Peanuts: A Boy Named Charlie Brown

In 1947, Illustrator Charles M. Schulz submitted a comic series to his local newspaper company in Minnesota. The comic was called "Li'l Folks", and featured the lives of multiple kids, one named Charlie Brown, and a dog in a small town. Initially, "Li'l Folks" did not do well due to where it was located on the newspaper and Schulz realized this. After he demanded the company to move his comic, which failed, Schulz moved on to publish his comic on multiple big newspapers. A few changes had to be made to the strip, primarily the name of the series. This is due to the name "Li'l Folks" having a similar name to multiple comics at the time. In the end, the company Schulz worked for chose the new name for the comic, "Peanuts".

Peanuts went on to be one of, if not the most iconic comic strip series in the world, being well known for its characters, TV specials, movies, plays, and the merchandise. Peanuts' legacy still goes on to this day, having earned multiple awards, Charlie Brown and Snoopy being household names, TV specials still airing each year, Snoopy having his name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, being present in multiple theme parks around the world, earning billions of dollars in revenue each year, and Snoopy being used as the mascot for NASA.

Peanuts was on my list of cartoons to make into LEGO sets, but the problem came with how to represent it. This is an issue that even big companies have due to Schulz not mapping where everything is in any media. To further prove my point on this, all the other LEGO Ideas submissions of Peanuts are completely different from one another, some focusing on one scene or scenes. With all these companies and people are struggling trying to capture Schulz's world of Peanuts, it looked like this idea would be scrapped...

But then I had an epiphany! All the other idea submissions are recreating scenes from Peanuts, so why not create Peanuts itself? Stated earlier, Schulz never left a clear map of how the location in Peanuts was, so I integrated multiple sections from the comics and TV specials to form this idea. I also wanted to make the design of this idea to have the cartoon aesthetic perfectly, even more so than my other projects. With some time and decisions, this what I came up with.

Containing 840 pieces, the build is built around the theater building, which has the same brick style from the comics. Inside the theater is the stage with Schroeder's piano, prevalent in both the comics and "Merry Christmas Charlie Brown!". There are two sides of the building, the front, containing the sidewalk and iconic brick wall, and the back. The back consists of a giant field, containing multiple references from Peanuts. These include:

Although Schulz never properly mapped Peanuts, I hope that I have captured the spirit and style of it. And because of how the set is built, the ability to recreate scenes are just a nice bonus that can be done on this cartoony build.

There are six minifigures in this idea:

Initially, there were far more minifigures in this idea, but I had to make changes. At first, there was ten minifigures, then eight, then seven. After being properly told on why this idea wouldn't be submitted, I had to lower down the minifigure count down to six, since that seems to be the maximum for ideas like this. The six characters chosen are the most prominent in a scene like this, so that is why there are some notable characters absent. However, if this idea gains traction, I will show more minifigures I had planned in the update section, since Lego wouldn't let me submit this idea with all of them.

This is my fourth build on LEGO Ideas, and I hope that this captures Schulz's world of Peanuts. If you like this idea, don't be afraid to support it and tell everyone. This idea was originally submitted on June 3rd, but was turned down due to the reason mentioned earlier. So I hope that this time the project will go through due to me making the proper changes. This is also the first idea I have posted in a while, due to real life getting pretty busy. Now that I have some time, I will be able to work on more projects! So stay tuned.