It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 1966

     The Peanuts gang are celebrating Halloween while Linus waits for the Great Pumpkin.  Autumn is in full swing, Linus and Lucy go to the local pumpkin patch to find a pumpkin.  Lucy selects the largest one they can find!!  Then, she makes Linus carry it back to their house.  He is dismayed when it turns out that Lucy is going to “kill” the pumpkin to make a jack-o-lantern!!  On Halloween night, the gang goes trick-or-treating.  They stop at the pumpkin patch to jeer at Linus for missing the fun as usual.  Linus is convinced that the Great Pumpkin will come to his most sincere pumpkin patch!!  He persuades Sally to skip trick-or-treating and join him in the patch.

    All the kids get their goodies except Charlie Brown, he gets nothing but rocks?  They go back to the pumpkin patch to tease Linus and Sally.  Then the gang goes to Violet’s Halloween party.  Violet and Lucy ask Charlie Brown to serve as their model.  What they really want to do is use his bald head to diagram potential jack-o-lantern designs.  Snoopy is wearing his World War I flying ace costume and he has a fierce but losing battle with the unseen Red Baron.

     Linus and Sally are still in the pumpkin patch.  Sally becomes furious because Linus "made" her miss the Halloween festivities!!  Charlie Brown and the others come to the patch to get Sally.  Lucy realizes that Linus is not in his bed, she goes to get him and brings him home.  She takes off his shoes and puts him to bed.  Linus vows to Charlie Brown that the Great Pumpkin will come to his patch next year!!

     This film can be good for all ages and it includes many favorite American Halloween traditions.  Trick-or-treating, apple bobbing and the Great Pumpkin.  There is some of the usual Halloween imagery with ghosts, skeletons and this may alarm very young viewers?  Another aspect of this film is that the children treat each other poorly.  Name calling and putting each other down.  Lucy is horrible to everyone including her brother until the end of the movie.  Just because the kids are the cute Peanuts characters doesn’t make it right to degrade each other, put each other down, name call and think they are cute and funny.  (I have only slightly paid attention to this behavior?)  Possibly, there needs to be a newer and a more pleasant version of the Great Pumpkin?  But, there are other newer animated cartoons with a lot of noise, thoughtlessness, loudness, color-popping?  5* (I liked this movie)   

25 min, Animation, directed by Bill Melendez and written by Charles M. Schulz with the voices of Peter Robbins, Christopher Shea, Sally Dryer, Cathy Steinberg, Lisa DeFaria, Glenn Mendelson, Ann Altieri, Gabrielle DeFaria Ritter, Bill Melendez.

Note:  Imdb 8.2* out of 10* with 16,406 reviews, Common Sense Media Carrie R. Wheadon, 5* age 4+, 3* positive messages, 3* role models, 2* scariness, Amazon 4* with 2,633 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 94% with 17 critics 85% with 51,280 user ratings, Letterboxd 3.9* out of 5*.