In the last years of the Peanuts comic strip, Rerun became a major character, with a lot of focus being placed upon going to school and his want of a dog. Rerun got one of the best strips in the run, when Lucy hands him the football because she can’t be Charlie Brown’s placeholder one day. She asks him what happened, and Rerun’s response was, “You’ll never know.” I found this strip remarkably touching, because it was so ambiguous–like Lucy we would never know whether or not Charlie Brown had finally kicked the football, but in my heart I felt that he did, at last, kick that football.
I grew to like Rerun a lot, and by the end of the run he had become, in many ways, my favorite character. I feel a certain connection to him; he and I both debuted in 1973, he a few months before I. One of the reasons I liked the character so much was that the world just didn’t work the way he thought it should have, and seeing Rerun trying to make the world fit into the mold he’d made for it in his mind was endlessly entertaining.
So, if they’re making a Peanuts Christmas special about Rerun, I’ll watch it gladly. 🙂