It's the Great Old Ones, Charlie Brown!
Posted by:
Ken K. (IP Logged)
Date: 1 November, 2008 03:57PM
Okay, this has nothing to do with CAS, but then man does not live by CAS alone...
A few nights ago I was watching the Peanuts Halloween special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! (yes, I watch it every year) and bathing in childhood nostalgia when a certain scene made me sit bolt upright. It's the iconic scene where the kids are putting on their costumes. You remember--Sally holds up her sheet and shrieks at the horrible visage it assumes (shades of M. R. James!), Lucy dons a witch's mask not altogether unlike her normal expression, etc. The hapless Charlie Brown, of course, totally screws up his ghost costume by cutting eyeholes all over it. All these years I (and doubtless all the other viewers) had been feeling safely superior to that blockhead, Charlie Brown, who couldn't even wield a pair of kid-scissors.
My stunned realization was that I had been mistaken all these years, because the costume Charlie Brown inadvertently creates is not that of a ghost. Consider--what creature is described as an amorphous, shapeless mass covered in eyespots? Yes, there's just no way around it--Charlie Brown is trick-or-treating dressed as a Shoggoth!
The possibility that Charles M. Schulz was conversant with H. P. Lovecraft's oeuvre is a possibility that had never crossed my mind--indeed, it's difficult to see how it could have. But viewing the program as a coded communique to those capable of interpreting it explains so much--the aforementioned mask which only hints at what lies beneath, the WW1-era visions experienced by Snoopy (so reminiscent of the time-displacement in various HPL stories), even the failed ritual which prevents the Great "Pumpkin" from returning. It gives one furiously to think.
No wonder everyone gave him rocks.