Does the Great Pumpkin really exist in the Peanuts Universe?
Recently my family was watching "It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" from 1966 and I recalled how the plot of the show came from comics that were written over time in the years before the cartoon game out. And one thing we talked about was whether Linus was correct that The Great Pumpkin actually exists, or was everyone else right and it was in his imagination.
It seems a reasonable question, because one thing about Linus is that he's usually the wisest character on the show. Like the rest of them, he has flaws but he tends to see things more clearly than the rest.
Well, I was looking for old Peanuts strips and I found one that seems to answer the question in this article:
https://screenrant.com/funniest-peanuts-comics-about-great-pumpkin-linus-disappointment/
It is under item 4, "Great Pumpkin, You're Going To Drive Me Crazy!" November 1 1961.
Here is a direct link to the comic in question, (not sure if it will work long term).
In the comic, Charlie Brown says: "Hey wake up, Halloween is over... You missed The Great Pumpkin. It just came over the radio... He appeared in a very sincere pumpkin patched owned by someone named Freeman in New Jersey!"
When I was a kid we had a book that had a lot of the older Peanuts comics in it, and I'm pretty sure that I had seen this one and just forgotten about it.
So I think one of the following is true:
- The Great Pumpkin really exists in the Peanut's world
- Charlie Brown is lying
- Charlie Brown is teasing
- The radio was lying, like when NORAD reports where Santa's sleigh is on Christmas eve
- Charlie Brown misunderstood the radio
This question may have been answered in a later strip a day or two later, but I don't currently have access to the strips in the order they appeared.
This question is mostly about whether Charles Schulz decided to have magic in his "universe" or not.
What do you think?
I don't have an answer, but a possible explanation is that Shulz is making a reference that's been lost to time, such as a radio commercial or a (then) current event in the New Jersey area, that was widely known in the early 60s. This would fit into the "Charlie Brown misunderstood the radio" answer.
Mentioning New Jersey and the name "Freeman" is pretty specific, which made me suspicious. Charlie being confused about some current event or ad would make sense for the tone of the comic rather than Linus being right all along, or for Charlie to tease Linus like that. If the joke was Linus being teased or lied to, Charlie would probably be making a sly face or laughing or something in the last panel, and I think Shulz would have used a different character like Lucy for that joke, it's pretty out of character for Charlie.
It occurs to me that the War of the Worlds radio broadcast ((1938) reported an alien invasion that began in New Jersey, but I don't know how Freeman fits in. There was an American libertarian magazine (1950-2016) called The Freeman. Maybe they once wrote about the Great Pumpkin?
You may be right that it is a reference to something topical that is now obscure. Schulz would do that from time to time.
I remember one strip that I first saw in a compilation. The punchline was “Hyannis Port”, and I had no idea what it meant. My parents explained to me that it was where the Kennedy family spent their vacations.
There was another strip with a gag built around one of the gang seeing a photo of a little girl playing on the White House lawn. It was only many years later that I understood that it was a reference to a famous photograph of Caroline Kennedy.
This is a fun question. I loved Peanuts when I was growing up back in the 60s and 70s, and I remember a lot of the strips in the article you linked to from when they first ran.
I just looked up the strip for the following day, and it has nothing to do with Halloween, so apparently this issue is never resolved.
My gut feeling is that the Great Pumpkin doesn’t really exist in the Peanuts world. Linus may be the wisest character in the strip, but he’s also neurotically dependent on his security blanket, so he’s not entirely stable. The Great Pumpkin is his delusion.
I also think that it would be very out of character for Charlie Brown to lie to Linus, or tease him.
That leaves the other two in-universe possibilities you laid out.
I think the real explanation is that Schulz was usually pretty good about continuity, but not above contradicting himself for the sake of a gag.
I think it’s much more likely that Schulz would break continuity than have his own self-insert do something so out of character.
Even the idea that a radio broadcast would mention the Great Pumpkin is a bit contradictory, since in other places, the Great Pumpkin is presented as Linus’ invention that only he and the other kids in the gang know about.
You mean they report a decoy location or something? I suppose operational security is as important for Santa Claus as it is for anyone else.
Yes, I wouldn't exactly call it a lie but, NORAD reports a slightly obfuscated and delayed location for Santa. This is both for security purposes as well as simply being a logistical limitation. On the big night Santa is moving at such an obscenely fast rate that it is near impossible to give perfect tracking of where his team is. This is why we don't see NORAD report Santa exactly over every house ( it's actually an interesting problem about being able to track the location of an object that is moving near, or possibly over, light speed then report that location using our current telecommunication networks that also obey the speed of light but I unfortunately don't know enough about that to really write about it) They do their best to give an idea of where Santa is but it's not perfect. This is also why it's important you get to bed at least a little bit before Santa is reported in your area because he is likely slightly ahead of wherever NORAD is currently reporting him.
NORAD knows this because it knows where he isn't. By subtracting who's sleeping from who's awake, or who's awake from who's sleeping (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation...