On Thursday night, October 27, 1966, CBS set aside its usual half hour of My Three Sons so a boy with a blanket could sit in a pumpkin patch and wait. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was only the third Peanuts special, and it tied Bonanza for first place in that week’s Nielsen ratings while pulling in roughly half of everyone watching television that night. Sixty years later, the line people still repeat from it belongs to Charlie Brown, who peers into his trick-or-treat bag at house after house and says, “I got a rock.”
That line came out of a real argument among the three men who made the special, and one of them lost. What children did about it after the broadcast caught all three by surprise, and the producer was still telling that story 40 years later.
Who Decided Charlie Brown Should Get A Rock?
After A Charlie Brown Christmas became a hit in December 1965, producer Lee Mendelson remembered CBS asking for “another blockbuster” it could run every year. Animation director Bill Melendez suggested Halloween because of the costumes and the trick-or-treating, and Mendelson later recalled the moment Charles Schulz, known to his friends as Sparky, “all of a sudden stood up with great excitement and said, ‘The Great Pumpkin!'”
The rock was Schulz’s idea as well, and Mendelson hated it. “Sparky said that maybe we ought to have Charlie Brown get a rock,” he told The Washington Post. “Oh, come on, that’s a little too harsh and cruel.” Schulz only dug in. “But the more I protested, the more he wanted it,” Mendelson said. “And after I protested more, Sparky said: ‘OK, he’ll get three rocks!'” In other tellings of the same meeting, Melendez was laughing right along with Schulz and pushed to repeat the gag, which left the producer outvoted two to one.
The joke lands because Charlie Brown’s costume is already a disaster. He cut far too many eyeholes in his ghost sheet, and he trudges from door to door while the other kids compare their candy. The special also gave viewers their first animated look at Lucy yanking the football away, but it was Snoopy who stole the night.
How Did Snoopy End Up Flying A Doghouse?
In the newspaper strip, Snoopy had already become the World War I Flying Ace who chased the Red Baron, and Schulz realized the goggles and scarf looked a lot like a Halloween costume. Melendez’s team turned it into a long sequence in which Snoopy flies his doghouse into battle and then crawls through watercolor French countryside after being shot down. Mendelson later told the Post it was “one of the most memorable animated scenes ever.”
The music came together only weeks before airtime. Vince Guaraldi and his sextet recorded the score on October 4, 1966, at Desilu’s Gower Street studio in Hollywood, and his new “The Great Pumpkin Waltz” drifts in as Linus sits down to write his letter to the Great Pumpkin. All of that craft served a small story about a boy who would not stop believing, and Schulz had a pointed reason for writing him that way.
Why Did Linus Keep Waiting In The Pumpkin Patch?
Linus had been waiting on the Great Pumpkin in the strip since October 26, 1959, when Schulz had him mix up Halloween with Christmas. That was nine years after the first Peanuts strip appeared, and by 1961 Linus was warning his friends, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” In the special he explains that the Great Pumpkin rises from whichever patch he judges most sincere, then “flies through the air and brings toys to all the children of the world.”
Schulz meant something sharper by it. “The Great Pumpkin is really kind of a satire on Santa Claus,” he told Mendelson, according to Mental Floss. He disliked the idea that children were promised a jolly man bringing gifts to everyone when many families could afford only one or two presents. So Linus keeps his vigil with Sally, who gives up trick-or-treating to sit beside him and then demands restitution when the only thing rising out of the patch turns out to be Snoopy.
Linus at least went home with his faith intact. Charlie Brown went home with a bag of rocks, and that is where the audience decided to step in.
What Did Viewers Mail To Charlie Brown?
After the broadcast, packages began arriving at Schulz’s studio in Northern California. Children who had watched Charlie Brown pull rock after rock from his bag mailed him their own Halloween candy. “Well, we got candy from all over the United States for poor Charlie Brown, and people were really upset with us,” Mendelson told ABC News in 2006. “I mean, we got some … not hate mail but letters that really didn’t like the fact that he got rocks in his bag,” he added.
Those packages kept coming long after that first Halloween. Schulz said sacks of candy addressed to Charlie Brown reached his office for years, and Mendelson described the same steady flow to the Post. The rock Mendelson had called too cruel became the scene everyone remembered, and the special came back to CBS nearly every fall until ABC took it over in 2001. This fall it is getting its own 60th anniversary events and collectibles.
Mendelson never lost his wonder at what Schulz had dreamed up. “This whole idea of the Great Pumpkin, just think about it, what a crazy, wonderful idea,” he told ABC News. The special still ends at four in the morning, when Lucy walks out to the cold pumpkin patch to bring her shivering little brother home and tuck him into bed. By daylight Linus is vowing to wait again next year, and anyone who first watched as a kid still feels a pang when Charlie Brown opens that bag.
