Peanuts has been a very popular comic strip for a very long time, so it shouldn’t have surprised me to find an extended reference to Snoopy and the gang in a decades-old TV show. And yet here we are.

On September 28, 1968, Get Smart, a spy spoof co-created by Mel Brooks, aired an episode titled “Snoopy Smart Versus the Red Baron.” This may seem self-explanatory, but I can pretty much guarantee you don’t know where this is going.

The episode begins with our newly engaged main characters–clueless Agent 86, real name Maxwell Smart, and Agent 99, real name unknown–flying out to Idaho. On the plane, Max is reading Snoopy and the Red Baron, a comic strip collection published two years earlier. Foreshadowing!

After some pointless slapstick, our heroes learn that their new mission is to stop Operation Starch, which their boss describes as “the most diabolical scheme ever devised by KAOS”–KAOS being the evil organization that our heroes with CONTROL always fight. What could possibly be that bad? KAOS has created a poison that eats America’s potato crop from the inside out, leaving nothing but empty skins. Since Americans cannot cope without a steady supply of French fries and potato chips, 86 and 99 must stop the poisoning, so the government can stop covering it up by selling edible foam rubber in place of real produce.

In Idaho, the couple stops to visit 99’s mother, only to discover that her new neighbor—”Mr. Smith,” who dresses in an outdated German military uniform — is the one behind Operation Starch. His real name is Siegfried, and he’s been using a Fokker D.VII that he built from a kit and repurposed as a cropduster to deliver the poison. He’s very proud of himself. Even Max looks impressed.

“Boy, I bet Snoopy would like to get this baby in his sights,” says Max.

But since Snoopy isn’t around, and since the local military base doesn’t have any aircraft to lend because they’ve sold everything to other countries, Max is the one who takes to the skies using another World War I-era plane, complete with helmet and white scarf, that just so happens to be lying around. The subsequent dogfight ends with Max heroically leaping from his own plane onto Siegfried’s and forcing him at gunpoint to land the felonious Fokker.

Why does this episode exist? I have no idea. Get Smart certainly did a lot of riffing on other properties–the previous episode was a Mission: Impossible parody, for instance. Probably, like Max, someone was reading Peanuts one day and started seeing old-timey fighter planes everywhere.

In any case, this episode is sure to amuse Snoopy fans, and the show as a whole is generally quite entertaining, even if not every joke has stood the test of time. A satisfied thumbs-up from this long-time Peanuts lover.