Aces high Snoopy’s First World War Sopwith Camel-flying persona honoured in exhibit at Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:47 PM CDT Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024

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Snoopy, Charlie Brown’s loyal, larger-than-life beagle in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts strip, is an icon in his own right — but Snoopy’s First World War Flying Ace persona is arguably just as famous.

Snoopy and the Red Baron, a touring exhibition curated by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, Calif. and on view now at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, is dedicated solely to Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel-flying, root beer-swilling, French lass-courting alter ego.

The exhibition features high-quality reproductions of Schulz’s original Flying Ace comic strips, video clips — including the ace’s first animated appearance in the 1966 special It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — and memorabilia, from toys to the Vietnam War-era United States Air Force patches created after squadrons adopted Snoopy portraying the Flying Ace as a symbol of home.

The travelling version of Snoopy and the Red Baron was modelled after a popular exhibition of the same name that opened at the Schulz Museum in 2015 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Flying Ace’s first comic strip appearance on Oct. 10, 1965.

“Every few years we’ll talk about retiring it, but everyone just keeps wanting it,” curator Benjamin Clark says over the phone from California.

“He’s a fan favourite — I think he appears in the strip over 400 times or something, which is a good number for a persona, not even a main character.”

All of the Flying Ace’s adventures take place in Snoopy’s imagination. In many of these elaborate fantasies, Snoopy would don his flying cap and goggles and climb atop his red doghouse, which would transform into a biplane modelled after the real British Sopwith Camel — “Can you think of a funnier name for an airplane?” Schulz once said — so he could get into high-altitude scraps with his sworn enemy, the Red Baron, whom we never see. (“Curse you, Red Baron!” became one of several catchphrases.)

The character was so popular it even inspired a novelty song — Snoopy vs. the Red Baron — released in 1966 by Florida band the Royal Guardsmen.

“Every few years we’ll talk about retiring it, but everyone just keeps wanting it.”–curator Benjamin Clark

Those early Flying Ace strips were a bit of a departure for Peanuts; Charlie Brown may have had his own football-wielding nemesis in Lucy, but he never had to face rat-a-tat enemy fire.

“Peanuts is a pretty quiet strip, generally speaking. The Flying Ace strips tend to be quieter later when Schulz begins to focus on his experience in France instead of showing him in battle. But those earlier strips are very dynamic. They have lots of action and are lots of fun, and it was translated into animation really quickly, too,” Clark says.

That evolution, from Snoopy imagining himself in dogfights to imagining himself in France — or “quaffing a few root beers” with American veteran and cartoonist Bill Mauldin, as he did every year in Schulz’s annual Veterans Day tribute — is visible as you move through the exhibition. There’s a wistfulness to those later comics.

“As a combat veteran himself and during those Vietnam War years, Schulz began to reflect a little more about how there’s really not much humour to be found in war, and he shifts his focus away from those kinds of storylines and more into things where it’s very homesick, and things like that,” Clark says.

There’s also a lot of history packed into the Flying Ace storylines. There’s a strip in which Snoopy’s brother Spike, a fellow solider, falls ill with the flu, a reference to the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918.

In another strip, our Flying Ace is composing a poem that sounds suspiciously like In Flanders Fields. (“I’ll change mine to sunflowers.”)

Otherwise, Snoopy’s imagination runs wild. Members of the Peanuts gang are often cast in imagined roles; quiet, bespectacled Marcie is the French Lass as she, canonically, is fluent in French, while bossy Lucy is the mean “Fraulein” he encounters when he ends up behind enemy lines — though, when he’s addressing her in German in his imagination, she always responds in English in reality. (“Drop dead, you stupid beagle!”)

Snoopy and the Red Baron is the first full-scale travelling exhibition to be featured at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada since it reopened in 2022 in its new space.

Manitoba is home to some real-life First World War flying aces — including Carberry’s Wilfrid Reid (Wop) May, who was famously part of the dogfight in which the real Red Baron, German fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen, was shot down.

The exhibition seemed like a good fit for a number of the museum’s audiences, says Vanessa Desorcy, marketing and communications specialist at the Royal Aviation Museum.

“For our older audiences who really love aviation and history and museums in general, there’s a lot of nostalgia for them, obviously. For the little kids who come in, it’s fun, it’s colourful, it’s playful, it’s relatable,” she says.

“And then we were reading that Snoopy is having a big resurgence with gen Z, which is interesting for us because that’s an audience we haven’t really been able to capture yet, so we thought this would be an interesting way to see if we could bring them in and get them interested in aviation.”

Clark, too, has noticed gen Z’s renewed interest in Snoopy (via Puffer Jacket Snoopy memes in particular). As to why this beloved beagle, and Peanuts more broadly, continues to resonate, he has a theory.

“It may have something to do with the fact that Peanuts, and Schulz himself through Peanuts, is so emotionally honest — and that was something the comics page really had not been. It was about making the joke, hitting the punchline, and moving on. But Schulz really poured some real honesty into it and some real bits of his soul, I think,” he says.

“I think each successive generation, as it’s maturing, will rediscover Peanuts for itself because of that, because they can read it and say, ‘Wow, these feelings are my feelings.’”

Snoopy and the Red Baron is on view until Jan. 4.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com