Nickelodeon Universe officially opens Saturday, March 15, at the Mall of America in Bloomington.

Camp Snoopy left two years ago, only to be replaced by “The Park,” which was basically the same as Camp Snoopy, with all of the popular Peanuts characters stripped off the rides.

It’s still hard to believe that United Features never reached an agreement with the Mall of America for the continuation of Camp Snoopy in Minnesota.

There are a handful of Camp Snoopys [1] (or is the plural Camp Snoopi?) throughout the United States, according to Charles M. Schultz, Inc. However, Schultz, who died a few years ago, no longer has a theme park in his home state.

The park was a natural fit in Minnesota. Now, the only Snoopy characters to be found are at Rice Park, frozen for all time in the form of bronze statues, battling for popularity with the nearby F. Scott Fitzgerald statue.

(Now an F. Scott Fitzgerald theme park, that would be something – the ride where you stare longingly at a green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, or the boat ride where you are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”)

F. Scott and Charles M. belong together. Their primary characters, Charlie Brown and Jay Gatsby, would spend a lifetime seeking acceptance from peers they wouldn’t get it from.

With the removal of Camp Snoopy, it seems we’re not getting the approval of Charlie Brown.

Don’t get me wrong, SpongeBob SquarePants has many desirable qualities – notably his can-do attitude in the face of overwhelming adversity.

However, there’s something about a Peanuts cartoon’s philosophical outlook that trumps Nickelodeon’s spastic one-joke-a-second approach.

I mean, we used to have Peanuts characters asking big philosophical questions, listening to Mozart and reciting the Nativity Story. The Fairly OddParents? Not so much.

While growing up, Jellystone Park [2] campgrounds and Bedrock City [3] in Custer, S.D., endeared Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear to me for life. They made the cartoons come to life. Similarly, Camp Snoopy brought the Peanuts characters to life. (For a kid, a three-dimensional cartoon is as close to nirvana as you can get.) Perhaps now, Minnesota children will learn about Snoopy by purchasing insurance from MetLife.

Camp Snoopy is gone and Schultz’s cartoons continue on in reruns. They’re great cartoons, but they are reruns. And Lord help us, if they start to rerun the 1990s cartoons, when Schultz seemed to have an unearthly obsession with Snoopy’s cousin Spike, talking to a cactus out in the desert.

The Peanuts characters continue to sit in front of television sets with knobs. They make references to 1950s baseball players. And does anyone keep their dog in a doghouse anymore? Most neighbors would probably call animal control for animal abuse if they witnessed a dog left outside overnight.

Snoopy is fading away.

All hail SpongeBob.