In Winnipeg, Snoopy battles the Red Baron once more

Riddled with bullet holes, the biplane spirals uncontrollably to the ground, trailed by thick plumes of smoke and spurts of flame. It’s happened again.

“Curse you, Red Baron!” cries our intrepid flying ace … a beagle?

At the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada (RAMWC) in Winnipeg, a comic art exhibition celebrates the First World War fighter pilot alter ego of the Peanuts gang’s beloved pup, Snoopy. Curated by the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, Snoopy and the Red Baron runs through Jan. 4., landing in Winnipeg for the touring show’s sole Canadian stop.

“The Flying Ace strips are really about adventure,” says Benjamin L. Clark, curator of the Charles M. Schulz Museum. 

“That imagery is still very romantic in our culture. That’s why it resonates, we can all imagine fleeing from our day-to-day life and going into some grand adventurous thing with peril involved.”

Sitting atop his doghouse in aviator goggles and cap, Snoopy first took to the skies in the Oct. 10, 1965, Peanuts comic strip. 

It was the first of many times the adventurous beagle was foiled in his attempts to ground his nemesis, the Red Baron, an off-panel adversary based on real-life German flying ace Manfred von Richthofen. 

The Red Baron exhibit hosts quality reproductions of war-themed strips dating back nearly 60 years. These are mounted alongside informational placards explaining Schulz’s creative process as well as his inspiration for both Peanuts and the historically informed First World War storylines he wrote.

“Anything that Schulz portrays as factual in the strip, he needed it to be right,” Clark says. “He wanted to present factual information.”

Snoopy’s aerial action was perhaps most famously portrayed in the 1966 television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

“I think that the Red Baron image was enhanced by the wonderful animated passages in the TV special in which Snoopy in the biplane swooped through the beautifully painted sky,” says Jean Schulz, who was married to Charles for 27 years and serves as president of the board of directors at the Schulz museum.

No slouch on the yoke herself, Jean holds a pilot’s license and participated in the 1975 All-Women Transcontinental Air Race (or the Powder Puff Derby, as it was known). The race was featured in Peanuts at the same time, with characters Peppermint Patty and Marcie as surrogates for Jean and her mother.

“(Their) route duplicated the actual route of the race that year,” Jean says.

The inspiration for the tales of combat in the Red Baron strips, which endured until Peanuts‘ conclusion in 2000, was multifaceted. “Ideas come from multiple things brewing in a creative person’s head,” Clark says.

“The adventure serials that Schulz would have seen at the theatre growing up, those World War I melodramas, his son Monte working on model planes … it’s all of that.”

A combat veteran of the Second World War, Schulz’s own experiences with the trials of war and feelings of loneliness may have contributed to Snoopy’s solipsistic fantasy.

“His time in the service really matured him in important ways,” Clark says. “He would say that he learned everything he needed to know about loneliness during his time in the army.”

The RAMWC is a choice landing strip for Snoopy, not just for the unique prestige of the museum’s royal designation, but also for the real-life Manitoban connection to the scourge of the skies, the Red Baron.

Richthofen met his demise during a battle on April 21, 1918, near the River Somme in France, when he was shot down by a landlocked Australian anti-aircraft gunner, as most experts agree. But the Red Baron’s final aerial foe was Carberry, Man., native Wilfred (Wop) May, who the Baron was pursuing when he was hit. 

“May, at that time, was a very junior pilot,” says Robert Nash, who is a Royal Canadian Air Force veteran and a research volunteer at the RAMWC. “He had just joined the squadron. It was something like his third mission with the squadron.”

May would become one of 21 First World War flying aces from Manitoba, a title given to combat pilots credited with shooting down five or more enemy aircraft.

Bringing the story of this local hero back into focus, Nash believes that the Snoopy exhibit is not only a sprightly celebration of flight in pop culture, but that it fulfils “the museum’s desire to promote Manitoban and Canadian aviation history.”

Visitors to the museum should have no problem spotting the exhibit entrance, where the hallmark red doghouse looks like an anomaly among the decommissioned aircraft of yore. Patrons will be guided by the placards around the spacious room, interspersed with framed strips, chronicling the adventures of the Flying Ace.

In one strip, Snoopy’s brother, Spike, laments that his idea for a poppy-based poem, strikingly similar to In Flanders Fields, has been co-opted by another soldier. “I’ll change mine to sunflowers,” he says.

Elsewhere, model plane sets of the Sopwith Camel, Snoopy’s plane, demonstrate the inspiration Schulz took from his son Monte’s fascination with First World War toys. Nearby, pocketbook reprint collections of Red Baron strips show the pipeline from inspiration to fruition.

Mounted on walls around the space, retro TV displays — complete with faux wood panelling — run clips featuring Flying Ace Snoopy from televised Peanuts specials. And on the show floor, glass displays host vintage items like music boxes, tin lunchboxes and Snoopy novelty LPs from the ’60s pop group the Royal Guardsmen.

Beyond consumer goods, the Red Baron exhibit also showcases memorabilia collected by American combat veterans. 

Archival photos on display show fighter pilots of the era with Flying Ace Snoopy plushies accompanying them in the cockpit, as well as custom Flying Ace Snoopy squadron patches and insignia. 

“The image of Snoopy as the Flying Ace definitely resonated — these young guys bringing over a piece of home and comfort,” Clark says.

“[Charles] once noted the phrase that goes something like, ‘Captain, we can’t let men go up in crates like these.’ That stuck in Sparky’s memory and undoubtedly was reflected in the Red Baron adventures,” says Jean, affectionately referring to her late husband by his nickname.

As both Peanuts and the character Snoopy approach their 75th anniversaries next year, Clark reflects on the lasting iconography created by Charles M. Schulz.

“The richness of Peanuts and the talent of Charles Schulz, it’s still touching us,” Clark says. “Today, something like that is really priceless.”