Snoopy: the Santa of Thanksgiving
An Art Dogs Thanksgiving edition
Happy Thanksgiving Art Dogs!
This week’s edition is short, sweet, and seasonal. We’re celebrating with Snoopy.
Snoopy is the alpha balloon at the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (Seriously, one of my friends is a “balloon handler” this year, and everyone wants to walk Snoopy.)
The first Snoopy premiered at the parade in 1968, and more than 40 Snoopys have followed—the most appearances of any style balloon.
A Goodyear engineer named William Ludwick from Akron, Ohio, designed the first Snoopy balloon. It took “nearly eight months and 1,500 man-hours” to “design, cut, seam, glue and assemble the more-than-4,000 square feet of fabric going into the carcass.”1 That first Snoopy balloon weighed 250 pounds and stood 50 feet tall.
By 1969, they’d turned Snoopy into an astronaut.
In 1987, he morphed into an ice skater.
Today, Snoopy’s balloon weighs closer to 540 pounds. It’ll require up to 90 handlers to walk him through the streets of Manhattan. The handlers act as both chauffeurs and human anchors—they are each required to weigh at least 120 pounds to keep Snoopy from soaring away.
As you might imagine, there are lots of fun facts about the Macy’s balloons to read up on.
Snoopy doesn’t just grace our TV screens and skies as part of the parade each Thanksgiving. “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving,” turns 50 this year. The show first aired on CBS in 1973, and now feels like a time capsule from the Vietnam War era. Here’s one of my favorite scenes of Snoopy preparing an unusual Thanksgiving dinner:
You can watch the special for free on Apple TV here. NPR did a write up about how the movie has aged here.
One of the best things about these short Peanuts films is the music. If you’d like to tune into those sounds today, as I plan to, you’re in luck. A new reissue collects the entirety of the 1973 television score for the first time. As Pitchfork writes: “it’s a lithe, funky counterpart to the wintry, wistful moods of A Charlie Brown Christmas.” The composer, Vince Guaraldi, drew inspiration from the growing funk movement of Northern California in the early 1970s.
I hope you enjoy the tunes, balloons, and, if you’re celebrating, the revelry with loved ones today.
Happy Thanksgiving, Bailey
Bonus: Photos of Charles Schulz with dogs
Art Dogs is a weekly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these weekly posts to your email inbox.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/lifestyle/around-town/2018/11/18/hang-on-snoopy/8287381007/
Love this, I learned so much growing up in the UK about American traditions via Snoopy cartoons
I had no idea there was a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. And what’s for dinner? Buttered toast, buttered dog’s ear and popcorn but what are those giant kidney shaped things in the bowls and why are they all different colors?
Love Snoopy so much!