Pig-Pen
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Pig-Pen is a character in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.
Pig-Pen's gimmick is that he is always dirty. He is best-known for the cloud of dirt and dust that follows him wherever he goes. When he takes a deep breath such as to sing, the dust rises briefly around him. He sometimes refers to it somewhat nobly as the dust of ancient civilizations.[1] He cannot and will not wash it off for more than the briefest of periods. In fact, he is referred to in an early strip as the only person who can get dirty while walking in a snowstorm. Nevertheless, on rare occasions he has very briefly appeared clean, and hence unrecognizable, in the strip. Once this was in order to impress Violet, of whom he was a bit fond.
One night after washing and dressing in clean clothes, as Charlie Brown watched, Pig-Pen stepped outside and almost instantaneously became dirty and disheveled, and noted, "You know what I am? I'm a dust magnet!" At one point, Pig-Pen decided it was important to have clean hands, but one day while trying to wash his hands, he realized that the dirt would not come off and he had "reached a point of no return."
Charlie Brown is the sole Peanuts character to accept Pig-Pen for who he was, even defending Pig-Pen's uncleanliness in one strip (which was re-used in A Charlie Brown Christmas):
| “ | Don't think of it as dust. Just think of it as the dirt and dust of far-off lands blowing over here and settling on Pig-Pen! It staggers the imagination! He may be carrying the soil that was trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan! | ” |
Pig-Pen first appeared in the Peanuts comic strip on July 13, 1954 (in a strip directly parodying part of the first chapter of Lord of the Flies). Schulz admitted that he came to regret Pig-Pen's popularity, given his essentially one-joke nature; he utilized the character very rarely in the later years of the strip's run.
Like most of Schulz's characters, Pig-Pen appeared in several of the animated Peanuts television specials beginning in the 1960s. In the 1990s, he appeared (in an animated overlay against a live-action backdrop) in a series of television commercials for Regina vacuum cleaners where all the dirt is sucked off his filthy trousers by one of the company's products.
Geoffrey Ornstein first voiced Pig-Pen in the 1965 movie A Charlie Brown Christmas. Although he also later played the role in A Boy Named Charlie Brown, other various actors have voiced him ever since.
Pig-Pen last appeared in the Peanuts comic strip on September 8, 1999. That strip was very uncharacteristic of him in that it showed him embarrassed to the point of shame in his dirtiness; with none of the pride or inevitability that was in the earlier strips.
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