The Beagle Has Landed: A Timeline of the Snoopy Watch

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz debuted his daily comic Peanuts on October 2, 1950. The series starred a round-headed kid named Charlie Brown and his anthropomorphized dog, Snoopy.

For those of us who weren’t around back then, newspapers were a big thing. And all of them had a section devoted to the funnies, a full tabloid-sized page featuring a host of black and white (and color on Sundays) line drawings of comical characters and their exploits. And back then, Peanuts was a breakthrough because it featured a group of children who discussed existential dread and moral philosophy. Peanuts looked like kids’ stuff, but it wasn’t.

Maybe that’s why Snoopy’s popularity endures to this day, 25 years after Schulz died and the strip stopped publishing, and after most of Snoopy’s comic strip cohort has disappeared from the pop culture consciousness.

Of course, a big part of Snoopy’s legacy comes from merch. At the time of Schulz’s death in 2000, he was earning $30 to $40 million a year from licensed goods. You could (and still can) buy Snoopy anything and everything – including watches. And like the Peanuts gang itself, Snoopy has evolved from being a cute kid’s comic character to a mainstay of high-end watchmaking as well.

Come with us as we explore Snoopy’s horological odyssey.

United Features Syndicate (UFS) – the syndicate that owned the Peanuts comic strip – started licensing merch in the mid-1950s. According to Timex, the brand first produced a watch with the Snoopy character on the dial back in 1965.

These simple, pin-pallet watches were popular in the 1970s for many reasons. They were affordable. They offered fun animations, such as a tennis ball floating on a transparent disc to indicate the seconds. And they came in adult-sized versions as well as kid sizes under 30mm.
 

Snoopy also led a rich inner life, which appealed to the counterculture of the 1970s. Thus, these vintage watch dials offered up different versions of the dog, including the tennis pro, the WWI Flying Ace, sleeping Snoopy, and dancing Snoopy. Fortunately, you can still find working models of these vintage windups on eBay for a very reasonable price.

Or, you can get a brand spanking new Timex Snoopy. When Timex reissued its 1960s-era Marlin Automatic watches in 2018, it also introduced its first limited production Snoopy Edition (pictured here) featuring the beagle’s aviator avatar.
 

Five years ago, Timex celebrated 70 years of Peanuts with special Snoopy editions of the Q Timex 1979 Reissue, Marlin Hand-Wound 1976 Reissue, and Timex Standard. Now, there are over 30 different Peanuts-themed watches available on the brand’s website.

In the 1980s, UFS expanded its licensing agreements to other watchmakers. A quick Google search will reveal partnerships with everything from Invicta to Citizen, but many of these mass-produced, quartz-powered timepieces were made by Armitron, a New York-based brand founded in 1956.

While these brands no longer make Snoopy watches, you can still pick one of Armitron’s quartz-powered babies for under $50 on eBay. Mostly marketed as kids’ watches when they came out, so these pieces are the very definition of cheap and cheerful. Still, they have their own kind of charm – especially the Snoopy and Schroeder Musical edition.
 

A friendly PSA for would-be collectors of character watches: You will see a lot of these pieces listed as being made in 1958. This date refers to the year the intellectual property was copyrighted, not when the watch was manufactured. Heck, the first quartz wristwatch was the Seiko Quartz Astron, and it wasn’t released until December 25, 1969.

One of Snoopy’s most enduring associations is with NASA.

In 1968, the space agency wanted a way to promote greater safety awareness among its employees and contractors using a publicly renowned symbol for spaceflight. Al Chop, who was director of the public affairs office for the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, suggested Snoopy’s astronaut alter ego.
 

Schultz, who was a big supporter of the U.S. space program, agreed to let NASA use “Snoopy the Astronaut” at no cost, and even drew the image the award pin was based on, as well as promotional art for posters to promote the award program. And one of the first winners of the Silver Snoopy was Omega, maker of the watch that helped bring astronauts home safely after the aborted Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

In 2003, Omega unveiled the first “Silver Snoopy” Speedmaster, employing the lapel pin’s Snoopy image in the watch’s 9 o’clock sub-dial. This limited edition Speedy was such a sensation that it begat several other Silver Snoopy Editions.
 

Our favorite is 2020’s Speedmaster “Silver Snoopy Award” 50th Anniversary, if only for its animated caseback featuring Snoopy, which appears inside his Command and Service Module (CSM) floating around the far side of the moon.
 

The caseback also has an Earth disc, which rotates once per minute in sync with the watch’s small seconds hand.

George Bamford, the founder of Bamford Watch Department, got his start in the watch biz by customizing watches with cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and, of course, Snoopy.

In 2021, Bamford collaborated with Franck Müller to create a Snoopy-dial version of Müller’s signature Crazy Hours complication. The two brands have since teamed up to release three different cartoony takes on the Crazy Hours in total.
 

Also in 2021, Bamford, in association with the international watch-enthusiast publication Revolution, produced the limited-edition Bamford x Revolution GMT Joe Cool.
 

This piece was distinguished by its white dial featuring Snoopy in his laid-back Joe Cool persona, with his two arms serving as the hour and minute hands, along with a third pointer with the figure of Woodstock perched on the tip as a second time zone indicator.

Somewhere in the vast space between the haute horology Franck Müller and the low-end kids’ watches from Armitron lies two limited Seiko 5 Sports releases from 2023 – the SRPK25 and SRPK27 55th Anniversary Editions.

Both timepieces featured the lovable beagle on the dial. The latter model saw Snoopy using his ears to “helicopter” across the dial. Meanwhile, on the caseback, his bird buddy, Woodstock, is depicted floating to earth attached to a parachute emblazoned with the collection’s signature “5 in a shield” logo.
 

The SRPK25, a.k.a. “Surfboard Snoopy,” recreates scenes from a 1969 panel picturing the pup peering out from behind a surfboard to which Seiko has added the words “Seiko 5 Sports.” On this model, Snoopy also appears on the caseback riding the waves. Both models were presented in a presentation box featuring an interior reproduction of the original comic strips

Released in the same year as the Franck Müller x Bamford collabs, the Swatch x Peanuts collection from 2021 featured six different watches, in either the gents or “new gent” case sizes (i.e., 41mm and 34mm, respectively).

The saturated, comic-strip-inspired palettes blend seamlessly with Swatch’s signature bright colors and were true to the brand’s DNA. However, it’s the attention to detail that takes this collaboration to the next level.
 

Each version came in specially designed packaging, and those fans collecting all six watches could get their hands on a bespoke frame that displayed all the watches together. And good news! The 41mm Smak!, which illustrates Snoopy sleeping on his doghouse, is still available.

Both Peanuts and Orient watches are turning 75 this year, so why not celebrate together? Orient is one of those underrated, value proposition brands, and it’s good to see the brand break out of its lane with a watch that will also bring attention from character watch collectors without alienating their core fans.
 

There are four watches in the Orient Peanuts 75th Anniversary Limited Edition Bambino collection, each featuring a rather elegant sleeping Snoopy on the dial. In celebration of their respective 75th anniversaries this year, there are two versions of the dressy Bambino editions (one with a white dial and one with a champagne dial), a sporty diver, and the show-stealing, semi-skeletonized Open Heart Edition.
 

Snoopy’s bestie bird, Woodstock, also appears on the dial. And as an easter egg on the Bambino and diver models, have Woodstock peeking out of the date window on the first of each month.

It was tough to top the initial hype of the MoonSwatch. But in 2024, Swatch introduced the all-white MoonSwatch Mission to Moonphase, the first model in the collaborative collection to use a moonphase complication – and one with a very chill Snoopy pictured resting in the curve of a crescent moon. Not only did this model pay homage to Omega’s history with the Silver Snoopy award, but it also acknowledged Swatch’s Snoopy collection.
 

The connections became even clearer with a second, all-black version of the Mission to Moonphase released later that same year.
 

Then, in August of this year, Omega unleashed a third version called Mission to Earthphase Moonshine Gold.
 

The Earthphase uses an innovative complication to show how the Earth appears when viewed from the Moon. Just like moonphase complications, the Earthphase indication follows a 29.5-day cycle, but in reverse. When there’s a full moon, there is no Earth, and when there’s a new moon, we see the entire globe. And sitting just below the Earthphase indicator is an illustration of Snoopy and his bestie Woodstock sitting on the Moon and gazing at the glory of it all.

Did we mention that the Moon’s sparkly dark blue moon phase discs are coated with Omega’s Moonshine Gold? It’s all enough for us to exclaim, “Good Grief!” (but in a good way).