It’s still August, but the sounds of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are already taking over the airwaves. The iconic soundtrack to the 1966 special produced by legendary jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi has re-entered the Billboard Top Album Sales chart at No. 46 for the week of Aug. 22, proving that it’s never too early to get into the Halloween spirit.
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One of the holiday’s most recognizable recordings, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown serves as the score for the animated perennial favorite of the same name. A half-hour spooky-season television special based on the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, the cartoon features Charlie Brown getting a trick-or-treating sack full of rocks, Snoopy living out his ace pilot fantasies, and Linus waiting in a pumpkin patch for the mythical Great Pumpkin.
View this post on Instagram“You must get discouraged because more people believe in Santa Claus than in you,” Linus writes in his letter to the Great Pumpkin. “Well, let’s face it. Santa Claus has had more publicity. But being No. 2, perhaps you try harder.”
The classic debuted on Oct. 27, 1966, on CBS and continued to air annually on network television. In today’s era of streaming, however, the Emmy-nominated toon has moved over to Apple TV+, where it streams exclusively, along with all the other Peanuts programming and specials. Now, getting nostalgic is as simple as pressing play. But until recently, hearing the wonderful tunes from the special was a bit more complicated.
Concord reported that the original recordings were thought lost. The first 2018 soundtrack had to be reconstructed from the TV audio. Then, after producer Lee Mendelson died in 2019, his sons searched the family archives and found the original 1966 session reels—in boxes labeled “Big Pumpkin Charlie Brown,” no less. Those tapes became the basis for the 2022 definitive 24-track edition, which includes musical cues and alternate takes of classics like “Linus and Lucy,” “Trick or Treat,” “Graveyard Theme,” and “The Great Pumpkin Waltz.”
According to InsideHook, Guaraldi’s relationship with Peanuts began in 1963 after Mendelson heard Guaraldi’s 1962 Grammy-winning hit, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” The track, which lays the foundation for “Linus and Lucy,” caught the attention of Mendelson, who recruited Guaraldi to the music for Schulz’s Peanuts projects, marking the start of a beautiful Peanuts relationship.
“Friends getting together and agreeing to have a good time,” Peanuts historian Derrick Bang told Den of Geek about the friendship between three men. “And you should include [animator] Bill Melendez. It was a quartet, not a trio. Schulz basically wrote the story outline, and then Mendelson would work with him and flesh it out, turn it into something that would run roughly 25 minutes. Melendez, at the same time, is taking notes and deciding on animated sequences.”
He added, “Occasionally, Guaraldi would be part of the conversation, most importantly in the case of Great Pumpkin. This was the show where Guaraldi decided that ‘Linus and Lucy’ would become the Peanuts theme. Guaraldi decided this was it. This was going to be the running theme for however long this series continued.”
Guaraldi, with support from bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Colin Bailey, became the Vince Guaraldi Trio and recorded the soundtrack at Desilu’s Gower Street Studio in Hollywood. Emmanuel “Mannie” Klein provided the trumpet, John Gray the guitar, and Ronald Lang the woodwinds, with John Scott Trotter, former music director for Bing Crosby, overseeing the production.
The compilation originally debuted on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart on Oct. 2, 2021, at No. 25, then peaked on Sept. 24, 2022, at No. 21. With the soundtrack re-entering more than two months before Halloween, it looks like fans are getting an early start this year, and more importantly, nowhere near tired of hearing Guaraldi’s magic.
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