February 1, 1952: And I'll Rock You Away To That Sugar-Plum Tree

Isn't it just a tiny bit hard to believe that songs like this were ever popular? I think this joke is actually a little bit funnier now because of that.

January 31, 1952: Dog On Skates

It strikes me that, right now, we are about halfway between the original look for Peanuts and the "classic" style of the strip's heyday. Charlie Brown still has an oval head and solid black eyes, but his proportions are a bit less stylized. Snoopy is still relatively small compared to the other characters, but he is a bit longer. (He's still far away from the balloon animal-like look he had in Peanut's later years.)

Oh, the strip itself? There have not been a huge number of funny-cause-he's-a-dog strips so far. (The one with the TV antenna atop his doghouse has been the funniest of that lot.) Thing is, as Snoopy's personality becomes better-known and he becomes less like a normal dog, these kinds of jokes become less effective. I remember, as a kid, seeing some old compilations of Peanuts strips with Snoopy jokes and not quite "getting" them because the humor was tied up in Snoopy doing non-doglike things, when most of my experience with the character came from the days when he had almost given up dogliness altogether.

Just today I saw a copy of one of the old Fawcett Peanuts collections, flipped through it, and found the strip in which Sally laments that she can't go to school because she's not old enough. Snoopy responds in a thought-balloon that you also have to prove you're a human. I remember that strip from reading it in 1st grade and not finding it especially funny. I like it a lot better now.

January 30, 1952: Schroeder gamely fights typecasting

We know it's Schroeder because of the musical notation in the first panel, but this is a side of the kid seldom seen.

January 29, 1952: Snoopy's Pride

Snoopy doesn’t stoop to begging for treats... unless someone else might get it instead.

What kind of candy is this that it’s equally suitable for kids and dogs?

January 27, 1952: Blind Man’s Bluff

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I expect a lot of kids today have never heard of this game, either.

I just like this one, it’s mostly a collage of smaller jokes, like “At least I’ll be near home!” and “What trees?”

January 25, 1952: Charlie Brown figures it out

That is an excellent point. Special deals provided by companies tend to be cunningly arranged so that they sound great but only a tiny portion of respondents will ever be able to cash in. Those boxtop deals were fairly common at the time, but only bulk buyers would be able to take advantage of them. Most of them had no use for a tricycle, or whatever else was being offered, either.

Just so you know, I had to restrain myself from making a reference to the movie Punch Drunk Love here.

January 24, 1952: Hammer-Klavier

German is a funny language when you think about it. I guess it is somewhat less funny when you try to spell something in it.

Schroeder gets annoyed with the other kids fairly often. ‘tis the curse of the misunderstood genius, I guess.

META: (last one I hope) Image fixing done

RSS will be back on in a short while. Have a look around if you like to reassure yourselves the strips are here. Sadly there was no way I could discover for saving the number of post flags (like interesting, funny, weird) and all those counts have reset to zero. At least all your comments have been saved, and no one needs to refollow!

Someone suggested uploading the strips to the blog, but that makes me a bit more nervous from a legal standpoint. Comics.com explicitly makes the strips available via embedding, so I figure I'm safe there. Still, if this happens again I probably will start hosting them locally; they don't seem to have gone after the Comics Curmudgeon.

META: Warning to RSS readers, image fixing about to begin

This is to warn everyone reading via RSS that I'm about to do the image fix. To try to reduce the number of duplicated feed entries, the feed will be off for maybe half an hour or so. If tomorrow night rolls around and you don't get a new comic them Something Went Wrong and you should resubscribe.

In any case, there will be some duplicated feed entries. Unfortunately, I do not know of a way to prevent Blogger from reposting those once the feed is turned back on.

Here we go!

META: More on the Image Break

I have figured out a way to fix all the links in one fell swoop. However, it is fairly drastic mojo. It will likely remove any flags (funny, cool, interesting, etc) that have been set on posts. Trial runs have indicated that it probably will not erase comments, but it might result in some strange feed behavior. I am not doing it immediately, but will probably do it in the next few days.

For those of you interested in what this entails....

A quick Google search didn't turn up many promising avenues. An Ask Metafilter thread from 2005 said it might require hacking the Blogger API to implement changes of this magnitude.

It turns out that it doesn't require going quite that far. It is possible to export all of the posts of a Blogger blog into an XML file, and then import it later either to the same blog or a different one. While it is on the local machine passing it through a quickie Python script easily fixes the links, once I get the old URL format solidly recognized (for the record, Comics.com's new URL system is rather simpler than the old one). It turns out that even comments get exported to the archive file.

The problems arise from the fact that, while I can restore the blog posts to a new blog then change its address to match the old one, not all of the old blog's settings get restored. The kinds of issues this produces ranges from minor (having to reupload the banner) to somewhat harsh (anyone following the blog will have to refollow).

The alternative is to delete all of the posts on the current blog and reimport them from the hacked backup. This should be safe since I have the blog backed up. It will keep all of the settings and followers, but I don't know if it will do something nutty like resend all of the pages as new RSS entries.

Will probably take action on this in a day or two.