It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I'm sure it had been many years since I saw the animated Halloween special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, before watching it again last night on broadcast TV. Of course, when I was a kid it was regular viewing, when Halloween was actually something I looked forward to, and the world of Peanuts enthralled me.

Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Great Pumpkin is a shimmering bit of Americana, a crystallization of just what was so great about Charles Schulz's comic strip. The core characters are Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and Sally--small children weighted down with the existential problems of adults. In this tale, it is Linus' struggle with faith, a neat metaphor for almost any religion that worships the unseen and largely absent deity.

Although Charlie Brown is in the title, this show is really about Linus. He is full of truisms: "Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker," or "I've learned never to discuss three things: religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin," and finally, after Sally, his supposed acolyte turns on him, shouting "I want restitution!" he states, "You've heard of the fury of a woman scorned? It's nothing compared with the fury of a woman denied tricks or treats."

There are other min-philosophy lessons as well. Charlie Brown's role in this special is to be at his Charlie Browniest, most especially the ritual of Lucy holding the football for him, only to pull it away right before he kicks it, causing him to land flat on his back. This was played out every autumn for decades. In the show, she tricks him with an unnotarized document. We also get two of his greatest quotes: "I had a little trouble with the scissors," when we see his misbegotten attempt to make a ghost costume, and the most culturally resonant line, "I got a rock." This line has come to symbolize the general sense of disappointment all of us feel at one time or another.

My favorite part of the special, and it was when I was a kid, too, was Snoopy's adventure as the World War I flying ace. I love Charlie Brown's narration of the tale, his snapping a salute as Snoopy, wearing goggles, heads out the door. I love the atmospheric animation and music as he heads across war-torn France, only to appear at the Halloween party, just in time to ruin Lucy's apple-bobbing--"My lips touched dog lips!" My favorite aspect of the comic strip was Snoopy's rich fantasy life, which contributed to mine. Although I never imagined myself flying a Sopwith Camel.

In the end, Linus reiterates his faith in the Great Pumpkin, as we must all maintain our basic faiths, no matter what they are (as Charlie Brown points out, he and Linus have "denominational differences"). Perhaps Linus is right, and Santa Claus is more popular because of better publicity, and somewhere on Halloween night, the Great Pumpkin appears in the most sincere pumpkin patch, a place I think we can all imagine.