This is by no means intended to be my last word on the 1966 television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, but I recently provided the below short bit of writing for a facebook group’s weekly feature and I’d like to transfer it here so that when I bail, it ain’t lost. Plus I’m a little disappointed that life once against got in the way of doing any regular Halloweentime writing here, someday I’ll need to quit my job and accept starvation in return for being able to watch and write about movies til I lose breath.
When I began living up in the northern part of the United States, a surprising amount of people independently would ask me why I’d go to areas where snow happens over staying in Miami? And I’d have a plethora of answers for that, hostile and benign, but the easiest go-to remains the most truthful one: I watch the world move by color. The colors in the sky, the colors in the trees, and the colors in the ground. I don’t think I’m particularly unique in what I associate with the autumnal season: oranges, reds, and yellows… those seem particularly universal for anyone trying to describe what the visual sensation is, even down in Miami. It is funny enough not what I would physically associate with the reality of Halloweentime where I now live, where winter begins creeping in by whiting out the sky, overcasting the sidewalk in grey shadow, and the fallen leaves all now begin sinking into damp seasonal rainy mud or curling into brown and black. But it still feels attached enough to the soul of autumn that when I close my eyes, it’s those colors that I imagine of welcoming me back when I open them.
I don’t need to close my eyes though because we have a lot of movies to maintain that sensation and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is possibly the deepest evocation of that sensation within audio-visual media. Nobody could profess the Bill Melendez television specials to be of the most trailblazing animation, but they often make due and where they don’t has a nicely hand-crafted character in terms of their linework and shapes that make for the sort of coziness that results in A Charlie Brown Christmas succeeding as the comfort blanket it is. In Great Pumpkin’s case, Melendez and crew rely on the versatile range of shades between red and orange to recreate the moods one associates with late October. The skies are changing between paint splashes of reds and oranges (as well as blues and grays before the cool black night of the latter half), the ground is littered with vibrant leaves, and the unconfined spaces – interior or exterior – all seem to extend from those moods in their color. And that’s merely the backdrop for what might be the most grown-up of all Peanuts special plots: an overall reckoning of disappointment in the low-stakes lives of children, whether it’s Charlie Brown falling for the football or Charlie Brown being surprised when he gets a rock. He’s not the real mark of this theme though so much as Linus’ dedicated and steadfast waiting for The Great Pumpkin, a work of character writing that navigates right between the adult understanding that the Great Pumpkin obviously doesn’t exist and won’t show up and Linus’ tragic insistence that as long as he maintains sincerity and the wonderfully cluttered pumpkin patch he’s making camp in radiates sincerity as well… someday his hopes will be rewarded. Maybe not this year, but it has to be this year doesn’t it? It’s both drily amusing and a little heartbreaking to witness compared to Charlie Brown’s slip-ups being just outright hilarious.
That hilarity – as well as the mindblowing sophistication with which a mid-special sequence where Snoopy famously imagines himself a wartime Flying Ace, gets shot down, and has to navigate back to Allied lines in breathtaking silhouette against the most profound sunset skies and empty fields – is a big part of what makes the realities of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown easier to swallow and real fun to watch. And while Linus’ final beats of defiant faithfulness into the end of the closing credits might be a comforting and optimistic resolution against one’s best ideas, it is somehow not the moment I think most gets to catalyzing my hopes that things can work out if I just keep sincerity in the world. That is Linus closing the second act by rhapsodizing to Sally – the only person who will buy into wasting their entire night in that pumpkin patch – on the joys of the Great Pumpkin in the world as the shot widens further for that twinkling starry night to take up more of the frame than the two kids in that patch and Linus’ praise reaches the distant fading ends of the soundtrack. It’s a cosmic check against Linus’ delusions but it also gives me the blithe memories of watching the inky dark sky and pinholes through my childhood bedroom window until morning light, a dynamic real-world transformation only met by It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and its metamorphic stratospheric reds and blacks.
Movie Motorbreath 