Tier List by Griffin Tench

Overall Tier List

Super listener, Griffin Tench, created this data-based tier list for the strip overall and for each decade. His process is detailed below. Meanwhile, enjoy these fabulous charts of the characters through the years.

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

Griffin's Process

"Several years ago, I was very bored and had too much time on my hands, so I started rereading Peanuts (I have all of the Fantagraphics books) and recording which named characters appear or are referenced in each strip. Eventually I made my way through all 50 years, so I now have a whole Excel file of data. I also wrote a short program using Java to use the data I collected to create tier lists for each year and each decade of the strip, as well as one for the entirety of the strip’s run.

(A caveat here: the collection of the data required me to make a lot of judgment calls about which characters appear in each strip. As you might imagine, Woodstock in particular gave me a lot of trouble, as there are plenty of birds that may or may not be Woodstock that show up from time to time. There were also some potential Linus/Rerun mixups. So the numbers that I came up with could easily be different from the numbers that another person would come up with if they compiled their own data.)

(One other caveat: to be eligible to be on the list, a character must be named and also must be physically seen in at least one strip. This means that the little red-haired girl isn’t featured here, unfortunately. The same goes for all adult characters and the little pig-tailed girl from Rerun’s kindergarten class.)

To construct the tier lists, the algorithm minimizes the total sum of all the differences between the number of times a character appears and the average for the tier that that character is in. For example, in the overall tier list, the third tier consists of only two characters: Lucy, with 4774 appearances, and Linus, with 4131. This means that the average for the third tier is 4452.5. Lucy has 321.5 more appearances than the average, and Linus has 321.5 fewer appearances than the average. So for this tier, the sum of all the differences is 321.5+321.5=643. The algorithm aims to minimize the total sum of all those differences across the tiers. And the number of tiers is simply the square root of the number of characters, rounded to the nearest whole number.

Main Trends

• The four-person main cast of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus that dominates the second half of the 50s and basically all of the 60s

• Charlie Brown being the clear main character for the 50s and 60s, only to get surpassed by Snoopy starting around the time that Woodstock enters the strip

• The sudden surge of Rerun appearances in the late 90s

• An overall nine-person main cast consisting of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Sally, Peppermint Patty, Woodstock, Marcie, and Schroeder. These are the nine characters who have over 1000 appearances each, and there’s a pretty sizeable gap between them and the next-most-prolific character, Patty."