What I Think Happened to the "Peanuts" Characters

December 9, 1965, 60 years ago: A Charlie Brown Christmas premieres on CBS, based on the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz.

There have been speculations as to what happened to "The Peanuts Gang" as they grew up. Here's mine:

* Snoopy: Let me get the elephant in the room out of the way at the start. I'm sorry, but beagles don't live as long as other dogs. Charlie Brown would have suffered the natural death of his beloved pal, probably while he was in high school. And, not actually being a World War I flying ace, he couldn't be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

* Charlie Brown: The most traumatized child in the history of American popular culture could have gone one of two ways. I will spare you the unrosy scenario, and suggest that his inner decency led him to become a child psychologist -- actually helping kids, unlike Lucy with her "Five cents, please" booth.

Maybe he even becomes a "pop psychologist," offering wisdom on The Tonight Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and calls out Dr. Phil McGraw to his face: "Unlike you, Dr. Phil, I'm a doctor, not a salesman."

Robert Picardo as Dr. Charles Brown, a.k.a. Doctor Chuck

It just occurred to me: Despite also living in California, Charlie Brown is not related to Back to the Future's Dr. Emmett Brown. Unless Charlie's father became a barber because it was the family business, and, with his wild, Einstein-like hair, "Doc Brown" became the black sheep of the family.

* Linus Van Pelt: Instead of still needing a security blanket, he would have become a "security blanket": The Scripture-quoting kid would have grown up to become a minister or a priest, the kind of clergyman who says, "When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. But when I ask why there are so many hungry people, they call me a Communist."

Pope Leo XIV... or Father Linus Van Pelt?

* Lucy Van Pelt: I have previously speculated that she would have gone MAGA. But she would have been the right age -- if not the right hair color -- to go to law school, become a prosecutor, and become of the original Fox News women trashing President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. She would have worked in George W. Bush's Administration, gotten her own show on Fox, and would probably still have it today, calling for the privatization of Social Security, even as she collects it, though she can afford not to.

In fact, doesn't Jeanine Pirro look like she could be Lucy as a senior citizen?

"You liberal blockhead, I'll slug you!"

* Schroeder: We never did learn his first name, did we? Or even if "Schroeder" was his first name or his last name. Anyway, he could have become a concert pianist, maybe even a PBS host.

* Sally Brown: Charlie Brown's sister is harder to figure, since she was younger, and the character was never really developed. She did see through Linus' devotion to the Great Pumpkin, so maybe she goes on to become a scientist, or a detective, or a journalist, looking for the truth behind the myths.

* Franklin Armstrong: A 1994 TV special gave the strip's black character a last name. When he was introduced in 1968, he mentioned that his father was serving in the Vietnam War. I can easily imagine Franklin also going into the Army, becoming an officer, and retiring in late 2016 rather than let Trump be his Commander-in-Chief.

* Peppermint Patty: Her full name was eventually revealed to be Patricia Reichardt. Based on most of her appearances, it's easy to guess she would have ridden Title IX to become a pioneering female athlete. But I can also imagine her learning her lesson from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and learning how to cook, and becoming a celebrity chef.

Which raises the possibility of her appearing along with Charlie Brown on the same episode of The View, with journalist Sally as one of the panelists!

* Marcie Johnson: The same special that gave Franklin his surname gave one to Marcie as well.  It has become "conventional wisdom" that Peppermint Patty and Marcie, despite being kids never appearing to reach puberty, are considered to be a gay couple: Patty, the jock; Marcie, the intellectual lesbian. Although, when introduced in 1971, Peppermint Patty called her "my weird friend from camp." Which makes me think of Alyson Hannigan in American Pie: "There was this one time, at band camp... "

I don't think that Marcie was gay. Given that she seemed to be friendlier to Charlie Brown than anybody on the show except Linus (and maybe Schroeder), maybe "Charles" (as she called him) would have ended up with her, instead of with "the little red-haired girl," who was named Heather Wold in the TV specials.

It's entirely possible that the character of Alex Dunphy on Modern Family was based on Marcie, with the dark hair (which eventually got a lot longer than Marcie's), the glasses, and the high intelligence. So maybe, like Alex, Marcie goes on to become a scientist, and, with their interests overlapping somewhat, she and Charlie Brown do go on to get married and have "Brownies." Who knows: Maybe they even got a beagle that they named Snoopy Jr., or Snoopy II.

* Pig-Pen: Up until 1980, his nickname was always written that way, hyphenated. From 1981 onward, Schulz wrote it as one word: "Pigpen." In The Peanuts Movie in 2015, he finally got a real name: James Evans -- just like the father and son in Good Times. Maybe that's why he's so dirty: He got caught in an explosion of "Dy-no-mite!"

In the 1990s, he appeared, in an animated overlay against a live-action backdrop, in a series of commercials for Regina vacuum cleaners, where all the dirt was sucked off his body and filthy trousers by one of the company's products. In 2015, Pig-Pen appeared in a commercial for All laundry detergent for a tie-in with The Peanuts Movie.

So, how about this? He finally figures out a way to become clean, and advertises his method in infomercials! He becomes as well-known as Billy Mays of OxiClean, Vince Offer of ShamWow, and, perhaps most pertinently, Dr. Shannon Klingman of Lume/Mando.

So, maybe they all turned out all right. As Schulz said, explaining why Charlie Brown always seemed to lose, "Winning is happy, but happy isn't funny." Well, they deserved to be happy.

Maybe not Lucy. But the rest deserved to be happy.