The Time-Warped Freeway

I was, perhaps, awaiting today's comic strip on the Peanuts official site (the comic, unfortunately, will only stay in the site archive for a month) with some slight amount of anticipation. I first saw the storyline in the old Fawcett Crest paperbacks, one in which a freeway was to be built over Snoopy's doghouse (this would presumably mean it running through the Brown family back yard, but even by this point the strip's reality had perhaps become odd enough that the thought would only occur to odd people like me). He gets a week's reprieve because of "National Dog Week," but there was one comic where that was almost over, and Snoopy was hugging his doghouse with the thought "You've been a good home!"... and then, the comics in the paperback went on to something else.

Even before the arrival of that particular Complete Peanuts volume, though, I had finally managed to find the punchline reprinted in another book... Snoopy is on top of his doghouse, determined to hold back the bulldozers, when Charlie Brown shows up and says "You can cut the pose... they're not starting work until 1967!" A good joke in 1960, understandably one that a reprint book editor could have cut without thinking too deeply about... and, of course, another strange (in a small way, of course) time warp right now. As for me, I'm assuming that the freeway met the same fate as the Spadina Expressway in Toronto.