After 31 years, Snoopy has been dropped as the face/mascot of MetLife Insurance. I sort of like this since I never liked the idea of him being exploited to sell insurance, but I guess Peanuts is probably the most exploited comic strip out there so MetLife was just one of the group of entities tied to Peanuts.

MetLife is re-branding in some way, but some how, I don’t think Snoopy will be affected. But maybe he will, it’s said that MetLife paid between $10 million and $15 million per year to use the Peanuts characters! Nice work if you can get it.

But I will miss seeing his smiling face on the blimp. Here’s the whole story in Wall Street Journal.

But I wouldn’t mind seeing the Peanuts music and references disappear from that All detergent ad. It creeps me out when I see that kid walking as if he was Pigpen, with all the dust coming off of him and the other kid in the Charlie Brown shirt. It’s sacrilege in some way. If you haven’t seen the commercial, you can see it here.

Sometimes I think Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame had it right, he was against exploiting the characters for commercial reasons. But then again, if someone offered me millions of dollars anything for the use of my own comic characters, I would be all over that.