Peanuts Great Pumpkin Comic Strip Predated Famous TV Special by Two Years

In 1966, CBS debuted the now-classic television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The kids in the Peanuts gang take part in typical Halloween activities, including trick-or-treating and pumpkin-carving. Linus is the exception. He is busy preparing for the arrival of a mythical being known as the “Great Pumpkin.”

Linus explains the legend this way: “Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere.” Then the Great Pumpkin hands out toys to the children waiting for him. Linus spends the special writing letters to the Great Pumpkin and trying to convince others that it exists. He spends Halloween night in a pumpkin patch, waiting. The Great Pumpkin never emerges, but Linus still vows to wait again next year.

A casual Peanuts fan may know only that much about Linus and the Great Pumpkin. Dedicated readers of the Peanuts comic strip know the story goes much further.

The early strips

The Great Pumpkin first appeared in a Peanuts comic on Oct. 26, 1959. Linus is writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin when Lucy asks, “What in the world are you doing?” Linus answers, “Don’t you know? This is the time of year when we all write to the ‘Great Pumpkin’ and tell him what we want for Halloween. The ‘Great Pumpkin’ loves little children. I can see him now, rising up out of the pumpkin patch with his big bag of toys!” Lucy just stares at him, dumbfounded.

The next day, Charles Schulz ran a similar strip. Linus again chatters on about the Great Pumpkin while Charlie Brown stares blankly at him. A few more strips follow the same pattern, with people looking at Linus in disbelief. Charlie Brown eventually tells him, “You’re crazy.”

The Great Pumpkin never rises out of the earth to hand out presents, and it never answers any letters. After Halloween, Charlie Brown and Lucy even tease Linus about it.

Schulz repeated the pattern for the next few years. During the last week of October, he had Linus write more letters and preach about the Great Pumpkin’s impending arrival. In 1960, Linus convinces Charlie Brown to wait in the pumpkin patch with him, and Charlie Brown asks a very good question: “It just occurred to me that there must be ten million pumpkin patches in this country… What makes you think we’re in the right one?”

Funniest of the early run

The year 1961 brought a couple of particularly funny Great Pumpkin strips. In one, Linus cites the recent historical record of Great Pumpkin appearances. “On Halloween night in 1959, the Great Pumpkin appeared in the pumpkin patch of Boots Rutman in Connecticut,” he says. He adds, “In 1960, the Great Pumpkin appeared in the pumpkin patch of R.W. Daniels of Texas.” The specificity is very, very funny. I’m surprised it didn’t make it into the TV special, since many of the earlier Great Pumpkin strips fed into that script.

Another strip is basically the Peanuts version of the Tiger King meme where Joe Exotic says, “I am never gonna financially recover from this.” Linus tells Lucy he has to believe in the Great Pumpkin because he has already sent out 57 pumpkin cards. Then he says, “It would be economically disastrous for me not to believe it!”

I was surprised to find that in 1962, Linus successfully converts Lucy to Great Pumpkinism. Lucy even starts her own pumpkin patch to lure the Great Pumpkin and collect a pile of presents. Linus tells her that her pumpkin patch is completely hypocritical, most likely because of her greed. She gives up and sells her pumpkins instead.

Reading them back-to-back

Read a bunch of Great Pumpkin strips in a row from the October Peanuts archives, and the effect is twofold. If you have watched the TV special many times but haven’t read these strips, they feel like deleted scenes. It’s a lot of fun to see the other ways Linus tries to convince his friends, and the different ways they find him ridiculous.

The second effect is that Linus feels a bit different. In the special, he seems to hold a quirky belief. In the strips, he looks like an obsessed madman, and everything about the Great Pumpkin gets funnier. The feeling pays off especially well if you read the entire month of Peanuts comics from October 1964.

October 1964

Schulz usually ran Great Pumpkin strips just a few days before Halloween, maybe a week before at most. He would then spend the first day or two of November showing Linus complaining that he had missed the Great Pumpkin again. In 1964, he did things differently. On Oct. 5, 1964, he began a multi-week storyline about Linus running for class president. It was an election year, and the presidential election was a month away, so the storyline was timely.

For two weeks straight, nearly everything in the strip was about Linus’ run for office, and he is a very good candidate. His powerful, even somewhat revolutionary speeches get his classmates riled up, and he keeps rising in the polls. Linus is all set to win. Then, on Oct. 21, Schulz and Linus did something completely unexpected. In his rousing final speech before the election, Linus brings up the Great Pumpkin, and his run for office collapses on the spot.

Taken on its own, the strip still makes sense as a joke about how one extreme position or misstep in a single speech can sink a candidate. But Schulz spent two whole weeks ignoring the Great Pumpkin and then made it the entire focus of the payoff. That is beyond brilliant, and it makes Linus seem downright deranged for his beliefs. The time and patience it took show Schulz’s sheer skill as both a storyteller and a joke-teller. It takes the cake, or maybe the pumpkin pie, as the greatest Great Pumpkin strip ever.

Source: Polygon