Snoopy

In the 1978 TV special, What a Nightmare, Charlie Brown! (bear with me, it gets good), Snoopy has an argument with his ostensible owner Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown, wrongheaded as always, wants his dog to be more normal. He wants a loyal, submissive sled dog who will drag him around, eat only what Charlie Brown gives him, and who sleeps inside his damn doghouse and not on top of it.

That night, Snoopy scarfs up pizza and ice cream and descends into a surreal dream. In the dream, he is working in an arctic sled dog team. Snoopy runs all day and, to avoid starving, becomes a shaggy, fanged dog angrily fighting for scraps of raw fish and meltwater. He obeys, takes only what he needs, doesn’t act out of order, and fits a strict role. What the special shows us is what Snoopy thinks of the idea of being a “normal” working dog. Even in the nightmare, he searches for an escape by drinking and dancing at a pub before he’s fully broken by the musher. When he wakes up, he feels all the more sure that being a normal pet is not for him.

Like so many of Snoopy’s games, his pet-hood is a play-act. His doghouse is a bachelor pad stocked with fine art, he eats whatever he wants, he often walks on two legs, and, especially when animated by Bill Littlejohn, he is stretchy and joyful. Snoopy is a dog, but he doesn’t ever live up to the name. He’s a pet, a lawyer, a cool kid, a musician, a sporting gentleman, a free-love kisser—but he’s really just a dog, right?

Snoopy is suburban feral. In a neurotic corner of America where children fret and need therapists, Snoopy is fluid and only rarely soul-searching. Travelling from screen to page to eye and back, he is the real soul of the entire Peanuts enterprise. Naysayers be damned, I say. Even if he moonlights as a corporate mascot, selling insurance or consumables, he’s a character that cannot be ruined because he is utterly undefinable. Snoopy has life figured out— he’s learned how to kill domestication and dance all over its grave. He fails to fit anywhere in particular, and thus, of all the characters in the Peanuts media, he might be the only one who fully succeeds at inhabiting his body.

I got the idea to pair Snoopy with MiniDisc in my art because they both evoke the year 2000 to me. That was the year that the Peanuts comics ended and digital media distribution started getting big. The MiniDisc is cool and sensual, standing as one of the last waves of physical music distribution that wasn’t an artifact of nostalgia. Well, it wasn’t at the time. There’s a slick and sly physicality to both Snoopy’s play-acting and the MiniDisc. They’re both kind of weird! They both come to me in a kind of dream where we can look past the corporate origins of our favourite things and find the electric, queer drive to create that they embody.

Another reason that I wanted to put Snoopy into the groovy world of turn-of-the-millennium MiniDisc ads was more visual. Sony’s approach to selling the MD invoked a throwback ‘60s cool. That same ‘60s cool (found in Shibuya-kei music, lounge revival, and stylish video games) needs iconic and simple characters to thrive. Snoopy, as a character who is very popular in Japan and whose manners and wiggly personality came into their own in the ‘60s, was a perfect fit for remixing these old ads into something wilder and more artistically compelling.

There’s just something cute and romantic about physical media in 2021, especially miniature media.

And the year 2000, when Snoopy and MiniDisc might have met, is the last year before so many things happened that defined my life through pain and fear. And to me, the nightmare Snoopy has in the 1978 animation outlines what is really dangerous about our lives a lot of the time: that we’re being turned into domesticated monsters through scarcity, terror, and competition. And I wanted to make something feral in a way that I can coexist with now. It’s a cuddly, compromised kind of ferality, one that makes the world feel bigger and reminds me that playing, whether it be with real dogs or weird TV dogs, is what drives our love of the world. Snoopy is our friend and survives every attempt to confine him with his wildness intact. Honestly, I try not to take it all too seriously if I can help it.