schulz's daughter Amy Schulz Johnson had some interest at a young age in learning how to draw and perhaps taking over her father's strip one day. According to a recent biography, Schulz shot her down immediately saying 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.

** Physical example. Following heart surgery in the late-1980's, 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 anytime 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 ''ComicStrip/CalvinAndHobbes'' did), but Schulz didn't have the time left to do so.[[/note]] He died mere hours before his final comic ran in newspapers.

** 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, [[WesternAnimation/ThePeanutsMovie characters who starred in an animated film released in the previous 12 months that grossed several hundred million dollars]].

** Peppermint Patty was intended to be a main character of another comic strip Schulz planned. But he didn't have the time, so he added her in the ''Peanuts''.

* TheWikiRule: [[http://peanuts.wikia.com/wiki/Peanuts_Wiki The Peanuts Wiki]].

!!''ComicStrip/{{Peanuts}}'' is the TropeNamer for:

* AluminumChristmasTrees (along with the real ones, but ''Peanuts'' is what made it an example)
* CharlieBrownBaldness
* CharlieBrownFromOuttaTown, indirectly.
* DontCallMeSir
* IGotARock
* ThePigPen
* SecurityBlanket
* ThroughAFaceFullOfFur
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** For the ''WesternAnimation/ThisIsAmericaCharlieBrown'' mini-series (if you want to call it that) from the 1988/89 season, 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.