Here are Charlie Brown and his Peanuts pals, Linus and Lucy, to sell you a 1962 Ford Falcon.

It’s a little bit difficult to fathom today, but in the 1960s a balloon-headed comic-strip character named Charlie Brown was a multimedia superstar. Created by Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts depicted little kids who vented their fears and anxieties in a way grownups could relate to, and the gentle social satire struck a chord with mid-century America.

Charlie and his pals—Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and the gang—were syndicated in more than 2,600 daily newspapers and starred in multiple television specials, which featured music composed by jazz great Vince Guaraldi. Peanuts was a hit with corporate America. too, winning major endorsement deals with Metropolitan Life, Dolly Madison, and the Ford Motor Company.

In this Ford spot, Charlie sticks to a very simple message: the 1962 Falcon is the lowest- priced six-passenger car in America ($1,985, though it’s not mentioned here). Ford was then comfortably in the lead in the Motor City’s compact class as the Falcon racked up its one-millionth sale that year.

Rejecting the more radical designs of the imported compacts, Ford simply shrank its big-car engineering down to compact proportions, and it proved to be a winning strategy. (See our feature on the 1960 Falcon here.) Meanwhile, once Charlie delivers his message, Lucy decks him once again with one of her signature haymakers. Video follows.