..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Good grief, Charlie Brown, what hath the Great Pumpkin wrought?

Like the benevolent orb of Linus van Pelt’s fertile imagination, Halloween has risen above its quasi-religious roots and blossomed into a holiday on a commercial par with Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving. Once merely a day set aside for English beggars -- who would exchange prayers for morsels of food -- Halloween has emerged as an infinitely more secular excuse for Americans to spend $6.9 billion each October on candy, costumes, haunted houses and, yes, giant orange squash.

It stands now as this country’s second-largest commercial holiday behind Christmas. And, that ain’t Peanuts, gang, even if the estate of the late cartoonist Charles M. Schulz benefits greatly from Linus’ dream of a Great Pumpkin that flies through the air and bestows presents on all the good girls and boys of the world.

Along with Schulz and musician Vince Guaraldi, who wrote the irresistibly catchy scores to the Peanuts cartoons, veteran animator Bill Melendez is at least partially responsible for turning Halloween into a month-long multi-media event, for children of all ages.

Before the debut of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, 38 years ago on CBS, Halloween entertainment was pretty much limited to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Bobby “Boris" Pickett’s “Monster Mash" and the annual blitz of classic horror movies at the local Bijou. Campuses didn’t routinely erupt in violence, as October gradually morphed into November; Devil’s Night revelers had yet to turn Detroit into the world’s largest ashtray; and The Munsters, The Addams Family and Bewitched were still decades away from being considered classics, worthy of marathon repeats on cable TV.

Back then, trick-or-treating took place in neighborhoods, not shopping malls, and any parent who spent more than $5 on a costume for their kids was put down as lazy, a show-off or criminally lazy. The arrival of puberty pretty much signaled the end of going out begging for packets of candy corn. Grown-ups didn’t desperately try to re-live their childhoods, by competing for the title of Scariest Haunted House.

Blessedly, the hoopla rarely lasted more than a week, or just enough time for the jack-o-lanterns to begin putrefying on a porch. Then, America enjoyed a bit of a breather before having to come to grips with Thanksgiving, and, immediately after that, Christmas (and, yes, Hanukkah and Kwanza) shopping. All very orderly, and all now very much a memory.

The frost isn’t even on the Great Pumpkin, and DreamWorks is releasing Surviving Christmas, on Friday. Castle Rock’s The Polar Express comes steaming in on Nov. 10, with Columbia’s Christmas With the Kranks arriving two weeks later. Already in video stores is Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure, and an animated Bikini Bandits Save Christmas due next week. Something for everyone.

If Halloween didn’t already exist, however, distributors of DVDs and other video products might have seen fit to invent a holiday just like it, before which they could release, re-compile, re-package and re-price all of the movies in their inventories that feature monsters, witches, serial killers, masked fiends, ritual sadism and pagan ceremonies. In other words, 60 percent of all films targeted at teenagers in the last 20 years.

Already this month fans of creature features have been rewarded with the second installment of Universal’s valuable Monster Legacy collection (films in The Mummy, Invisible Man, Creature From the Black Lagoon series) -- simultaneous to the Van Helsing launch -- and a boxed set of Friday the 13th chop-’em-ups. Also on tap are three films in the It’s Alive series, Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me but Your Teeth Are in My Neck, Tony Scott’s stylish The Hunger, Return of the Living Dead Part II, Gabriele Salvatores’ vastly under-screened I’m Not Scared, creepy Rob Lowe in Salem’s Lot, Lars Von Trier’s second feature Epidemic (1988), super-duper director’s cut editions of Oliver Assayas’ Demonlover and Dawn of the Dead, and Tom Hanks’ debut picture, He Knows You’re Alone.

Of all these titles, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown likely has inspired the most business from television advertising, book and video sales, ancillary consumer products, Halloween costumes, cross-marketing projects and audience growth.

Even though “Peanuts had a few years to go before it would become a national cultural phenomenon, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was a huge success for CBS. The network had commissioned the half-hour special after A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown’s All Stars! had demonstrated just how commercially viable Schulz’ comic-strip creations could be, even when transplanted into an unfamiliar medium.

Melendez had met Schulz while collaborating on a commercial project in the early’60s -- the granddaughter of an advertising-agency executive had suggested using the Peanuts characters in the campaign -- and both men felt comfortable together, first as artists and then as friends. In 1963, Melendez and producer Lee Mendelson came up with the idea of enlisting Guaraldi -- then, best known for the chart-topping “Cast Your Fate to the Wind" -- for the initial TV special, after hearing him perform in a San Francisco nightclub. The deceptively spare and breezy soundtrack, which included the oft-covered “Linus and Lucy," complemented Melendez’ uncluttered interpretation of Schulz’ world.

The 87-year-old native of Mexico remembers being dumbfounded by the positive response to “A Charlie Brown Christmas. Indeed, he still seems a bit mystified by the cartoons’ enduring popularity, characterizing it as a “happy accident.”

When asked if he felt somehow responsible for Halloween’s emergence as a major American holiday, Melendez was at an even greater loss for words.

“It’s news to me,” he said, sitting in his memento-filled office, hard by the Ventura Freeway in Sherman Oaks. “When we first started working on these specials, we had no way of knowing if there were any fans out there to support them. I didn’t think they were that important or monumental, so I was amazed by the reaction.

“I did it for fun, and because it was a good story … very illustratable. No one could imagine the specials would be repeated year after year.”

Beyond that, Melendez, added, “It meant that the same people who wouldn’t answer our knock on the door before the specials aired, now, at least, were curious about us. It made us acceptable in Hollywood.”

The word, “synergy,” wouldn’t be embraced by the corporate world for another 20 years, but the concept had already been mastered in the entertainment world by such visionary talents as Walt Disney and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

In the mid-’60s, half-hour cartoons had a difficult time getting noticed, even in Hollywood. Marketing campaigns were practically non-existent for such limited prime-time fare, and only the network brass gave a hoot about ratings. The ancillary markets were barely noticed, let alone exploited.

The success of the first two Charlie Brown holiday specials guaranteed that, henceforth, no holiday -- including Arbor Day -- would go un-commemorated by the Peanuts gang, or any other beloved cartoon character. The show had delivered exactly the right demographic audience to CBS’ advertisers, most of whom would kill to share a timeslot with Charlie Brown, Snoopy or, even, Pig-Pen.

Charlie Brown had a bit too much of Hamlet in him to qualify as a corporate mouthpiece, but Snoopy quickly emerged as the nation’s top dog. His likeness appeared on every conceivable surface, including a blimp.

For the advertising community to jump feet-first into such an expensive undertaking, though, it would first be necessary to make the buying season long enough to be justify extensive marketing campaigns. The roughly 30-day window of opportunity between Thanksgiving and Christmas no longer was seen as cost-efficient, either for toy makers or movie studios.

The seasons seem to grow longer with each passing year.

For many merchants, the Halloween push began right after Labor Day, with cobwebs and black cats filling the shelves recently vacated by back-to-school specials. The sounds of Christmas music already can be heard in the aisles of some warehouse-sized retail outlets.

“All of October is geared toward Halloween, but Christmas is always No. 1 … in fact, our ‘Christmas in July’ programming stunt has become very popular, as well,” observed Gary Marsh, the Disney Channel’s executive vice president for original programming and production. “Halloween is the ultimate wish-fulfillment-fantasy holiday for kids. It’s an empowering holiday that allows them to transcend reality, and, for once, make the decision as to who they’ll become for that day.

“We connect to Halloween when the kids connect to it. All of our shows have special Halloween episodes.”

Halloweentown III: Halloween High, which debuted on Oct. 8, completes the trilogy of original Disney Channel original movies set in a normal American city that also serves as a portal to the enchanted land where monsters go to escape reality. Kimberly J. Brown plays teenager Marnie Piper, an aspiring witch who lives in the “real world” with her mom (Judith Hoag) but often visits her grandmother (Debbie Reynolds) in Halloweentown.

Although the Disney Channel is included in most basic-cable tiers, it isn’t advertiser-supported. Like almost everything else on cable and satellite television, the three chapters of Halloweentown will be repeated several times during October. Unlike the vast majority of kids-centric programming created in the last quarter-century, Halloweentown has yet to make the inevitable crossover to the video and DVD marketplace.

Most new Halloween fare for pre-teens can be described as “spooky, but not scary.” The emphasis is on “empowerment” and story telling, not specials effects, faux gore and 2,000-plus years of religious and paranormal tradition.

Halloween also provides network marketing departments with other unique promotion opportunities. For instance, ever-enterprising Nickelodeon is in the midst of its on-air "Nick or Treat" sweepstakes, in which kids compete for a chance to go trick-or-treating with All That star Christina Kirkman and Zachary Williams, of Romeo!, in their own home town.

Peter Keefe, president and CEO of Earthworks Entertainment, reminds that Halloween-like celebrations take place around the world, providing several other opportunities for producers of seasonal entertainment for kids. Masks and costumes are all an integral part of the pre-Lenten celebrations of Fasching, Fastnacht, Carnival and Mardi Gras; Mexico’s Day of the Dead and England’s Guy Fakes (a.k.a., Bonfire Night), during the first week of November; and incipient trick-or-treat nights in Japan and Europe.

“Between Brazil and the United States, alone, there are 100 million kids,” says Keefe, whose company is releasing the animated features, Nine Dog Christmas, in time for Christmas, and Nine Dog Night of Fright, for Halloween, 2005. “And, for adults, these sorts of holidays trigger feelings, harkening back to our childhood … warm, sweet, honeyed feelings of happiness and frivolous abandonment. Masks and costumes allow kids and adults to escape from the rigid day-to-day world, and it relaxes us.”

“Nine Dog Night of Fright will hit the shelves of video and book stores about a month before Halloween. By substituting one pumpkin-covered dust jacket for something more generic, it can be sold year-round, just as is done in the cable universe.

ABC will air It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on Tuesday, Oct. 26, mere hours before tens of thousands of orphaned pumpkins -- in vacant lots, near and far -- will be unceremoniously pitched into the garbage, to make room for millions of Christmas trees. What happens to all the trick-or-treat snacks that go unsold is a question best left unexplored.

- by Gary Dretzka

October 19, 2004