Much like generative AI, cricket’s LBW rule and season five of Love Is Blind, some phenomena are near impossible to explain. So it is with the watch world’s limitless hype for a dog called Snoopy. It started with a 1950 newspaper cartoon strip called Peanuts, escalated by way of NASA’s perilous Apollo 13 mission and has got so out of hand that recent new releases from Omega, Bamford and Seiko featuring the black and white beagle have all either sold out in a hot second or are basically unobtainable to the Average Joe (or Joe Cool himself).
Assuming you don’t have the necessary £18,000 to skip the authorised dealer waitlist and pick up a pre-owned ‘Silver Snoopy Award’ 50th Anniversary Speedmaster but are desperate to get in on the hottest watch trend of recent years, help might finally be at hand. Releasing today as part of the free watchOS 10 software update, Snoopy has arrived on Apple Watch in a major way. Those who already roll with the tech titan's smartwatch will know about its surprisingly attentive approach to horological history. From world timers to solar dials and even Gérald Genta’s favourite Mickey Mouse, its treasure trove of over 50 customisable watch faces reimagines almost every function you could care to own from the likes of Rolex, Patek Phillippe and AP. Until now, there has been one glaring omission from this catalogue. In remedying Snoopy’s absence, Apple and its partners at the Charles M Schulz Studio took the opportunity to create the most detailed and straight-up delightful watch face yet.
“When you design an analogue watch with Snoopy, he's a static character right?” says Paige Braddock, chief creative officer at Charles M Schulz Creative Associates. “So all you're really focusing on is the hands and the arms. You wouldn't believe the minutiae we go into to make them work at every angle, but going into this first meeting with Apple I was going ‘I don’t even know if I'm smart enough to wear this watch.’”
That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he'll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.
“I'm typically a very organised person,” says Gary Butcher, human interface designer at Apple. “So I felt, ‘We've got a limited amount of time together and there might be some uneasiness, so I'll print out 148 pieces of blank paper and we need to leave the room having filled out every one of those pages.’ By the end of the day, we'd not touched the wall of A3 paper, but had tons of sketches littering the table.”
Key to this process was defining the look and feel of Snoopy himself. When he first debuted alongside Charlie Brown in 1950, Schulz’s creation walked on all fours, barked like a dog and had few of the anthropomorphic qualities he’s known for today – let alone the antagonistic attitude towards his owner. Eventually, the team settled on an ’80s-inspired design with a shorter nose than Snoopy had in the ’70s and a straighter one than he did in the ’90s. Such are the details you sweat when you’re working with people who are paid to be Peanuts obsessives.
“In the initial brainstorm, the team had started with sort of generic sketches where he’s walking in the rain with an umbrella or whatever,” says Braddock. “But there are some very specific Snoopy things that that no other comic character does, like he holds up his ear and blocks the rain for Woodstock.”
In some ways, the dynamic nature of the Apple Watch is an easier canvas to design for than your typical timepiece. Its square aesthetic mimics the shape of Schulz’s original cartoon panels – just as the comics used coloured ink instead of grey on a Sunday, so too does the Snoopy face – and there’s no real limit to the quantity or fidelity of animations on offer thanks to the Watch’s always-on display and up to 2,000 nits of brightness. Once both sides had agreed on Snoopy’s design, the real challenge on Apple’s side was ensuring users would actually see the animations they’d made.
If you’re going to the effort of sketching out Snoopy as he rides his kibble bowl down the minute hand, that helter-skelter-style joyride needs to have the opportunity to show up more than once an hour. So Apple’s engineers created a whole scene layout engine that can rotate certain clips by six degrees every minute, as well as a Snoopy decision engine that figures out the optimal time to showcase them without too much repetition. Unlike Lucy’s much-memed promise to hold the football in place for kicker Charlie Brown, this system works reliably in watchOS 10 – even when your nephew bugs you to show them 12 different animations in the course of a minute.
“Snoopy has this way of bridging the gap between generations,” says Eric Charles of Apple Watch product marketing. “What's really interesting about the strip is that the scenarios Snoopy ends up in are still relatable to the audience that grew up with him and a new audience that's being introduced to him.”
As much as the Snoopy x Apple Watch hook-up is a loving nod to his more hard-to-acquire collaborations, it’s also a way to democratise Schulz’s most enduring creation. Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that Apple sells more watches in one financial quarter than the entire Swiss industry does in a year. With the latest Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 featuring improved screen tech, intuitive double-tap gesture controls and a carbon neutral design, this dominance shows little sign of wilting – especially with a major redesign rumoured for next year.
Having trained under Schulz before his retirement in 1999 and stayed with his studio ever since, few people place more importance on Snoopy’s horological legacy than Braddock. “The first time I came out here to interview and start working in the studio, Schulz walked me over to the gift shop and said, ‘OK, today everything's free, pick out whatever you want.’”
“The one thing I picked out was a Snoopy watch.”
The Snoopy face for Apple Watch is available now via watchOS 10.
