The Real Story Behind ‘A Charlie Brown Valentine’
“I’ll tell that Little Red-Haired Girl that I love her,” Charlie Brown says in a scene from 2002’s A Charlie Brown Valentine. “Then I’ll give her a big hug. Then I’ll go bungee-jumping from the moon.”
We never learn the Little Red-Haired Girl’s real name in this classic special, but we know the name of the woman who inspired her: Donna Mae Johnson. She, too, was redheaded and the object of Peanuts creator Charles Shulz’s affections. According to The Washington Post, art didn’t imitate life in at least one way. In real life, Charlie Brown got the girl, as Schulz and Johnson dated. In fact, she was his first love.
The feeling, according to Donna Mae, was quite mutual.
“Oh, we dated about two years,” Johnson revealed to Comic Riffs in a 2015 interview. “I loved him.”
While they may have been in love for a short time, it didn’t turn into a marriage. Instead, Donna married Al Wold, a handsome firefighter. Schulz went on to marry Joyce Halverson Doty, who may have served as the partial inspiration for Lucy. Donna, however, was never far from his thoughts.
The little red-haired girl was first mentioned in a November 1961 comic strip, where Charlie Brown states that he’d “give anything in the world if that little girl with the red hair would come over and sit with me.” That begs the question: Does the Little Red-Haired Girl ever notice Charlie Brown?
You’ll have to watch A Charlie Brown Valentine to find out!
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Originally published February 05, 2025
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