Do not impregnate Peanuts people

I’ve been looking at some of the past lawsuits over Peanuts. The various owners of Peanuts over the years have been aggressive — generally appropriately so — about protecting their rights to the characters and going after unlicensed use of them. I am not sure if they’re just more aggressive when the use can be seen as vulgar or if that’s just more likely to draw newspaper coverage, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it certainly drew coverage. In 1979, a Chicago maternity store made the mistake of putting a pregnant Lucy in their ads, and found themselves with a sizable lawsuit on their hands. A couple years later, the pregnant one was Peppermint Patty, showing up in an ad for health services in a college paper, leading to a financial settlement. (They’d gone after another college paper in 1979, for a cartoon with a cursing Lucy.) And in 1981, the syndicate went after a Minneapolis bookseller for publishing a pornographic take on Peanuts that featured such characters as…