Snoopy, Charlie Brown's good-natured beagle who lives quite an exciting life in his fantasies, has been around for almost 70 years and is loved by many of all ages around the world.
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| Early drawing of Snoopy |
Snoopy made his first appearance on October 4, 1950, two days after the comic strip Peanuts debuted. When Charles Schulz, the creator of the strip, was 15 years old he drew a picture of his dog Spike which later served as the inspiration for Snoopy. Schulz planned on naming the dog character Sniffy but discovered that name was already used in a comic strip so he came up with the name Snoopy from a suggestion his mother had mentioned earlier about naming the next family dog Snoopy. The name first appeared about a month later on November 10.
According to some strips in 1968, Snoopy's birthday is August 10. When the comic strip first came out, Snoopy appeared to belong to no one. As the years went by, the beagle began to spend more time with Charlie Brown than with the other characters. It was eventually confirmed that Charlie Brown is the dog's owner when he says his parents bought him Snoopy after a boy dumped a bucket of sand on him.
Snoopy often imagines himself in fantasy lives. Some of his lives include being a writer, a bow tie-wearing attorney, a hockey player, a college student known as Joe Cool, and an astronaut - claiming to be the first beagle on the moon. His best known role is the British WWI flying ace. In his fantasies he often fails when trying to become famous. His books are never published and his doghouse (the Sopwith Camel) is always being shot down by the German flying ace Red Baron, his imaginary enemy. According to Schulz, "He has to retreat into his fanciful world in order to survive. Otherwise, he leads kind of a dull, miserable life. I don't envy dogs the lives they have to live."
Over the years, Snoopy became the mascot of several companies, including NASA and the insurance company MetLife. With NASA he became their safety mascot after the 1967 Apollo 1 fire disaster. With MetLife he became their corporate mascot in the 1980s. Three airships owned by MetLife that provide aerial coverage of sporting events feature Snoopy as the WWI flying ace on their fuselage.
The comic strip came in last place in the New York World Telegram’s reader survey of cartoons the first year it came out, but it didn't take long for it to gain popularity and appear on the tv and big screens. At the time of Schulz's passing in 2000 (mere hours before his final comic strip was published) Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the other Peanuts characters were appearing in more than 2,500 newspapers in 75 countries with over 350 million readers.
