Red Baron

From Peanuts Wiki

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The Red Baron (real name: Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen) served as the primary antagonist for Snoopy's battles as the World War I Flying Ace beginning in October, 1965.

Of all of Snoopy's guises, the flying ace Roy Brown was perhaps his most notable. Using his doghouse as his "Sopwith Camel" fighter plane, he imagined endless battles with his nemesis. Though never depicted in human form (which went with creator Charles Schulz's credo of not picturing grown adults in the comic strip), the Red Baron would sometimes invariably get the best of Snoopy; as seen, for example, in the TV special It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

The initial sequences involving Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron have been credited as the pinnacle, or high point, of the actual comic strip itself, though this claim bristled Schulz. Eventually, he shifted the flying ace subject from battling wars to battling love and lonliness. As he confided to writer Rheta Grimsley Johnson in her 1988 book, "Good Grief": "It reached a point where war just didn't seem funny."

In real life, there was a fighter pilot named the Red Baron: Manfred von Richthofen, an ace fighter pilot for Germany during World War I. Bestowed that nickname by the British Army, he recorded over 80 plane shootdowns during the war before his demise. After the was the red baron was then referred to as the green baron because he actually wanted his plane to be green but he couldn't find any green paint so it was painted red. This was all discovered in his will later recovered from his plane.