Snoopy

Cartoon Character / Animated Character

Cartoon beagle Snoopy is a sidekick/star of the long-running newspaper comic strip Peanuts, created by Charles Schulz. Snoopy was the oddball, manic pet of lovable loser Charlie Brown. Originally a minor figure, Snoopy grew to become the strip's best-known character. His quirks were famous: sleeping on top of his doghouse, pretending he was a WWI airplane pilot or Foreign Legionnaire (in costume), showing the ropes to his bird friend, Woodstock, and even playing shortstop on Charlie Brown's sandlot baseball team. Snoopy appeared in Peanuts comic strips from 1950 until Schulz's retirement (and death) in February of 2000, and now appears in rerun strips in hundreds of newspapers.

Extra credit: While struggling to become a famous writer, Snoopy invariably began stories with "It was a dark and stormy night." The phrase was originally penned by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in his 1830 story Paul Clifford... Snoopy inspired another popular catch-phrase, this one created by Schulz: "Happiness is a warm puppy"... Snoopy lent his name to the lunar module for the Apollo 10 space mission, NASA's last test flight before the Apollo 11 landing of Neil Armstrong; the command module on Apollo 10 was known as Charlie Brown.

Other famous canines include Scooby Doo, Laika the space dog, Toto and Checkers.

Blog posts mentioning Snoopy:
So Long, Bill Melendez Biography Review: Schulz and Peanuts