You get a rock.
I always thought that this was the start in Charls Schulz’s trilogy into the christian rewbirth of Linus.
It starts out on Halloween, he is worshiping an evil pagan god in a field, clearly a holdover from darker times where a giant anthropomorphic pumpkin will bestow riches upon him for his faith. However, he comes to learn that this was nothing more than tomfoolery and is greatly disillusioned. Based on the next few specials I can only speculate that he must have started lookign into this “bible” thing all the kids were talking about.
By Thanksgiving he is all about prayers and giving thanks and what not and is just a little more pious than your average kid. No one pays him much heed.
By Christmas he is spouting not but bible verses and goes on and on about the true meaning of the holidays. Becoming the most steadfast christian in all charliebrowndom.
I can only assume New Years involved some sort of pro life protest.
If by “pro life protest” you mean “Charlie Brown goes to a New Years party but also has to read War and Peace before school starts again and ends up falling asleep and missing the little red-haired girl coming to the party,” then yes.
Tonight’s the night - unless you’re in the Washington DC area, that is! 
Channel 7 (WJLA) is preempting The Great Pumpkin for a special on the Virginia governor’s race. According to this morning’s Washington Post, WJLA will show a “compacted” Great Pumpkin sometime tomorrow evening.
Just wanted to let others know, just in case they were going to tune in tonight at 8 PM. The -better not- fuck with the Charlie Brown Christmas special! Heh.
So it’s going to be squashed?
All ABC affiliates (except for the one in Washington) are airing the Great Pumpkin twice- tonight unedited in a one-hour timeslot (with the rest of the hour filled with an edited version of You’re (Not) Elected, Charlie Brown*, as ABC has done for the past couple of years, and in a (presumably shortened) half-hour edition the following night.
*The original DVD release from Paramount also combines The Great Pumpkin with Elected. When the rights to the Peanuts specials went to Warner Home Video last year, they released Elected as a seperate DVD, presumably to cash in on the 2008 presidential election, and combined Great Pumpkin with the bizarrely-canon-breaking yet strangely entertaining It’s Magic, Charlie Brown, in which Charlie Brown finally gets to kick the football…but only because he’s invisible. (Don’t ask.) Warner also released Pumpkin as part of a collection of the first five Peanuts specials from the late 1960s.
Here’s one from Monty.
Nooooo!
Our local ABC affiliate has the following “Programming Alert” on their webpage:
Due to the broadcast of Bridgestone Titans on 2 With Jeff Fisher on Tuesdays, October 27th from 7-8pm, WKRN will delay broadcast “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” WKRN will air this children’s classic on Saturday, October 31st from 1-2pm.
I actually registerd on their stupid website to leave a comment to complain about this. They’re airing an interview with Titans coach Jeff Fisher ON A BYE WEEK instead of Charlie Brown? Morons!
And showing it Saturday afternoon ON HALLOWEEN? So even if we record it, we won’t be able to watch it until Halloween is OVER?
:mad::mad::mad:
When I watch the Peanuts specials like ItGPCB anymore, I always think “why don’t they make it wide screen?” Generally, the scenes are side scrolling, so they could mostly fill in the edges with known backgrounds. The backdrops aren’t that busy that they couldn’t fill in something that matches when they don’t have a known backdrop.
Apparently, the stars of the upcoming TV special Disney’s Prep and Landing are Charlie Brown’s homies. Thanks for that bizarre fact, ABC promo department.
Yeah, kinda weird. And couldn’t they have hired someone who sounded like the original kid?
Why does Linus take a bite out of an apple, and then throw most if it away?
Strange to watch Sally totally pimped over by Linus, missing out on both Halloween candy AND a party, and totally ready to bitch-slap his pumpkin-worshiping ass… Only to see her all over his campaign effort in the very next half hour!
Huh. Chicks.
He’s her sweet Baboo.
I watched this with my kids tonight. Damn, these things are timeless. My daughters were just as transfixed as I always was. I don’t completely understand the voodoo of these old Peanuts specials (or of the strip in general), but I’m amazed at how well they still hold up, and how well kids still respond to them more than 40 years after they were made. Snoopy still rocks, no matter how old he gets.
DtC - you are right; there is a certain MoJo to the Peanuts specials that is hard to pin down. For the first time, tonight, I noticed the totally psychedelic skies and backgrounds. Trippy, man. That might have something to do with it…TRM
Where the hell are their parents?
I prefer the DVD. It’s hasn’t had anything cut for extra commercials.
I heard that and just repeated to myself, “Homies? Did he just say homies?”
Love makes you do strange things. That seems to be one of the recurring themes in the Peanuts strip and specials. Linus is Sally’s sweet babboo- or at least she thinks he is- so she’ll do anything he says- which might not be the wisest decision.
And although I find Charlie Brown saying “homies” strange, I have no qualms with him rapping, as he did for ABC’s promo for the show this year. I don’t know why.
The famed Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones once said “I dream that I’m Bugs Bunny, but when I wake up, I’m Daffy Duck.” I think it’s the same way with Charlie Brown and Snoopy- we are all Charlie Brown, but we wish we could be Snoopy. While Charlie Brown is being told he wasn’t invited to Violet’s Halloween party, worrying about his friend spending all night in a pumpkin patch, and getting nothing but rocks in his trick-or-treat bag, Snoopy is imagining he’s a World War I flying ace roaming behind enemy lines. Now which of those sounds like a cooler way to spend your Halloween? I thought so.
Speaking of Chuck Jones, I once heard an interview with him where he was asked why most of his characters were animals. He said (paraphrasing) - “It’s a lot easier to humanize animals than it is to humanize human beings.”
Probably because it was mealy tasting. After all, it had been lying on the ground.