When I was a kid, I was pretty obsessed with Charles Schultz’ long-running comic strip about childhood and all of its under-appreciated angsts and existential pains, which went by the disarmingly and misleadingly simple name, Peanuts. It may be one of the most mis-named comic strips ever, and I think I recall that Shultz himself hated the name, as it was forced on him by the syndicate. Perhaps the most famous character from the strip, other than the perpetually-downtrodden Charlie Brown, Snoopy the beagle, was often seen doing many things generally far beyond the capabilities of a normal beagle. Things like typing bad prose on a manual typewriter (all while balanced on the apex of a dog house roof, no easy feat) and pretending to fly a WWI Sopwith Camel, often with some remarkable attention to detail.
But one thing Snoopy was almost never seen doing was driving a car. Except for one notable time, during one of the Peanuts animated specials. This was a full-length animated film from 1980 titled Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) — that parenthetical doing the work to remind you that Schultz never tired of making poor Charlie Brown’s life difficult. Would it have killed him to give the kid one nice vacation?
In this film, Charlie Brown, along with his pal Linus, and also inspirational crypto-lesbian couple Peppermint Patty and Marcie, manage to become exchange students in France. Charlie Brown brings along Snoopy (who seems to have invited noted bird Woodstock along, too) and once in France, they need a way to get around, as the plot involves a mysterious invitation to a chateau in the French countryside. This group of elementary school students, a dog and a bird seem to have managed to rent a car, a blue Citroën 2CV, and Snoopy is chosen as the driver:
I suspect Snoopy got the driving gig because he (A) had a beret, and (B) in dog years I guess he was the only one old enough to drive an automobile. Did he have a license? Maybe not, but even back then pretty much anyone could go to an AAA branch and get one of those paper “International Driving Permits” and, honestly, I wouldn’t be too shocked to find out AAA doesn’t have a problem selling one of those mostly useless things to a dog.
In that clip above you can see the Peanuts gang walking through a rental lot full of non-specific but somehow still European-seeming cars. They all seem like some manner of blended up Volkswagen/Austin/Renault/Simca/Somethings and I find them generally quite charming. But there is at least one car that is definitely meant to be recognizable, most likely because it has become such a symbol of France itself: a Citroën 2CV.
The 2CV is fairly well-rendered by the animators, and is definitely identifiable. Snoopy does cause a chain of crashes that damages the rear end of the car, leading to Marcie yelling a lot of angry French to the other drivers. After all these decades, I decided to look up what she actually says, and it seems it’s a lot of oddly archaic expressions, which I suppose makes sense considering she’s a Midwestern American kid with an elementary school French education. Anyway, here’s the translation, via Reddit:
« Qu’est-ce que tu as dans le crâne !? » « What’s inside your head (skull) !? »
« Ouh ! Les cornes ! » « Oh ! The horns ! » (implicitly the devil’s)
Meaning : look ! He’s lying so hard I can see his devilish horns pointing outside his head ! First time I ever heard that ! I had to google the meaning, so it’s not used anymore nowadays.
« Que veux-tu que je fasse !? » « What do you want me to do !? » Here she is answering to something like « you shouldn’t have done X ! » the other driver is likely to imply she’s responsible for the car crash, so she’s basically saying « are you serious ?! You’re the one who crashed his car ! »
« Que dalle ! » « Hell no ! / No way ! »
This could be translated as « nothing » in other contexts. Here this is simply a reject of the other’s saying.
« Le pied de nez ? Du menu fretin ? » Seriously I don’t know to what she may be answering here … that’s also an old way of speaking. You won’t encounter these in any present situation.
Not technically insults, but certainly not a good way to make friends either.
There’s a lot of time in the movie devoted to Snoopy driving this 2CV around, which is a treat, and we even get some wiper-related hijinx:
The animators do a decent job of keeping things consistent regarding the damage to the rear end, as the mangled rear bumper shows up throughout:
This shot of the 2CV with the open roof but the umbrella used to keep out the rain feels like a nod to the famous quote from Pierre-Jules Boulanger, the man in charge of Citroën during the development of the 2CV, when he asked his engineers to “build me an umbrella with four wheels.”
I don’t know if I really think this was a reference to that quote, but it’s an interesting coincidence.
Remember when I said this movie was the only time we see Snoopy drive? Well, I kind of lied. Because there is one more, but it’s a sequel, of sorts, to this movie, and it was 1983’s What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?, which picks up right from the end of Bon Voyage, and includes the same 2CV. For a while.
The blue 2CV has some mecahnical problems, which lets us see how the animators chose to render the engine. It’s not great. Here’s one example:
That engine is sort of a mess, with a lot of hard-to-identify parts. It does seem to include a radiator, which an air-cooled 2CV would not have. Other views are a little more carefully considered:
This looks more like an engine, but it seems to be a longitudinal inline-four, not the flat-twin of an actual 2CV. This one has a radiator, too. You’d think someone would have found a picture of an actual 2CV engine, right? I guess they couldn’t be bothered.
Eventually, the 2CV self-destructs
…which forces the kids to find a replacement vehicle, which turns out to be another 2CV, this one looking like a Charleston version, based on the two-tone paintjob:
I don’t think there was ever a brown-and-blue Charleston, but it doesn’t look bad!
This 2CV is a bit better rendered, with the hood ripples present, and a more carefully drawn front end, including a more accurate grille and bumper:
But, it’s still a 2CV, which means that we can still say the only car canonically seen driven by Snoopy is a Citroën 2CV. I’m a bit surprised by this myself, considering there were Peanuts-themed ads for the Ford Falcon back in the 1960s:
At this point, though, I’m standing by Snoopy being an exclusive 2CV-driver. This feels like important information to have, so I’m glad to have been of service.
In the early 1970s, Monogram, a company that made plastic model car and model airplane kits produced a model car kit called “Snoopy’s Bugatti” which featured Snoopy (wearing a leather helmet, goggles and a scarf) and a 1926 Bugatti Type 35 (which was a high performance French sports car which won many races back in its day). It was a fairly simple kit that snapped together and didn’t need to be painted to look good.
The kit was a follow-up to Monogram’s earlier plastic model airplane kit of “Snoopy’s Sopwith Camel.” It was apparently intended to capitalize on the sales success of the Sopwith Camel kit. Of course, Snoopy never drove a Bugatti in the comic strip, but the product planners at Monogram felt that an iconoclast such a Snoopy might have owned and driven Bugatti, and Charles Schultz must have signed off on it.
After being out of production for quite a few years, another model car company, Atlantis, purchased the molds and the rights to produce the plastic model car kit, only now it is sold as “Snoopy’s Race Car” with no mention of it being a Bugatti. The car is the same but there’s no Bugatti ornament on the radiator. Maybe an issue with Bugatti wanting royalties or something like that.
If you want to watch a 2CV disassemble, there’s the beginning of the 1965 comedy “Le corniaud” (the sucker) with Bourvil and Louis de Funès. That’s how Bourvil’s character ends up driving a Cadillac DeVille convertible from Naples to Bordeaux.
“Bah maintenant, elle va marcher beaucoup moins bien, forcément…” The scene is iconic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCiVQ7gaLw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sucker
I shared this one with my mom! She’s always been a fan of Snoopy/Peanuts, so of course all of the VHS releases were regular viewing when I was growing up.
Are those golf clubs in the back? Whose are they? And it looks like one went missing between their arrival and when they got the Charleston.
Came here to ask that question. What are those kids, dog, and bird doing hauling around one set of golf clubs? Did they bring them with them all the way from the States? Is golf even a thing in France?
There are golf courses there, but I imagine they would frown on four people, a Beagle and possibly a bird sharing one set of clubs. Just like most courses do here in the States. And all the clubs I could see were woods with head covers. No irons visible.
I enjoyed the early Charlie Brown specials, but the later ones annoyed me because they got new voice actors who didn’t sound like what I remembered. But the Bon Voyage clip linked above did have some pretty decent animation.
I’m hoping that older French speakers that saw this air on TV knew all of those archaic French phrases, understood that Marcie was too young to know typically know them, that 95% of the audience wouldn’t understand this, and that this was an easter egg hidden for their enjoyment. I’m also hoping that Shultz included them and the rude hand gestures, knowing they would get by the censors and not be understood by the vast majority of viewers.
He served in France in WW2, which I feel like has to be part of the story, right?
Hmm… I don’t recall if there was a similar run in the newspaper series. The only other non-human comic character I can think of who drove a car is Opus, and his Nash Metropolitan (which did spark in me at least an idle interest in those petite vehicles).
I though Opus only drove used Volvos. Huh.
those gestures that snoopy makes are not ones your kids should be copying… 😀
I guess I can forgive the sins of Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson for their inaccurate portrayal of the mechanical inner workings of the 2CV, because this is my favorite Peanuts Special. We own the full DVD collection of the Peanuts television specials on DVD, and I insist that we watch “Bon Voyage” after “Peppermint Patty is an Insufferable Jerk and Complains About the Culinary Skills of Elementary Age Children, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept Wildly Inaccurate Portrayals of Historical Events”. I absolutely detest “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”, starting from the first time I watched it. Apparently I told my mom that Charlie Brown should punch Lucy and Peppermint Patty in the nose. I start washing dishes when the Blushing Bride queues up “She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown”. I have softened my stance on Peppermint Patty since I learned that she is being raised by a single father who is out of town a lot, but I still root for Marcie. I can still see the “CBS Television Special” title intro spinning towards the viewer in all of its 1970s Spirograph glory.
Since the Autopian has taught me how the 2CV dash-mounted shift lever functions, I cannot wait to watch “Bon Voyage” yet again to see if I can catch a glimpse of Snoopy deftly twisting, pulling and pushing the gear shift whilst offering concise Gallic invective with a barbed “Growf”.
Aside: I grew up in Northern New Mexico, and our Spanish is spoken with a slow sing-song lilt, which makes every sentence sound cheery, regardless of its content. It’s similar to the American Southern melodic lilt, and our manner of speaking is similar, especially wrong-handed compliments or side-eye sympathy. “Pobrecito” is the equivalent to “Bless your heart”. Insult or sympathy, it’s up to you to decide. When I was preparing to travel to Montreal for work, I was informed that French Canadians would be casually rude to me. If I spoke no French, they would become intentionally rude to me. I was warned to avoid taking it personally, because it was simply part of the culture of a proud people. It was good advice, because I was rocked back on my heels by the abrupt and dismissive behavior of, well, everyone in Montreal, and his advice helped me re-center and square my shoulders. My only defense was one word: “QUA?’. Spitting out “QUA?” loudly and sharply showed the locals that I came to play. In Spanish, the equivalent is, “?COMO?”, which, when shouted or spat out, is considered EXTREMELY rude, reserved only as a reply to offensive comments made about your parentage, your mother’s or sister’s purported promiscuity, or any high level insult that is the prelude to an invitation to stand and deliver on the field of honor. For someone used to gently offering the velvet glove of “Bless your heart”, or the sing-song languorous “Pobrecito/a”, barking “Qua!?!” at a stranger pained me. Perhaps if I had insider knowledge of Marcie’s heated invective, I would have been much less ill at ease. However, I plan to commit this phrase to memory, and to practice enunciating it under my breath as often as needed:
« Que veux-tu que je fasse !? » Your translation brings me joy.