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TL;DR: 

  • It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will stream for free on Apple TV+ from Oct. 28 to Oct. 31. 
  • Apple TV+ subscribers can watch the classic 1966 Halloween special anytime. 
  • The special will not air on TV in 2022. 
Peanuts gang in the pumpkin patch in 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,' which you can stream on Apple TV+.
‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ | Apple TV+

Good grief! If you were hoping to celebrate spooky season with Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang, you won’t find them on regular TV. The classic 1966 animated special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown won’t air on broadcast television in 2022. But you will be able to stream the special for free in the days before Halloween. 

‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ streams for free on Apple TV+ 

This year, Apple TV+ has the exclusive streaming rights to It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Subscribers to the streaming service can watch the 30-minute special anytime.

Don’t want to fork over $4.99 per month to see Charlie Brown get a bag full of rocks? It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown will also stream for free on Apple TV+ from Friday, Oct. 28 to Monday, Oct. 31.

The Peanuts special is a Halloween classic 

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown premiered on Oct. 27, 1966, on CBS. It was the third Peanuts TV special, after A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars. After the success of the Christmas special a year earlier, producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez were under pressure to deliver another holiday hit to the network. Fortunately, the story they came up with proved as enduring (and endearing) as its predecessor.

In the special, most of the Peanuts gang are busy preparing for trick-or-treating and Violet’s Halloween party. But Linus is focused on writing a letter to the Great Pumpkin, whom he believes rewards the most sincere kids with toys. On Halloween, Linus skips the festivities to wait for the Great Pumpkin with Sally. Meanwhile, Charlie Brown (voiced by the late Peter Robbins) gets nothing but rocks when he goes trick-or-treating and his dog Snoopy imagines that he’s a World War I flying ace doing battle with the Red Baron. 

‘It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ is actually about Santa Claus 

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Though It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown takes place at Halloween, the special is actually a pointed commentary on another holiday’s traditions. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz intended the Great Pumpkin as a satire of Santa Claus. 

“We forget that there are hundreds of thousands of poor kids in this world who are lucky if they get even one or two presents at Christmas time,” Schultz said in the book It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic. “And here they’ve heard so much about Santa Claus and all the gifts he delivers. It must be very hard on a lot of families … now I may be way off on this Santa Claus business and it’s not a big deal, I guess. But the Great Pumpkin is really a kind of satire on Santa Claus, because Linus of course writes for gifts and expects to get them. And when the Great Pumpkin doesn’t come, Linus is crushed. It shows you can’t always get what you hoped for but you can still survive.”

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