Charlie Brown Football Gag

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About

Charlie Brown Football Gag is a famous scene from the Peanuts comic strip series by Charles M. Schulz.^[1] It has been redrawn by several artists using different characters, used as political cartoons, and has also been used as an object labeling meme.

Origin

The first Peanuts comic strip featuring the scene appeared on November 14th, 1951 (shown below). In the comic strip, Violet holds the ball on the ground in order for Charlie Brown to kick it, but then gets scared of him kicking her hand and instead lets go of the ball just before the kick, which causes him to miss the ball entirely and fall flat onto the ground.

Later strips would replace Violet with Lucy.

The gag was reused several times onwards throughout the series, but with some changes.

The scene also appeared in the Charlie Brown animated specials. The first of which was in "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (shown below), which first aired on October 27th, 1966.

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