Vince Guaraldi - It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music From The Soundtrack

In the early 1960s, Charles Schulz's comic strip Peanuts was entering into a long period of enormous international popularity, which others in the entertainment industry were eager to capitalize on.  Television producer Lee Mendelson was keen to produce a documentary featuring Schulz and the success of his strip, and by 1964 had established a good working relationship with the cartoonist which also morphed into a fast friendship.  The documentary Mendelson envisioned would be mostly live action, with only a couple of minutes of animation included.  For that, Schulz recommended an animator named Bill Melendez, who he had earlier worked with for several years on a series of commercials for Ford vehicles featuring the characters.  

But despite his efforts, and the acclaim for the strip, Mendelson couldn't interest any of the then-existing networks in funding and airing a Charlie Brown & Charles Schulz documentary of the type he had in mind.

However, Peanuts-mania continued unabated; in the spring of 1965, the Peanuts gang was featured on the cover of Time magazine.  Shortly after the release of that issue, Mendelson was contacted by representatives of McCann Erickson, a New York-based ad agency whose biggest client was the Coca-Cola Company.  He was told that Coca-Cola was looking for a Christmas holiday special to sponsor, envisioning a half-hour animated program to air on the CBS Television network, and wanted to know if he and Charles Schulz were interested.  The two completed and forwarded to Coke executives a show outline from scratch in a single day, and after belated approval from the corporation, completed the production of that first special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, in just six months.  

Many of those involved in the making of A Charlie Brown Christmas and corporate and network executives were convinced that the program would be a disaster, due to its relatively slow pacing, flat animation, odd jazz-influenced music score, no laugh track and the inclusion of the reading of a Bible verse in the middle of it.  But for the fact that the special was completed only ten days before its air date, it might not have aired at all ("I really believed, if it hadn't been scheduled for the following week, there's no way they were gonna broadcast that show," Mendelson later said).  But CBS was left with practically no alternative but to show it.

Instead of being a disaster, the first showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, on the evening of Thursday, December 9th, 1965, was a smash hit, with almost half of the TVs on that night tuned in to the program.  The special ended up being the #2 show for the week (behind Bonanza), garnering considerable critical acclaim as well, and during the following year's awards season winning not only an Emmy but a Peabody award as well (the show is also credited with killing off the decade-long aluminum Christmas tree fad; within two years of its airing, the ornamental trees were no longer being regularly manufactured).  It also set the template for the subsequent tradition of half-hour animated television specials (Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer had begun airing in the years prior to the Schulz special, but both were full hour-long programs).

Eager to exploit what they saw as a winning formula, Coca-Cola immediately commissioned another Charlie Brown special, Charlie Brown's All Stars, to air during the summer of 1966.  That show was also a huge hit, the top-rated show for that week, with ratings and audience share rivaling that of the Christmas special.

With the added success of the second special, Mendelson, Schulz and Melendez figured they were in a pretty good place with the network.  But that impression soured with the very next meeting, held the week after All Stars aired.  From Mendelson's recollection of the conference:

Network Exec:  Congratulations.  The ratings [last week] were great - two in a row!  ...What do you have in mind for the NEXT one?

Mendelson:  Well, we really haven't discussed it...

Network Exec:  We want you to come up with a BLOCKBUSTER like Christmas... something we can run every year, sometime between October and February.  ...If we don't get a blockbuster, we may not pick up the option [for additional Peanuts shows}.  Can you do it? 

On the spot, Mendelson agreed to do it, although at that point he had no clue as to what sort of story idea and setting the production team could come up with in which to place this anticipated "blockbuster".  However, going back to Schulz and Melendez, within a week the trio had hashed out an outline focusing around the Halloween holiday, based upon a series of strips printed in October, 1959, where Linus, confusing the traditions of Halloween and Christmas, began believing in the Great Pumpkin, a magical being who was claimed to bring toys and gifts to deserving children every October 31st.  The "Great Pumpkin" stories became an annual theme in the comic strip for every October afterwards, so there was a wealth of input and gags for the team to mine.  Other now-iconic elements and scenes, such as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, and Snoopy as a World War I flying ace, were added, along with scenes involving Schroeder and his piano so the team could once again engage the services of jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, whose score for the Christmas special was widely celebrated.

Guaraldi was enthusiastic about scoring another Peanuts-related project, his fourth after ...Christmas, ...All Stars and the unsold Schulz documentary.  In his excitement and interest regarding the many scene and mood changes in the Great Pumpkin script, he composed twenty original songs for the program in the basement of his San Francisco home, and expanded his regular recording trio to a sextet to include a flutist to accentuate the loneliness and isolation of scenes with Linus sitting in the pumpkin patch.  He also re-utilized the song "Linus and Lucy" from the Christmas show, establishing it as the signature tune for all subsequent Peanuts specials.

 

The time allotted for production of the Peanuts Halloween special was even shorter than that for A Charlie Brown Christmas - just four months this time, rather than the previous six.  But with a solid story and chops honed from the previous specials, the show was completed and ready to air far ahead of time. The initial broadcast of It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown occurred on Thursday, October 27th, 1966 on CBS.  It was an even huger hit than A Charlie Brown Christmas, scoring a 49 share in the Nielsen ratings (meaning almost half of all TVs on that night were tuned into the program) and tied for the #1 show of that week.  Although it was nominated for Emmys in the next year for "Outstanding Children's Program" and "Special Classifications of Individual Achievements", it did not win (in the former category, both Great Pumpkin and All Stars were nominees, which I think split the Peanuts votes, allowing some forgotten Jack & The Beanstalk cartoon from NBC to walk away with the award).

However, the show was immediately hailed as a classic, and celebrated for its artistic style; unlike the first special, It's The Great Pumpkin utilized much more camera movement.  And artist Dean Spille went the extra mile, and hand-painted the backgrounds of the French countryside during Snoopy's flying ace sequence, utilizing a linear perspective rather than the regular flat design of the earlier shows.  To this day, those scenes are recognized as a major achievement, and influenced several other animated specials for years to come.  The show was also the first Halloween-related special, establishing that holiday as a television genre.  And the execs got what they asked for: It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was rebroadcast annually on network TV (on CBS until 2001, then on ABC) for the next fifty-three years, until Apple TV+ purchased the rights in 2020.

I adore both A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown - but if I had to chose between the two, I'd go for the latter, every time.  The Great Pumpkin just hits me different...  And I'm not alone; the program is regarded to this day as the best of all the Peanuts specials.  When I was a kid, I couldn't WAIT until the night this program aired!  It was the perfect way to get into the anticipatory mood for upcoming trick-or-treating and other Halloween shenanigans.  It's sort of sad now that kids today don't really have the chance to see it as their parents and grandparents viewed the show, as a widely anticipated annual network event and tradition - somehow, watching it on Apple TV+ just doesn't feel the same to me.  Despite the program's now-wide availability and easy access, to this day I REFUSE to watch it at any time other than the Halloween season.

Although the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was released immediately after the show's first airing (on Fantasy Records in December 1965 - it is still the second-best selling jazz record (behind Miles Davis's Kind Of Blue) and top-ten best selling Christmas album of all time), it took decades for the Great Pumpkin soundtrack to see the light of day.  Concord Music announced that it would be releasing the long-awaited soundtrack in 2018, but discovered that the original studio master recordings were missing.  So instead, the label released music culled directly from the special's audio track, removing any dialogue and most of (but not all) extraneous sound effects, a move that Concord Music was heavily criticized for.

After Lee Mendelson's death in 2019, his children combed through his basement archives, searching for any Peanuts-related music he might have retained.  In mid-2021 they finally found some of the original monaural analog session reels recorded for the show in 1966.  The tapes included nearly all of the music cues recorded by Guaraldi, along with several alternate takes.  Concord utilized these masters to rerecord and reissue the soundtrack album the following year, although some songs remained missing, forcing the label to one again use some selections from the audio track, albeit 'cleaner' versions.

So here for your perusal is the reissued It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music From The Soundtrack, recorded by the Vince Guaraldi Sextet in Hollywood on October 4th, 1966, and released by Concord subsidiary Craft Recordings on August 26th, 2022.  I hope that this selection gets you and your family into the Halloween mood!  Have a happy October 31st... and as always, let me know what you think.

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