October 28, 2006:
I think I'm going to make an annual tradition of taking pictures of my television when It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown plays during prime time, and using them as a backdrop for a whiny, directionless Halloween Countdown entry. It worked last year, anyway.
The truth is, I want so badly to still be a person who can be here and do this on a daily basis, but it's just not the case anymore. I mean, I can try, and sometimes, the stars will align jussst right enough for me to pull it off without anyone realizing that I'm not still a person who can be here and do this on a daily basis. Other times, like this week, where we've gone Countdown entry-less for three days, the microscopic cracks turn into big obvious holes, and next thing I know, there's e-mails in mah box callin' me an asshole and threatening my future children. But what can I do?
I can watch It's The Great Pumpkin, and I can try to remember why I do this in the first place. It's harder to stand out now than it was before. A lot of people do this kind of thing now, and a lot of what I think I'm digging up for the first time, or maybe second time, or maybe third time online is already all over YouTube and Wiki. It's tough when I look at how much has changed on here, how technologies have increased and how general styles have evolved, and I realize that I'm still doing the exact same thing I did with the very first article on this site in April of 2000. Half of me believes there's a beauty in that; the other half worries that I'm getting too old to resonate with the kind of demographic a site like this would conceivably attract. My pie charts must look all screwed up.
Then I remember how much Time used to be on my side. Now, Time is like my arch-nemesis. Time, always fucking my shit up. Time, always stepping in to blow down my awesome tower of cards like a big, tangible, vindictive bitch. I used to sit on the patio eating cake with Time, and he'd tell me to have another slice. It didn't matter. I could still do what I wanted to do, because what I had to do was what I wanted to do. There's a bigger distinction now. There's things I have to do, and things I want to do. In a way, maybe it's better that this falls into the latter category. People can forgive me for saying things like "I'm going to update every damn day" and fail when they know I really didn't want to fail. It's easier to understand "couldn't" than "wouldn't."
Granted, what I'm writing here tonight means more to me than it does to you. Obviously it does. And even with my guard down, this is still a veneer, but I have to say something that doesn't feel like a routine. Maybe I should confess something. Like how I still can't tie my sneakers, I don't know. I'm human. So are you. If you're a regular reader, we're probably very much the same kind of human in many ways. We're the kind of people who'd keep using the word "human" in a conversation until one of us says "more human than human," and then we'll both throw up devil hand signals and know it's funny because neither of us ever listened to White Zombie through more than pure incidence in our lives. We'll be okay, especially when holiday specials are on television.
Halloween and I have a strange relationship. I like it more in August than I do in October. It's partly because I'm wiped out after writing so many tributes to it, but I think there's more to it than that. I guess Halloween is a mounting crescendo that rarely quite pays off for me. I get so fucking excited when department stores first put together their spooky scary costume aisle, but by now, in my head, I'm so done with it. Ready to unwind and/or ready for the Christmas season, which has always been more "my time" than anything with a black-and-orange color scheme. I start to think of Halloween like I do Time -- as a person -- and I feel really guilty about it, like I'm in a relationship that I'm about to end, or like I'm fake-cheating on Halloween by jerking off to pictures of Santa from the Sunday circulars. I don't know.
I stop feeling that way when something like a Great Pumpkin prime time network broadcast happens. It's like, okay, you can stop searching around and stretching for reasons to love Halloween, because here, now you have one. You've got the Great Pumpkin. A fine cartoon filled with fine Halloween-themed television commercials, all part of a fine annual tradition that you've finely crafted over the course of your fine finening life. Relax. Enjoy. Go take a piss during the Snoopy Red Baron sequences like you always do, but otherwise...relax, and enjoy. Sit on the couch, wrap yourself in blankets and drink something that wouldn't feel as right to drink during any other calendar month. You're doing what you're supposed to be doing now, but not just because you're supposed to be doing it. Way to be, my friends.
A few weeks ago, a reader e-mailed me to ask who the fuck that kid with the orange sleeves is. I'm glad he asked, because few others seem to have ever noticed this mystery boy, and the ones that did chalked it up to something it isn't, like an animation flub or sheer black magic. This scene is from the Halloween party sequence, where the kids finish apple bobbing and are ready for tricks or treats. Who is that boy? Let's dissect.
Charlie Brown had a multi-hole ghost costume. It's not him. Sally's got a normal ghost costume, but it's not her. Lucy's a witch, so it's definitely not her. Schroeder is a man-witch, and we could get into the Dan Conner argument about how that'd make him a warlock, but either way, that's not him saluting Snoopy either. Patty? Violet? Hells no.
I've researched. It's a boy named "555 95472." More commonly known as "5." For serious. Same kid that did the eagle dance in the Christmas play. Check this out:
That's a desktop background swiped directly from the official Peanuts site. See that orange-shirted kid down there, partly obscured by Pig-Pen? That's 5. Same haircut and shirt as 5 was seen wearing in other Peanuts toons. And the sleeves match up with the mystery boy that held the door open for Snoop Dog. It's 5. Don't argue. Agree with me so we can move on and give three cheers for that gamut of awesome paper Halloween decorations hanging from the ceiling.
IMDB lists this sequence as a goof, saying it's Charlie Brown with an incorrect costume. IMDB is wrong. I know, it's hard to believe that IMDB could be wrong. They've never ever ever been wrong before. That's NOT Charlie Brown. It's 5. 555 95472.
It's funny. You've seen this special a thousand times, and I've seen this special a thousand times. And yet, there's always something I catch that I never noticed before, or at least, there's something I never noticed and said "hey wait" in response to before. Example: When Linus and Sally are in the pumpkin patch, and he's talking gibberish about the impending arrival about the Great Pumpkin. There's this split second scene where Linus's eyes get so large that you can actually see white in them. They're not black dots for that split second. They're crude white circles with little black dots inside them. There's no way I didn't see it before, so why was it striking me as such a crazy thing last night? Was I paying closer attention? Maybe my idea of humor has changed between then and now, and where formerly something like Linus with white circle eyes would've meant nothing, now it's a reason to cackle. Watch the special and look for this scene. Tell me it's not messed up.
Then there's this other scene -- the one where Snoopy dances along to Schroeder's piano playing during the Halloween party. It felt like, 6,000 times longer than I ever remembered it being. It was to the point where I was absolutely sure that I was watching some kind of special extended edition meant to celebrate the Great Pumpkin's 40th anniversary. The fact that I never really noticed how insanely long this sequence lasted provides hope that I'll someday watch It's The Great Pumpkin and stumble onto a scene featuring Violet beating on Patty with a bat.
Commercials that air during holiday specials work for me the same way commercials that air during the Superbowl work for most. There's a certain delight in seeing these kid-skewing ads on prime time television. Sure, it's a little less of a big deal now that we have so many all-day kids networks smashed all over cable television, but this is network TV, see, and the fact that I saw an ad for some godforsaken high-end Power Wheels truck at 8:12 PM on ABC warmed my soul like ethereal wonton soup. Sure, now I'm of the age where commercials for real trucks should be affecting me more than commercials for toy trucks, but I've already pledged my allegiance and it's too late for a take-back.
Course, if the commercials are holiday-themed, that's all the more reason to breakdance. M&M's makes good on their vow to rock our worlds with a Halloween commercial, starring anthropomorphic candies who can't gain access to a hot costume party. Aside from one really borderline K-Mart ad, this is the only Halloween commercial I remember seeing, which shifts M&M's up the trick-or-treat ladder past Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, but not quite on a step high enough to tackle fun-sized Snickers off the throne. They're getting closer each year. Snickers better hire a CG crew and stick cartoon eyes on one of its candy bars before it's too late.
Fucking Christ, Ronald, what's happened to you? If you've seen any kid-skewed McDonald's commercials recently, you may be wondering why Ronald now spends his time dancing, pole-vaulting and playing Frisbee rather than, you know, telling us to eat cheeseburgers. It's not that he's had a change of heart. People have come down so hard on McDonald's for the shocking revelation that it in fact sells unhealthy food that, between all of the new rules for child marketing and the people who make movies about dying from eating McD's food, the company won't even show Ronald in the same city as a cheeseburger anymore. Instead, he promotes "healthy living." When I grew up, Ronald would get Shakespearean haircuts while dipping forty-five living Chicken McNuggets into barbecue sauce. Now I have to watch him playing DDR while the Pump Panel Reconstruction Mix of New Order's "Confusion" from the Blade soundtrack blasts in the background. It's gross.
The real irony is that the McDonald's ads that cater to the adult market are absolutely littered with beauty shots of fried crap. I'm not sure how the distinction makes any sense. You can hide crap food from kids or parade it around in front of them; parents still make the call, because they've got the car, they've got the money and they've got the Power of the Punch. It's not that this is such a passionate subject for me -- I just miss commercials where we'd see kids in school doodling McNuggets in their notebooks, only for the doodles to come alive and turn into enough real McNuggets for the whole class to share. That, plus, Ronald looks like an idiot playing DDR.
It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was everything it needed to be. I felt better. As I was watching the special, which I knew full well to be a thirty-minute special, I kept wondering why it had an hour allocated to it. After the end credits rolled (with Linus giving Charlie Brown the business the whole way through), I found out. To extend the 40th anniversary celebration of Chuck's Halloween special, they also aired 1972's You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown. This seemed strange at first, since the special has absolutely nothing to do with Halloween and absolutely everything to do with garnering viewer complaints that ABC couldn't just give the extra thirty minutes to Garfield's Halloween Adventure. Alas, it all tied together in the end.
See, the special deals with Linus's run for class president at school, with Lucy being his campaign manager and everyone else pitching in to make sure he gets the popular vote by any means necessary. Linus ultimately wins, but not before almost blowing it all by talking about the Great Pumpkin during his final campaign speech. (Hence the "HA HA" graphics -- everyone laughed at him.) So there, the decision to run You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown wasn't completely arbitrary. Plus, it was interesting to note how every character's voice sounded 100% different between the first and second specials; particularly Linus, who went from a garbled-but-coherent little boy to a fifty-year-old man trapped in a second grader's body.
The best part of the special was the minute appearance by 555 95472, because I needed a smoking gun for the case stated earlier. That's him up there in the orange shirt -- note the "5" iron-on in the second picture.
I know I'm probably wrong about 5 holding the door open for Snoopy in the Halloween special, but let's pretend I'm not because it gives this article some semblance of meaning besides me saying "sorry for not posting any articles lately."
At the end of the hour long block, which sadly featured no celebratory interstitials about what an impact It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown has had during its forty year run, we got a teaser announcing that ABC will air A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving this November. Yessss. Jelly beans and toast. Yesss.
After that, I just sat quietly on the couch, trying desperately not to pay attention to Men In Trees. I thought about what Halloween means to me, and about what writing about Halloween means to me.
I ripped open a bag of Great Pumpkin fruit snacks and flipped through a Wal-Mart circular informing me of the incredible markdowns on every costume they have in stock. A few hours later, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 came on Bravo, with the first beats of its opening credits perfectly aligning to a sudden storm outside. Rain clanged against the dormant air conditioner outside my window. Lights flickered and candles were lit. More Great Pumpkin fruit snack bags were shredded open. I saw that M&M's commercial again.
That's what Halloween means to me. As for what writing about it means to me...I guess this is it. Even when I mess up. Even when my heart can only afford to be half here and half there, it still means a lot. Makes me miss out on some action, but if I can't be Spider-Man, I'd still rather be Uatu than Speedball. Because who the fuck is Speedball?
