Great Pumpkin turns 40
Classic Charlie Brown animated special honoured.
The Peanuts gang celebrates the 40th anniversary of the animated TV special, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
(Source: www.suntimes.com)
In early 1966, CBS had a simple request for legendary cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, known to his friends and family as 'Sparky.'
"The network came to Sparky," recalls Schultz' widow Jeannie, "and simply said, 'Deliver us another hit.'"
1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first animated adaptation of Schultzs' Peanuts comic strip, was a monster success despite network fears over the show's Christian and anti-commercial messages. CBS hoped that Schultz, along with executive producer Lee Mendelson and animator/director Bill Melendez, could make lightning strike twice. The animators delivered with It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which turns 40 this year.
Once again, Schultz and his collaborators took a substantial risk: in the cartoon, Charlie Brown played second fiddle to Linus' obsession with the Great Pumpkin, a mythical squash who leaves toys for deserving children on Halloween. As comedian Chris Rock observed, "Charlie Brown is such a loser. He wasn’t even the star of his own Halloween special."
But Schultz and his collaborators stuck with what worked: taking the essential elements that made Peanuts such a classic comic and put it on TV.
"We basically took the characters off the comics pages and transported them to television," says producer Mendelson.
Jeannie Schultz agrees. "It was keeping Sparky's characters and his vision intact that made it all come together."
It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown featured some classic animated moments, including Snoopy on his flying doghouse battling the Red Baron, and Charlie's now-famous wail when he opens his Halloween loot bag: "I got a rock."
Snoopy.com celebrated the show's 40th anniversary by holding an essay contest where fans could write about their worst Halloween stories. Lew Seitz' winning entry details how his childhood vigil at a pumpkin patch, hoping to see the Great Pumpkin for himself, ended when he encountered a shotgun-wielding farmer.
Not surprisingly, United Features Syndicate, which owns Peanuts, celebrated the occasion by lending the title out to a horde of merchandisers.
Sababa Toys offers the It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown board game, where players can be various Peanuts characters racing around a board collecting costumes and candy, eventually hooking up with Linus in the Great Pumpkin patch. Sababa also unleashes a 40th Anniversary dominoes design in a collectors' tin. The playing pieces feature images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the rest of the Peanuts gang.
USAopoly brings out a 500-piece pumpkin-shaped puzzle game that forms a picture of the Peanuts characters. Uno is flogging a collectible card game based on the show, while HarperCollins has issued a retrospective written by Mendelson and Melendez, titled It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: the Making of a Television Classic.
Paramount is offering a special edition DVD of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, with a bonus scene called "You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown."
Of course, the final word is from Linus himself: "I've learned there are three things you don't discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin."
