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.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Linus's belief in the Great Pumpkin wouldn't be half as funny if it came from any other character. Why? Because Linus is the voice of reason among the characters, the one who tells Charlie Brown not to sweat his losses so much or that the best approach to the Little Red-Haired Girl is just to go and talk to her. Instead of being a statement about religious faith, Schulz could simply be saying that even the most rational of people can have blind spots.
• 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.
  • Speaking of romantic feelings, is Schroeder actually uninterested in Lucy or does he simply see her as a distraction from his music?
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • Is Charlie Brown really oblivious to Peppermint Patty and Marcie's affection for him? Or does he notice how they feel about him, but refuse to consider showing any indication of returning those feelings for fear of breaking the other girl's heart and potentially destroying the friendship the two of them share?
  • The Fridge Logic of a kid being as dirty as Pig-Pen even in academic and social settings has led some to speculate that he's the victim of Parental Neglect. (The revised version of theatrical parody Dog Sees God even mentions it as a possible explanation for his Adaptational Villainy.) Of course, if we're taking the comic strip at face value, Pig-Pen bathes as much as any other kid but simply attracts dirt and dust like a magnet and is surrounded by his trademark dust cloud as soon as he steps outside.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: In the December 18, 1983 comic strip, Charlie Brown tries to use a food flag system for Snoopy, with each color representing a different food time of the day (breakfast, mid-day snack, supper, etc.). After teaching Snoopy this, Charlie Brown comes to see Snoopy waving all the flags to signal to Charlie Brown. Could this be a case of Snoopy using the system as a way to get more food given he's a Big Eater, or is it possible Snoopy has no idea what color any of the flags are given he's a dog, and waved all the flags thinking one of them would correspond with what he wanted?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The franchise is the Trope Namer, from later generations of viewers of A Charlie Brown Christmas not knowing that artificial Christmas trees with needles made of aluminum were an actual brief fad around the time the special was made.
  • Linus' punchline in the July 22, 1959 strip, noting that by the time Sally grows up, "There'll be three major leagues!", works as a Non Sequitur observation about societal advancement in the future, but was likely also intended as a nod to the ongoing discussions about the future of baseball that were happening in the wake of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moving to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, in 1958. New York City mayor Robert Wagner and and New York lawyer William Shea launched a campaign to replace them, which ended up focusing on the formation of a third major league, which was tentatively announced to the media in November of 1958. Others even suggested four separate leagues in the future. Five days after the strip in question was published, Shea announced concrete plans for the league, which was going to be called the Continental League, slated to begin play in 1961, but the American League and National League responded by announcing they would add two expansion teams each, including a new NL team for New York, which led Shea to back down. The new team, which became the Mets, would honor Shea by naming their stadium after him.
• Archive Panic: A half-century's worth of daily comic strips, 40+ animated TV specials, and five (soon to be six!) full-length animated films. Be prepared to spend a lot of time with these characters.
• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • There are lots of opinions on when the strip's golden age was, how far it fell from that over the years, and exactly when the Seasonal Rot first set in, but everyone agrees that the 1980s were the weakest period, with frequent rehashing of old ideas, misguided attempts at relevance, and the inexplicable rise of Snoopy's brother Spike. Some of this was due to circumstances beyond Schulz's control, namely a heart attack that forced him to slow down his working pace. While some fans maintain that the strip enjoyed a creative renaissance in the last few years of its run, others believe that it never recovered from its '80s doldrums, often citing the increasingly scratchy art. This too was a side-effect of Schulz's heart attack; though he recovered, his motor skills started to deteriorate.
  • Many feel that the 1980s and 1990s were a low point for Peanuts animation, often for the same reasons mentioned above, or for coming out with strange story ideas and having some of the characters act, well, unusually out of character (most notably Linus in You're In the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown), though some specials from that era like She's a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Why, Charlie Brown, Why?, It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, and the This Is America, Charlie Brown anthology are well-regarded.
• Audience-Coloring Adaptation: Even those who are aware of the comic strip tend to be shocked upon learning 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 the animated adaptations of the Broadway musicals (Snoopy the Musical and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown), which carried over his musical numbers and thus had him singing.
• 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 and her crush on Schroeder, or they hate her for the very same reasons, finding her to be too much of a crabby and unlikable jerk towards the cast (especially Linus and Charlie Brown), as well as too stalkerish towards Schroeder. 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. She's a bit less divisive in the cartoons; they tone down her crabbiness and make her more of a Jerk with a Heart of Gold (since her abrasive personality from the strips wouldn't translate well to long-form media).
  • Sally. Some people enjoy her for her show and tell scenes and her relationship with the School Building. Others find her obnoxious for being disrespectful towards Charlie Brown and clingy to Linus.
  • Peppermint Patty. There are those who find her a breath of fresh air and one of the most three-dimensional characters. On the other side, a group of fans think she appears too much (to the point of sidelining earlier characters like Shermy, Patty and Violet) as well as many of her storylines either lasting for too long or being too ridiculous.
  • Franklin. Downplayed. Compared to other characters, Franklin's reception as a character is more lukewarm than mixed. He's appreciated for how kind he is as he's the only major character to never pick on Charlie Brown. However, he often gets criticism for having virtually no flaws.
  • 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 engages in. In addition, while Violet isn't as equal-opportunity 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:
  • The 1973/07/05 strip has Charlie Brown anxiously waiting to see the sun rise, worrying that it'll look like a baseball to him, only to instead find that it looks like Alfred E. Neuman. It (sort of) makes sense in context, as the preceding story arc (starting with the 1973/06/11 strip) had Charlie Brown seeing everything as a baseball.^note For a Doylist explanation, it was allegedly done as an affectionate nod towards MAD by Schulz in response to their Peanuts parodies — Schulz was friends with the magazine's staff and had contributed to it several times, including some of the Peanuts parodies. MAD's staff loved the moment.
  • Linus makes a brief appearance in "It's a Mystery, Charlie Brown", in which he utters four rhyming lines. He never has dialogue like this again in any Peanuts special.
• Broken Base: The football gag is either an iconic Running Gag that shows how hapless Charlie is, or an overdone joke that stopped being funny long ago and is just mean to Charlie Brown. Even Schulz ended up lamenting how he never let him kick the ball in the strips.
• Can't Un-Hear 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 vows that if he gets well, she won't pull the ball away. When he gets out of the hospital, she keeps her promise... but Charlie misses and kicks her hand instead. It was intended to be seen as an 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.
  • The arc with Thibault, as he spends every last panel insulting and mocking Marcie in the most sexist way possible. At the end, Marcie loses her patience with him and delivers a well deserved punch to his face. Everyone agrees that he had hit coming.
  • Charlie Brown, after a mean kid named Joe Agate pretends a game of marbles with Rerun is for fun before saying it's for "Keeps" after winning and stealing all of the latter's marbles, and after discovering that he's been doing this scam to several other kids while on his way to try to resolve things peacefully, decides enough is enough and challenges Joe to "knuckle down" in a game for keeps, before absolutely annihilating him and winning back everyone's marbles, getting to properly be The Hero for once.
• 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. And if one actually listens to the song, they'd hear that the titular "Charlie Brown" is characterized as a class clown, which the comic character is definitely not.
  • 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).
  • Everyone knows Charlie Brown is bald, to where he is the Trope Namer for Charlie Brown Baldness, and there are many jokes about the irony of Charlie having a barber as his dad despite not having hair. However, Charlie does have hair (note the curls on the front) and mentions it several times in the strip; more specifically, according to Word of God, he has a short blonde buzzcut that is barely visible. His bald appearance is a remanent from the comic's early days, where all the characters had similarly stylized looks to Charlie. By the time the comic began to undergo Art Evolution and gave characters more elaborate hairstyles, Charlie's bald appearance was too iconic to change, and so it was kept.]]
• 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.
• Deus Angst Machina: Everything in the universe conspires against Charlie Brown and his search for a bit of happiness.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Many fans have interpreted Linus as being autistic. He shows quite a bit of developmental maturity for his age, as well as extensive knowledge in different subjects (such as the Great Pumpkin, baseball, or the Bible), which can come off as special interests. More notably, his love for his Security Blanket (to the point that he's the Trope Namer for it) and occasional thumb-sucking can be read in as a kind of stimming, while his moments of becoming insecure and having breakdowns when he doesn't have his blanket show strong signs of autistic burnout, which commonly happen to autistic individuals when put under pressure, which many autistics cope by—you guess what—more stimming.
  • Some fans have theorized that Schroeder is autistic as well, due to his maturity and extensive knowledge in classical music (particularly Beethoven, whose music he's especially fixated on), which can be described as a special interest.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Schulz himself noted the discrepancy between Pig-Pen's popularity and his rare appearances in the strip.
  • Likewise, despite appearing even less often, Franklin and Eudora have sizable followings as well.
  • 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.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception:
  • Don't call Peppermint Patty just "Patty"; there's already a separate character named "Patty" that has been around since the very first comic strip, and looks and acts rather differently. if you need a shorter name, then call them Patricia (which is her actual name that Marcie uses).
  • Don't spell Frieda's name as "Frida" or "Freida" (though the mistake is understandable). And no, she is not the Little Red-Haired Girl, either.
  • Lucy and Violet should not be mistaken as each other and vice-versa. While they do look quite similar in the early years of the strip, Violet can be distinguished by the hairbun.
  • Do not pair up Belle and Snoopy and act like they love each other romantically. While this is usually done with the best of intentions, Belle is Snoopy's sister, not his girlfriend.
  • Linus and Rerun are not the same character, nor do they have the same designs; Rerun's hair is squarely on his scalp (a bit like a birds nest) and wears overalls, while Linus's hair curls past his ear and wears stripey shirts almost exclusively.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: It's common to see Darker and Edgier fan works about grown-up versions of the Peanuts gang; the most famous example is probably Dog Sees God, though there were plenty of examples before it. Popular elements shared by these works include Peppermint Patty and Marcie being lesbians, Linus being a pot addict, and Schroeder being a closet gay musician.
• Fanfic Fuel: Given the elusive and deliberately interpretive nature of the Little Red Haired Girl, it's no surprising that she provides a ton of fuel for fanfiction, many of which expand on her characterization and her relationship with the rest of the cast.
• Fanon:
  • Several elements of the strip, including the Little Red-Haired Girl's actual name and Marcie's last name are subject to this. It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown names the Little Red-Haired Girl Heather (and The Peanuts Movie would expand on this by calling her "Heather Wold"), while You're in the Super Bowl gives Marcie's last name as "Johnson" (though the 2015 movie would change this to "Carlin"). Schulz said that he never considered the animated specials canonical to the strip, though fanfiction writers tend to ignore this, and use these names regardless, if only because of familiarity with the specials. This especially applies to the name of the Little Red-Haired Girl, usually on the grounds that they have to call her something in fanfics, and as non-canon as the animated specials are to Schulz, the name for her has at least gotten precedent in being used (twice!) in the franchise.
  • 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.
  • Rerun's real name being "Leo", "Lionel" or any name that starts with L, to go with the Family Theme Naming as Lucy and Linus.
  • Pig Pen's name being Matt, due to his counterpart in the Dog Sees God play.
  • One common fan interpretation of the Little Red Haired Girl is that she not only reciprocates Charlie's feelings for him, but she too haplessly pines for him just as much as Charlie Brown does for her.
• 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 should count as canon or not (such as Marcie's last name, the number and names of Snoopy's siblings, and what the Little Red-Headed Girl name is and what she looks like).
• Franchise Original Sin: A major part of the comic strip's humor is Charlie Brown being a woobie Failure Hero and constantly perservering in spite of the odds being stakced against him. 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 His favourite composer was Johannes Brahms; he considered making Schroeder a fan of Brahms as well, but thought Beethoven's name, having three syllables instead of one, was more inherently amusing. (Schroeder does let slip in one strip — to his immediate horror — that sometimes he thinks he prefers Brahms to Beethoven, and when Lucy insists in another strip that Beethoven's birthday traditions include girls kissing the objects of their affection on the nose — whereupon she proceeds to act on this "tradition" — a shocked Schroeder says this "could start a stampede to Brahms!") 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 Rachmaninoff^note  The very first strip featuring Schroeder at the piano from 24 September 1951 shows him playing not Beethoven, but Rachmaninoff — specifically, Measure 20 of the Prelude in G minor, Op.23 No.5. 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.
  • Japanese merchandise gives a significant amount of attention to Snoopy's siblings, who are otherwise rarely focused upon aside from Spike. Of them, the favorite seems to be Olaf.
  • The franchise as a whole, though not to the extent as in its native United States, is utterly beloved in the United Kingdom and Ireland. To this day, merch of the series continues to flood shops around the country, the newspapers continue to reprint the strip, and the movie debuted at #2 at the box office when it was released there. The BBC were also keeping the specials in reruns up until the late-2000s, and a successful exhibit would run from 2018-19 at Somerset House in London. Some have attributed this to the less dense/wacky tone of it compared to creators such as Hanna-Barbera, instead going for a more gentle tone that made the series fit well with home-grown programming such as Postman Pat. As a result, Charles Schultz tends to be more revered and influential there than other old-era American cartoonists, often cited in the same breath as creators such as Wilbert Awdry and Michael Bond.
  • 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 happened 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 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.
  • The second week of February 2000, he worked on a strip to announce his retirement, feeling he couldn't handle publishing any more strips. Literally the day before it was published, he passed away in his sleep, and his retirement strip also became his eulogy.
  • 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 Schulz 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 Schulz'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 the 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.
  • Snoopy actually ended up beating Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin by about four months. On March 14, 1969, in the strip, Snoopy declared himself the first beagle on the moon, having beaten everyone, including the Russians, and even "that stupid cat next door"!
  • 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 in the following years for movies and television, and even videogames, albeit using glasses more sophisticated than disposable anaglyphs, with the Nintendo 3DS also showcasing glasses-free 3D.
  • 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 Punt, Pass and Kick 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 (also based on a scrapped episode concept), 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.
• Jerkass Woobie: Lucy Van Pelt may be quite abrasive to those around her, particularly to Charlie Brown and her siblings, but one can't help but pity her a little bit when Schroder never once shows any interest in her despite her having feelings for him.
• Just Eat Gilligan: Charlie Brown's team invariably wins when he isn't playing. Somehow the logical conclusion never seems to occur to him or anyone else.
• LGBT+ Periphery Demographic: Despite being presumably straight in canon,^note They both have crushes on Charlie Brown and have displayed an attraction towards several guys in the TV specials, while also showing no attraction to any girls. Schulz also deflected when asked about it, suggesting that they were too young to have a sexual orientation yet. 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 fan works, despite their crushes on Charlie Brown. Peppermint Patty has also attracted some non-binary fans as well due to her dislike of being referred to as sir or ma'am.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Believe or not, Charlie Brown. In Peanuts fanfiction, he's been paired up with Peppermint Patty, The Little Red-Haired Girl, Lucy, Frieda, Linus and Schroeder. 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.
• Like You Would Really Do It: The story arc where the Van Pelts move away. Did anyone really think Linus and Lucy would get Put on a Bus?
• Love to Hate: Lucy Van Pelt, though mileage will vary, if you grew up in Charlie Brown’s position.
• 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: See here.
• Memetic Psychopath: Quite a few dark parody comics depict Peppermint Patty as an unhinged, violent yandere hell-bent on destroying anything she considers competition for Charlie Brown's affections.
• 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.
  • By the later specials, it becomes obvious that the infamous staccato delivery of the dialogue, while influenced by the performances of the Children Voicing Children of the earlier shows, had become a deliberate stylistic choice on the part of the producers, perhaps because it was easier to animate. As Lucy in It's Magic, Charlie Brown, Sydney Penny voices her in the usual Peanuts manner, but as a main character in the Schulz-penned and produced live-action special The Big Stuffed Dog made around the same time, her delivery is normal and naturalistic, suggesting that she was told to be more halting and declamatory as Lucy.
• Nausea Fuel: The August 20, 1972 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 from March 1965 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. In the March 25 strip, 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, the icicle smashes his empty doghouse, showing Snoopy 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.
  • One 1966 story arc began with Charlie Brown waking up smelling smoke. Then he heard Snoopy frantically kicking on the front door, ran out to see what was going on...and stopped dead in his tracks to see Snoopy's doghouse burning to the ground, while Snoopy collapsed in his master's arms weeping over his home and possessions. It's very jarring to see such a tragedy happening, out of the blue, to this innocent cartoon dog...reminding us that such tragedies can befall any of us at a moment's notice.
• 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.
  • Schulz is often credited with inventing the terms "security blanket" and "fussbudget" (and he was known to take credit for them as well), but they both predated the strip. "Security blanket" dates to the 1920s and 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. "Fussbudget" is first attested in print in 1904, but was a fairly obscure bit of homespun slang until it became a Running Gag to describe Lucy.
  • 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.
  • Charlie Brown was obviously far from the first person with this name in the English-speaking world, but in the small northern California town of Boonville the Peanuts character's name may have become a source of amusement, since the people of Boonville had developed their own local jargon called Boontling, in which "Charlie Brown" referred to "pie", since a late 19th century resident of the town insisted on eating pie at every meal.
• One True Threesome: Quite a few people ship Charlie Brown/Peppermint Patty/Marcie.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Sydney Penny voiced Lucy in It's Magic, Charlie Brown. Around the same time, she had a major role in the Schulz-written and produced quasi-Peanuts live-action special The Big Stuffed Dog.
  • 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 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 Sally's singing voice was provided instead by Dawnn D. Leary.
  • 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.
  • Charlie himself was, weirdly enough, voiced in It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown by Justin Shenkarow, several years before becoming better known as Harold Berman.
  • In Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales and Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown, Sally was voiced by Megan Taylor Harvey.
  • In He's a Bully, Charlie Brown, Taylor Lautner voiced the main antagonist Joe Agate.
  • 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.
• Ron the Death Eater: Lucy van Pelt tends to receive this a lot from her detractors. While she is undeniably a Jerkass with a mean streak, she isn't totally heartless, nor do her actions ever go beyond generic bullying. Yet it isn't uncommon for many fanworks, most notably parody animations, to portray her as being far crueler than she ever is in canon, some even going as far as to portray her as a murderous psychopath despite her never doing anything of the sort in any official media.
• Sacred Cow: Regardless of some perceiving it as oversaturated, the strip is still widely beloved and will be defended from detractors due to its (at times) Sweet Dreams Fuel nature.
• The Scrappy: 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 Though most of her traits (and her outfit) would be carried over to Lucy van Pelt, who became far more popular.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: 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."
• Sequel Displacement: The strip is far more famous than its predecessor, Li'l Folks.
• Signature Line: Charlie Brown's Catchphrase (which is occasionally borrowed by other characters), "Good grief!", is well-known to anyone who has even a baseline knowledge of what Peanuts is, and it appears in every adaptation. If someone in another work says it, they're probably referencing Peanuts.
• 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.
  • There are some fans who really liked Robert Tower’s and/or Cam Clarke’s voices for Snoopy’s dialogue in You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown/Snoopy the Musical’s animated specials, and thought it was a shame that they were never used again, even though Schulz never wanted Snoopy to have dialogue in the cartoons. In fact, some would even go as far as to say that Snoopy being pantomime only works as funny small slapstick scenes in a B-plot to the plot of a special, and feel as though newer animated stuff like The Snoopy Show focusing mainly on him just doesn’t work, while him having thoughts adds more to his character/personality.
• 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.
• Trans Audience Interpretation: Woodstock was originally written into the comic as Snoopy's female secretary. After the character's introduction, Schulz decided to name the bird "Woodstock" after the music festival, and he decided to change the character's gender to male. Some fans interpret this to signify that Woodstock came out as transgender.
• 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.
• 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 Like the rest of the English-speaking world, the United States was on track to switch to metric by the early 1980s. Unlike everywhere else, however, the process went completely off the rails by the end of the 70s — major industries were split on the issue (some supported it, but the economically-vital housing sector — construction, engineering, surveying, etc. — was dead-set against), the public was overwhelmingly opposed (this was also true in other countries, but their governments forced it through anyway), and the cost of changing millions of road signs and other official stuff during the era of Stagflation was deemed "not worth it". So, Congress gave up partway through, leaving the weird mix of Customary & Metric that's still in use in the USA today.
    • 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.
    • There's also It's Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown (1984), which could not more obviously be tied to the 1983 film Flashdance.
    • You're In the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown revolves around a Punt, Pass and Kick contest, which was a real youth outreach competition operated by the National Football League, but the league discontinued the program in 2017.
  • 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 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • While the strip was very progressive for its depiction of racial equality, there were still moments where the strip could be racially insensitive:
    • Some of the early strips had the characters see Stephen Foster, a person who composed songs for minstrel shows, in a positive light.
    • Some of the strips had the characters dressing up like Native Americans as a gag, which is not acceptable nowadays due to being a form of cultural appropriation by non-native characters.
    • 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; because 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 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 Charlie Brown’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!"
• The Woobie:
  • Could you believe us if we told you that originally, the Butt-Monkey status used to belong to Snoopy instead of good old Charlie Brown? In earlier strips, the aforementioned dog (who didn't have any human characteristics at the time) was the usual target of pranks from the other kids or simply had bad luck.
  • Linus, whenever the Great Pumpkin fails to appear or when people try to force them to give up his Security Blanket.
  • 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.