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Great Pumpkin

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Great Pumpkin 10 Things You Didn39t Know About 39It39s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown39

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The Great Pumpkin is an alleged holiday figure in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz.

Contents

The Great Pumpkin is a holiday figure (comparable to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny) in whom only Linus van Pelt believes. Every year, Linus sits in a pumpkin patch on Halloween night waiting for the Great Pumpkin to appear. Invariably, the Great Pumpkin fails to turn up, but a humiliated but undefeated Linus vows to wait for him again the following Halloween. The Great Pumpkin was first mentioned by Linus in Peanuts in 1959, but the premise was reworked by Schulz many times throughout the run of the strip, and also inspired the 1966 animated television special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and had a brief mention in You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown (in which the mention of it almost blows Linus' chances in a school election). The best-known quote regarding Linus and the Great Pumpkin, originally from the comic strip but made famous by the TV special, is: "There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin."

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While Schulz usually avoided outright politics, he enjoyed his Great Pumpkin strips and also enjoyed incorporating religious references in many of his comics and animated cartoons.

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Peculiarly - given that the Great Pumpkin is supposedly believed in only by Linus - the strips of October 29 and November 1, 1961 make mention of officially reported Great Pumpkin sightings in Connecticut, Texas and New Jersey.

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Religious metaphors

The Great Pumpkin has been a symbol of strong faith and foolish faith, leading to vastly different interpretations of creator Charles Schulz's own faith. As described in the book on Schulz's religious views, A Charlie Brown Religion, Schulz's views were very personal and often misinterpreted. Linus' seemingly unshakable belief in the Great Pumpkin, and his desire to foster the same belief in others, has been interpreted as a parody of Christian evangelism by some observers. Others have seen Linus' belief in the Great Pumpkin as symbolic of the struggles faced by anyone with beliefs or practices that are not shared by the majority.

Still others view Linus' lonely vigils, in the service of a being that may or may not exist and which never makes its presence known in any case, as a metaphor for mankind's basic existential dilemmas. Charles Schulz himself, however, claimed no motivation beyond the humor of having one of his young characters confuse Halloween with Christmas. In the 1959 sequence of strips in which the Great Pumpkin is first mentioned, for instance, Schulz also has Linus suggest that he and the other kids "go out and sing pumpkin carols", something which he also asks the trick-or-treating kids in the special itself.

Licensed use on Poptropica

In October 2010, forty-four years after the initial airing of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the pumpkin was the topic of a licensed use by the children's internet site Poptropica. The site's 15th quest (island) is "Great Pumpkin Island", and features several of the Peanuts characters interacting with the avatars of Poptropica players. Again, the Great Pumpkin never appears.

References

Great Pumpkin Wikipedia