BlueBrixx Snoopy's Gift Shop Set 107426

BlueBrixx's Snoopy's Gift Shop is an officially licensed BlueBrixx-Pro model built from 430 blocks — a miniature shop with shelves and packages, and Snoopy on the roof.

Snoopy on a roof is the whole character

He is lying on top of the building, which is where he always is, and there is a fifty-year joke underneath it.

Snoopy sleeps on the roof of his doghouse rather than inside it. The interior is never drawn — not once in nearly fifty years — but it is described repeatedly, and the descriptions escalate absurdly: a pool table, a cellar, a library, an Andrew Wyeth painting, and at one point a Van Gogh that is destroyed in a fire and replaced with a Wyeth.

Charles Schulz was explicit about why he never showed it. Drawing the inside would have made it a real space with real dimensions, and the joke depends on it being impossible. A reader who is told there is a pool table in a doghouse accepts it; a reader shown a pool table in a doghouse stops believing the strip.

It is a good rule for any kind of storytelling, and Schulz arrived at it by drawing a dog on a roof every week and noticing what worked.

A shop rather than a scene

Most of the small Peanuts sets are dioramas with a printed backdrop. This one is a building at 430 pieces — shelves, stock, a facade — which makes it the one in the range that works as architecture rather than as a snapshot, and the one that can stand beside other buildings.

In the BlueBrixx range

Sets 107356 (Bath), 107358 (Skateboarding), 107359 (Picnic), 107368 (Barber Snoopy), 108609 and 108610 (Garden Rose and Dandelion) are the rest of the Peanuts line.

Specifications

Pieces: 430 · Series: BlueBrixx-Pro · Officially licensed Peanuts product