Marcie - History of The Character

History of The Character

Marcie made her first appearance in the daily strip from July 20, 1971, but her name wasn't mentioned until the strip from October 11. She first appeared on television in the 1973 special There's No Time for Love, Charlie Brown. A forerunner of Marcie's character, a girl named Clara, made an appearance in a sequence at a girl's camp in June 1968. As Marcie became a part of the regular cast, she appeared in the same class as Peppermint Patty, sitting in the desk behind her.

In the animated special You're In the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, Marcie's surname is given as "Johnson", but Schulz never gave her a surname in the comic strip; therefore, Johnson is not considered to be her official name. In other sources, Marcie's last name is given as "Howe." In fact, in one strip, Marcie tells Charlie Brown that her grandfather plays left wing in the World Hockey Association; Gordie, Marty and Mark Howe all played in that league (although only Gordie would have been old enough to be a grandfather at the time).

In the strip, Marcie was a soft-spoken voice of reason to Peppermint Patty, but in most of her earliest TV appearances she was usually portrayed as naïve and somewhat dim-witted. An example of the former showed in the 1973 Emmy Award winning special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving; when Peppermint Patty throws a fit about the "dinner" Charlie Brown made for them, Marcie gently reminds her that he didn't invite her to dinner, but she invited herself. The latter showed through in It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown when Marcie showed complete ineptitude in the kitchen, making several unsuccessful attempts at preparing eggs to color for Easter, and then later biting into one without removing the shell first ("Tastes terrible, sir"), all to Peppermint Patty's great consternation.

Later, Marcie was portrayed as an overachiever (she once quipped that she had already chosen her college and enrolled her three children in preschool) and academically the brightest of the Peanuts cast. Even so, she is possibly the most credulous and naïve of the gang. She apparently is under a great deal of pressure from her parents to excel in school, and in a story in 1990 sought refuge from her demanding parents at Charlie Brown's house and fell asleep on his couch.

The first actor to do Marcie's voice in the TV specials was a boy, James Ahrens, from 1973 to 1977. Various others have played Marcie ever since. As with all of the Peanuts performers who were too young to read a script, director Bill Meléndez sometimes had to speak the children's lines to them. Melendez (who had a distinct Mexican accent) has noted with amusement that some of the performers for Marcie imitated his reading so closely, they repeated his accented "Charlce" instead of "Charles".