In May 1983, a Peanuts kid named Five took a baseball to the head, and he was never seen in the comic strip again. Let’s assume one thing didn’t cause the other.
Long-running strips tend to shed a few characters without much fuss, and Peanuts shed more than most. From the very start, the strip centered on Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The kids around them had less job security, since Charles Schulz kept reworking Peanuts as he figured out what it was and how he wanted to draw it.
Peanuts is far from the only strip to do this. Probably the most famous example is Lyman from Garfield. He was Jon’s roommate and Odie’s first owner, and he simply disappeared one day around 1985. (Jim Davis has occasionally joked that anyone looking for Lyman should dig up Jon’s basement.) Most of the early human cast in Bloom County got dropped. Doonesbury pushed Nicole aside for Joanie Caucus, and Calvin and Hobbes had a short-lived Uncle Max storyline.
Charlie Brown’s original circle in Peanuts was his pal Shermy and their friend Patty (a different girl from Peppermint Patty). Schulz gradually phased both of them out as later arrivals such as Lucy, Linus, Schroeder and Woodstock took over. More characters kept coming after that, among them Spike, Snoopy’s brother, and Rerun, the younger brother of Linus and Lucy. By the ’70s, though, Schulz had settled on the version of Peanuts that most readers recognize.
Shermy, Patty and a few other one-time regulars ended up in a kind of character limbo. Today they mainly pad out crowd shots and pick up cameos in the animated specials, with the newest ones airing semi-annually on Apple TV. Below are five of the strip’s longtime benchwarmers, along with their best moments.
Shermy spoke first and exited early
Shermy was modeled on Sherman Plepler, a friend from Schulz’s childhood. During the first year of Peanuts he was one of the main characters, and he was the first of the gang to say a word.
His early lead faded fast. Shermy played the straight man and had no defining trait or talent. As Schulz grew more confident and filled the cast with livelier kids, Shermy’s appearances dropped sharply. By 1959 he rarely showed up, and he spoke for the last time in June 1969.
Patty got a second life as a snob
Schulz named the original Patty after his cousin, Patricia Swanson. Like Shermy, she appeared in the very first Peanuts strip, and like Shermy, she lacked any particular quirks for jokes to build on.
Patty lasted much longer, however. Schulz soon made her one of the neighborhood snobs, and she frequently joined forces with Violet to tease and bully the other children. That gave her enough of an identity to earn spots in most of the classic animated specials, and she continued to turn up in the strip into the 1990s.
Her appearances began to thin out in 1960, and the slide sped up once Peppermint Patty debuted in August 1966. One neighborhood apparently couldn’t hold two Pattys. The original sometimes went whole calendar years without a line of dialogue. Her last strip appeared in November 1997.
Violet was a rough draft of Lucy
Violet was the first new character Schulz added to the Peanuts lineup. The football gag technically began with her, and she was the first to call Charlie Brown a “blockhead.” Taken together, those details make her look a lot like an early test version of Lucy Van Pelt.
As with Patty, she became one of the neighborhood’s well-to-do kids, constantly boasting about her wealthy father. She and Charlie Brown also had an odd love-hate dynamic that ran through the strip’s first two decades or so.
Violet began to fade in the mid-1980s, and by 1985 she appeared only in the occasional cameo. Her exit came alongside Patty’s, in a Thanksgiving strip from November 1997.
Frieda’s one joke was her hair
Anyone who remembers Frieda probably remembers her pride in her “naturally curly hair.” Schulz brought her in during 1961 as a vain, talkative friend of Linus and named her after his own friend, Frieda Rich.
Her time in the strip was on the shorter side. By most accounts, Schulz couldn’t think of much for her to do apart from the hair jokes. She still got a few good moments: flirting with Schroeder while Lucy watched, introducing her cat Faron to Snoopy, and tolerating Linus’ oddities more patiently than most of the other kids did.
Frieda appears in several animated specials, including A Charlie Brown Christmas. In the strip, she’d been reduced to cameos by 1970, and after 1985 she was gone entirely.
Five was a walking ZIP code
Peanuts has odder obscure characters than Five, but not many with a stranger backstory. He first appeared in 1963 as a jab at ZIP postal codes, which were new then and which Schulz disliked. According to the strip, Five had a number in place of a name. His twin sisters are named 3 and 4, and the family surname is 95472, the ZIP code of Sebastopol, California, where Schulz was living at the time.
After the gag ran its course, Five spent a good 20 years as one of the most reliable background kids in Peanuts, though he’s frequently confused with an unusually tidy Pig-Pen. He’s among the dancers in A Charlie Brown Christmas and makes silent appearances in many of the classic specials.
In the comic strip itself, he never got past his single joke. He showed up a handful of times after his first strip, until that May 1983 baseball knocked him out permanently.
He fared better on TV. Five had lines in 2022’s It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown, which gave him a voice actor for the first time in nearly 40 years.