Should this be considered Snoopy's official birthday? I don't think Schulz planned out his characters' backstories in that much detail, really. Does it seem strange to sing "Happy Birthday" for a dog?
Snoopy is a dog of many emotions: surprise, tearful gratitude, and anticipatory happiness.
Snoopy sniffing tears of gratitude is pretty bad...and a surprisingly early harbinger of his later non-doglike behavior. I know Shulz is still experimenting with what works and what doesn't at this stage, but up till now Snoopy has been respectably doglike. If those tears were removed and he was sniffing at the cake, that'd be a huge improvement!
ReplyDeleteWell c'mon now, I think he did it mostly because it's funny to think of a dog as crying, let alone out of gratitude. That would make it a (Scott) Adamsian double-joke strip, which would be pretty edgy even now.
ReplyDeleteYa know, even when I see those Peanuts strips from the "Happiness is a..." phase, I never got the feeling it was being too maudlin. After all, most of the characters at some point have been pretty cruel to Charlie Brown....