1. It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the third Peanuts special (following Charlie Brown's All-Stars, and A Charlie Brown Christmas) to be produced and animated by José "Bill" Cuauhtémoc Meléndez. It was also the first Peanuts special to use the titular pattern of a short phrase, followed by "Charlie Brown", a pattern which would remain the norm for almost all subsequent Peanuts specials.
2. Bill Meléndez was the only person Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz trusted to turn his popular comic creations into television specials. He and his studio worked on every single television special and direct-to-video film for the Peanuts gang and Melendez directed the majority of them. He even provided the vocal effects for Snoopy and Woodstock in every single production, voice acting the characters in the studio by uttering gibberish, then the voices were mechanically sped up at different speeds to represent the two different characters.
3. When writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin, Linus states,
You must get discouraged because more people believe in Santa Claus than in you. Well, let's face it; Santa Claus has had more publicity, but being #2, perhaps you try harder.This is a cheeky reference to a well known advertising slogan of the time for Avis Rent-a-Car.
4. Peter Robbins provided Charlie Brown's voice, as he had done in the two previous Peanuts specials and would continue to do so until 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown. While Robbins, aged 14 in 1971, was replaced by younger child actors in the Peanuts specials produced after the 1960s, his trademark scream of "AUGH!!", first used here in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, continued to be used in the later specials for Charlie Brown and other characters.
5. Charlie Brown gets a rock at one house. According to Schulz in the book and retrospective TV special Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown, after the program first aired, bags and boxes of candy came in from all over the world "just for Charlie Brown" out of sympathy.
6. Actress Cathy Steinberg had almost finished recording all her lines of dialog as Sally when the producers received a phone call from Steinberg's mother informing them that one of Cathy's teeth was loose. Fearing that a sudden lisp would ruin the continuity dialogue, the producers rushed the young actress into the studio to finish recording her lines. Just as Steinberg was speaking her last line, the tooth came flying out of her mouth.
7. This is the only special where Pig Pen is shown wearing glasses. You can see them when he is with the other kids at the Halloween party around the apple tub just before Lucy bobs for an apple.
8. The music was performed by the Vince Guaraldi Sextet. Guaraldi's theme for the special, "The Great Pumpkin Waltz," is first heard when Linus is writing the Great Pumpkin at the beginning and plays throughout, but its the lively instrumental, "Linus and Lucy" which is mainly associated with this episode even though it originally appeared in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
"Linus and Lucy" is heard at the beginning of this cartoon as the pair prepare a pumpkin to be a jack-o-lantern, later as Linus mails his letter to the Great Pumpkin, and when Lucy wakes up at 4AM to take Linus home from the pumpkin patch.
9. When Linus walks into the living room after writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin, Lucy is sitting in front of the TV reading a TV guide. The picture on the cover of the magazine is a picture of Lucy.
10. Lucy's signature move - pulling the football away from Chuck as he's about to kick it, causing him to fly through the air and land on his back - was animated for the first time here.
Good grief!
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