Snoopy’s popularity is soaring. So is attendance at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa

The “Peanuts” comic strip, starring good ol’ Charlie Brown and Snoopy, his beagle of infinite guises, from World War I Flying Ace to author and athlete, made its debut in 1950.

Its creator, Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz, died in 2000 but “Peanuts” is bigger than ever, reaching new audiences online and market products around the globe.

The strip, still running in reprints, is nearly three quarters of a century old but its cast of characters still has fans around the world who are among multiple generations born since then.

In December, the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, recorded its highest attendance in 21 years.

“We see all ages enjoying the museum daily with visitors from all around the world. Since July, we have seen a 22% increase over our pre-COVID 2019 attendance,” said Gina Huntsinger, director of the museum, Wednesday.

“Last month, we broke the record for the most visitors ever in one month,” she added. “The Museum welcomed just shy of 11,000 people from December 1-31.”

And the trend’s not slowing down.

“This past weekend drew visitors from Taiwan, Croatia, France, Philippines, Mexico, China, South Korea, Brazil, Japan, India, and the Netherlands, in addition to 17 states.”

Commenters on the museum’s Instagram account (instagram.com/schulzmuseum) often say the museum is on their “bucket list,” referring to the 2007 film about two seriously ill men trying to do and see everything they want before they die.

“Just like Sparky, we keep doing what we believe in. Staying true to Sparky and his ‘Peanuts’ comic strip is at the heart of everything we do,” said the cartoonist’s widow, Jean Schulz, who founded the museum. She is also on the board of investors for Sonoma Media Investments, The Press Democrat’s parent company.

“Additionally, the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport and its recent renovation remind people when they arrive that this is the home of Charles Schulz,” she added.

The official Snoopy TikTok account has racked up 988,200 followers, closing in on a million. The account also promotes the ‘Take Care with Peanuts’ campaign, which includes partnerships with the Arbor Day Foundation for planting trees and the installation of “Peanuts” murals in hospitals around the world.

There are new and classic animated adventures on streaming platforms like Apple TV+.

There’s an ongoing wave of merchandising, including a recently introduced high-tech Snoopy watch. And Snoopy and other “Peanuts” character merchandise is currently available from various retailers including Pottery Barn, Uniqlo and H&M. There have also been collaborations with designers like Gucci and Marc Jacobs.

“Peanuts” products are marketed in most retail categories and some 30,000 licensing approvals are processed per month, said Melissa Menta, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Peanuts Worldwide in New York, which manages global marketing for “Peanuts” products and the brand’s social media.

A photo of Snoopy wearing a puffer jacket, mimicking a Schulz drawing from the 1980s, recently went viral online, sparking a new round of interviews with Menta on National Public Radio, in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

“I’m very popular right now. It’s a testament to Charles Schulz that he could create something that would appeal to people more than 20 years after his death and the last new ‘Peanuts’ strip, ” she said.

Schulz, who moved to Sonoma County in 1958, died of colon cancer Feb. 12, 2000, in Santa Rosa at age 77.

By the time of his death, he had written and drawn the "Peanuts" comic strip for nearly 50 years.

The strip debuted in 1950 and garnered hundreds of millions of readers worldwide. In the 1960s, it spawned television specials, books and a Broadway show.

At its height, the "Peanuts" strip ran in as many as 2,800 newspapers. Reprints still run in about 2,000 papers, including The Press Democrat.

“I think ‘Peanuts’ always has been in the zeitgeist of our younger generations,” Menta added. “It’s just more obvious now because of social media.”

The power of “Peanuts” is evident practically everywhere. NPR recently reported that the Red Cross gave out 400,000 shirts, containing Snoopy’s image, in three weeks during a blood drive.

A Snoopy plush doll in an astronaut suit launched in mid-November 2022 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and returned to Earth last summer.

Snoopy served as a “zero-gravity indicator,” floating when weightlessness in space had been achieved. The museum honored the ongoing relationship with NASA in an exhibit last year.

While “Peanuts” has long been popular, the Schulz Museum got off to a slow start. After the $8 million museum opened in 2002, attendance in its early months fell far short of consultants' ambitious preliminary estimates of 200,000 per year.

By 2010, though, the museum had established itself as both a tourist destination and a community center offering creative, changing exhibits with broad appeal, classes for kids and other community outreach events that would move it past its start as a static homage to the cartoonist.

“I think people often don’t know what to expect at the museum,” Jean Schulz said. “Once they come in and see it, they feel welcome and discover something that resonates with them, just like Sparky did everyday in his comic strip. Then they take that with them and spread it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On X (Twitter) @danarts.