Peanuts/WMG

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


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

Read the Fantographics 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?

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.

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 the Yellow Ranger from Power Rangers: Lost Galaxy.
  • 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 book store 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.

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 Schoolgirl Lesbians.

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

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.

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.

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 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!
  • 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).

Schulz never showed her because he wanted the readers to imagine their ideal girl as the little red-haired girl.

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.

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.

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.

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.
  • Schulz was born in the Twin Cities, which is known for... German Americans, including himself. This is why most surnames in Peanuts are either German or Dutch.

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.

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?

Frieda is the little red-haired girl

Frieda, for those of you who don't know, was a brother chucked 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 embarassment. So, to subtly hint that it was Frieda, he refered to her as "The Little Red-Haired Girl", since refering to her as the "Naturally Curly-Haired Girl" would be way to 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.

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.

On Halloween, Charlie Brown dressed up as Rorschach

Here's the proof. Exactly why Charlie Brown would dress up Rorschach has yet to be explained, however. This troper has not actually read Watchmen, so this WMG could be interpreted as Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch.

  • 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.
  • This may be the best WMG ever written.

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.

Schroeder is a high-functioning autistic.

He gets along fine w/ 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.

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 furninshings 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 arguably 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 psychadelic imagery.

  • Well, in Mad Magazine, a horny teen-age Linus tells a suggestive Violet, "Well, what do you think I kept this blanket around for?"

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

See above.

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 tries 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.

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.

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

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

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.

Charlie Brown is Charles Schulz.

  • Similar first names.
  • Although never mentioned in the comics, a magazine article stated that Charlie Brown's father is a barber just like Schulz's father.
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