August 8, 1953: Dogs playing baseball

So Snoopy is playing baseball now?

(Takes off critic's hat, puts it in box.) That's it, I'm done. I accepted Beethoven sponsoring Schroeder, but a dog playing baseball? That's too weird for me.

...

What's that you say? Snoopy has already done things far weirder than that, including moving into a doghouse hotel and erecting a TV antenna on his house. Sigh. If you insist. (Puts hat back on.)

I'm not sure if this is actually the first strip that implies or outright shows Snoopy as a player. It's possible at this point that he's just the team's mascot. In Peanuts' odd context, as Snoopy becomes weirder and more capable it makes increasing sense to use him as a player, although Schulz has fun with the idea for many years to come. (Remember "Peppermint" Patty's reaction? It took her years to figure that one out.)

I'm reminded, perversely, of those loathsome "Air Bud" movies Disney puts out, in which a Labrador Retriever proves to be freakishly capable at various sports. You know the ones, they're part of that long and hateful tradition of animal sports movies. They nearly always have a scene with a flabbergasted ref looking through a rulebook, then saying "There's no rule that says dogs can't play, guh-huck!" Yeah, and there's no rule about murdering your opponents either OMG IMA GENIUS.

Let's have a look at the Wikipedia synopsis for that movie:

After the death of his father, who has died in a plane crash, Josh moves with his family to Washington State and is too shy to try out for his middle school's basketball team and too shy to make any friends. He meets Buddy, a Golden Retriever who had escaped from his cruel owner, an alcoholic clown named Norman Snively, who had locked Buddy in a kennel after causing trouble at a birthday party and was taking him to the dog pound when the kennel fell off the truck. Josh soon learns that Buddy has the uncanny ability to play basketball....

Oh look, the dog plays baseball in the 2002 sequel called time to make the scare quotes "Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch":

Josh is off to his first year of college and Buddy has stayed behind with Josh's little sister, Andrea, and the rest of the family. Andrea, attempting to fit in with her Jr. High classmates, decides to join the baseball team and along the way discovers that Buddy also has the uncanny ability to play baseball. Just as the season is settling in, a terrible discovery is made - Buddy's puppies, have mysteriously started disappearing with the help of kidnappers' little helper, Rocky Raccoon. Turns out the kidnappers' were researchers who were kidnapping Air Bud's pups because they thought they had a special gene that would enable them to play sports.

I bring up these upsetting artifacts of popular culture to illustrate, by way of contrast, how awesome Peanuts really is.

August 7, 1953: This strip blows my mind, Beethoven edition

How is that even possible?

I'll tell you what though. Twisting your brain around so that this strip somehow makes sense in an ordinary way is a fun intellectual exercise in self-derangement.

Maybe Schroeder is sponsored by a local bakery called, for some reason, the "Beeth Oven." Or maybe it's renowned for the cooking of pastry. Pastry that contains beets. Beets, and extraneous H's.

Or maybe Beethoven was foresighted enough to leave a provision in his estate to support the sporting life of young enthusiasts of his work? And the representatives of that estate, to promote their own firm perhaps, decided to demand that the name of their long-deceased sponsor be put upon the jerseys of the beneficiaries.

Or maybe a local music store uses the composer's name as a trademark. Yeah, that seems plausible. And boring.

Has anyone tried saying "Beethoven" three times in a row, to summon his spirit?

There is still more interesting about this strip... apparently, Charlie Brown's barber Dad's shop is called "Family Barber Shop." This (and tomorrow's strip) may be the only time this is mentioned.

Finally, it is possible sometimes to believe that Beethoven Schroeder is a different character than Baseball Schroeder, since the two don't often express the interests of the other. Sometimes Schulz has Schroeder whistle something while walking up to talk to Charlie Brown, but that's infrequent. Here, at least, we have a solid (if silly) point of connection.