Peanuts is everywhere. Still.
Charles M. Schulz pulled in roughly $35 million a year at the peak of the comic’s run, with the strip appearing in 2,600 newspapers across 75 countries and translated into 21 languages, a cultural saturation so thick that Mitsubishi thought it was a good business move to slap a cartoon beagle on a truck for the strip’s 50th anniversary.
It was. And you can buy that exact truck now on Bring a Trailer.
Built for the Red Baron
It is a kei-jidōsha. Specifically, the Pajero Mini.
This tiny thing is technically a full-size SUV’s little cousin, sharing the rugged DNA of the Mitsubishis that chewed through Paris-Dakar dust, but scaled down to fit Japanese licensing rules, meaning it has a proper 4×4 system with a dual-range transfer case and a live rear axle, despite looking like something Snoopy might actually park next to.
Snoopy himself is plastered on it. Graphics cover the sides, the mudflaps, and the spare tire cover. Embroidered Snoopy is on the seats too. Good grief, Charlie Brown. It’s ridiculous. It’s charming. It’s a little absurd, really, to wrap a capable off-roader in comic strip art, but Japan loves special editions. So much so that Mitsubishi released a second batch of these because people just couldn’t stop buying the first run.
Would you put a Snoopy sticker on your Honda CR-V back in Ohio? Probably not. This feels different, somehow, more curated, less like a gas station impulse buy.
Under the hood sits a 660cc turbo inline-three making exactly 50 horsepower, a meager stat that barely registers on the Beagle Power scale, but sufficient enough for a car this small. You wouldn’t expect it to haul much. You also wouldn’t expect a 35,000-mile odometer to lie. The mileage is low. The condition seems tight. It drives. That last part is key. Unlike a Peanuts tea towel or a plastic snow globe that gathers dust on a shelf, you can put keys in this thing and go somewhere, maybe squeezing down a trail too narrow for the real Pajeros.
The auction closes on July 8. Lucy will pull the football away.
