Thread by @colinmarshall

Peanuts thread

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: To the best of my recollection, I only watched this once or twice in childhood in America. Yet in adulthood in Korea, it's become a required element of my Halloween viewing, and each time I watch it I grow more aware of its artistic merits.

Broadcast in 1966, it was the third animated Peanuts special — the first being A Charlie Brown Christmas, which immediately became an institution unto itself. On first viewing, the Great Pumpkin seems comparatively incoherent, less a story than a collection of standard vignettes.

The first mark of distinction I noticed on repeat viewings was in the texture of the skies. Something's going on there that isn't in the other specials, let alone in the starker comic strip — something surely enabled in part by a larger budget and the Halloween-night setting.

I often lament having grown up in a neighborhood consisting of nothing but houses, but it turned ideal at trick-or-treating time. So, it seems, did Peanuts' vague Minneapolis suburb of 30 years earlier, exuding as it does a Halloween ambience that feels highly recognizable to me.

While most of the Great Pumpkin's action takes place on Halloween night, it has two separate trick-or-treating sequences, the first of which comes right after the opening throwaway pumpkin-carving gag. Its ostensible purpose is just to show the title, but there's more going on.

This brief passage breaks from reality as soon as bats fly from a dilapidated house. As the background goes completely abstract, the kids are then beset by specters of jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, a black cat, and a witch — all apparently "real," since everyone flees from them.

As in A Charlie Brown Christmas, what makes this richly effective is Vince Guaraldi's score, here with flute providing a haunting autumnality. Though never released as a proper soundtrack (the sound effects are still in the mix), the music holds up today.

The flute comes to the fore in the main trick-or-treating sequence, which plays out in parallel with Snoopy's trek through Grand Est, over which he's been shot down in his World War I Flying Ace persona. (The show's sole misstep is having Charlie Brown explain this in voiceover.)

Guaraldi's score always reminds me of music from The Magic of Scheherazade, an NES game that used to fascinate me, and particularly its overworld theme. Legend has it that this score, too, was composed by a pianist, but nobody's been able to confirm it.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown has been acclaimed as a statement on the nature of belief. It always strikes me how Linus has thoroughly externalized the Great Pumpkin, yet also obviously invented the Great Pumpkin himself; the two truths evidently demand no reconciliation.

A Charlie Brown Christmas: Every Christmas I watch this, I wonder what audiences in 1965 would've made of Charlie Brown so readily calling himself "depressed." A cartoon character wouldn't say that today without a certain irony, but here it has a troubling straightforwardness.

He says something more striking before that: "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy." He's inexplicably condemned to near-social ostracism, yes, but he has an even worse problem: expecting to be happy.

Philip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic came out the year after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired. The special satirizes the therapeutization of American life then in its earlier stages, most obviously with the useless vogue diagnoses of Lucy's "psychiatric help" stand.

Now that most Americans alive were more or less born into the therapeutic mindset, we see all this as nothing more than a satire of the "commercialization" of Christmas. Would that it had done the same job on the trauma-centered worldview that it did on aluminum Christmas trees.

Much has been written about how the special overcomes its severe and evident budgetary limitations. More so than It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown from the following year, its charm lies in the crudity of both its animation and its performances, delivered by genuine children.

But this goes beyond mere charm to become a meeting of form and substance, which I look for in art before I look for anything else. The story, such as it is, tells of the value ultimately discovered in a small, scraggly, misshapen Christmas tree; the show itself is that tree.

And then we have the Bible quotation by Linus, prolonged by network TV standards, which though somewhat oblique to 21st-century ears nevertheless remains bracing — and certainly more compelling than Lucy's talk of hypengyophobia and real estate.