It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown watchalong (w/ Anthony, Jeremy & Jeff)

What’s up, dudes? Grab your pillowcase, your sincerity, and maybe a spare rock for the bag, because we’re gonna have a watch-along party for the 1966 Peanuts classic “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”! I’ve got Anthony Caruso from ‘Tis the Podcast, Jeff Loftin from Lost Christmas podcast, and Jeremy Phelps the Alamo City Santa with me to talk all about it!

Halloween’s creeping up on the Peanuts neighborhood, and things get off to a rough start: Lucy carves up a pumpkin from the patch (Linus is horrified she “killed it”), then pulls the football away from Charlie Brown yet AGAIN. Linus pens a letter to the Great Pumpkin, the Santa Claus of gourds, and gets roasted by everybody except Sally, whose crush on Linus has her signing up for the pumpkin-patch faith. Charlie Brown, meanwhile, scores an actual invite to Violet’s party and is living his best life… for about five minutes. While the gang hits the streets yelling “Tricks or treats! Money or eats!”, everyone else rakes in candy bars, gum and a quarter, and poor Chuck goes 0-for-Halloween: “I got a rock.” Then he gets to be Violet’s jack-o’-lantern drawing board. Snoopy, being Snoopy, ditches the plot entirely, straps on his scarf and turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel to dogfight the Red Baron, crash-lands, sneaks across the French countryside, crashes the party’s apple-bobbing tub and gets weepy to Schroeder’s World War I medleys. Back in the patch, the Great Pumpkin finally rises… and it’s a beagle. Sally goes full nuclear: “I was robbed!… You owe me restitution!” Linus slips and says “IF the Great Pumpkin comes” (rookie mistake), Lucy hauls her shivering brother home at 4 a.m., and the next day Linus is right back at it: “Just wait ’til next year, Charlie Brown!”

Fun voice-cast trivia: the kids were real kids, some trained actors and some straight from producer Lee Mendelson’s neighborhood, with Peter Robbins as Charlie Brown, Christopher Shea as Linus and Sally Dryer as Lucy. Director Bill Melendez voiced Snoopy by recording nonsense words and speeding them up. And Cathy Steinberg (Sally) had a loose tooth, so she had to knock out all her lines in one night before it fell out and gave her a lisp. She couldn’t nail “restitution,” so Mendelson recorded it one syllable at a time and spliced it together. Totally rad!

A rock in the trick-or-treat bag? Check. A beagle flying a doghouse against the Red Baron? Yep. A little girl suing for restitution over missed candy? Oh, you better believe it! So grab your ghost sheet, but too many holes in it, and head to the most sincere pumpkin patch for “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”!

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Lost Christmas Podcast
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It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown watchalong (w/ Anthony, Jeremy & Jeff)