Nerds and Beyond is getting spooky for the month of October! Every day leading up to Halloween, we will be sharing our favorite spooky films! For this Family Friday, we’ll be talking about the classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
When you first hear the opening chords, nostalgia sets in. Charlie Brown was always one of my favorites and between this film and the Christmas film, it’s a great family-friendly cartoon to watch on a crisp fall night.
The film follows the Peanuts gang of Charlie, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Sally, and more. Linus tells the story of The Great Pumpkin, who “rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with a bag of toys for all the children.” Charlie Brown tells Linus he’s crazy, and that The Great Pumpkin isn’t real, to which Linus states he’d stop believing once Charlie stopped believing in Santa Claus.
Linus treats The Great Pumpkin just like Santa; he writes letters to it, and awaits its arrival on Halloween Night, hoping for lots of presents. The whole beginning of the movie, more friends tell Linus that he’s not real.
Linus waits in the pumpkin patch with a sign welcoming The Great Pumpkin. As it gets later, Linus refuses to go out trick-or-treating and Sally joins him as they wait for any sign of The Great Pumpkin. As the rest of the friends celebrate, Sally and Linus wait all night for The Great Pumpkin to show up. When Linus mistakes Snoopy for him, Sally gets angry, yelling at Linus for making her miss Halloween, and she follows the rest of the friends back into the house.
Linus continued to wait for The Great Pumpkin, until Lucy dragged him back in to go to sleep. The film ends as Linus yells at Charlie Brown to just wait until next year when The Great Pumpkin will appear.
It’s a fun, cute movie about our innocence and believing in something magical and wonderful. It’s been a staple of mine to watch ever since I was little and many other people feel the exact same way, passing it down to their children to watch.
