Mar 25
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Happy Birthday Simon 🎂💙🎃
1981's Amazing Spider-Man Vol.1 #219 cover by artist Frank Miller.
Photos by Karen O'Sullivan, courtesy of Ray Parada's "Somewhere Below 14th and East, the lost photography of Karen O'Sullivan"
Trick or Treat, Charlie Brown! It sure is fun when Charlie Brown and his Peanut pals get together for the big Halloween Celebration. In fact
Every October from 1966 until 2020, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" etched itself into across the collective consciousness of young darklings with it's once a year broadcast on network television. (To watch it, click on the above link & jump to 5:45 on the timeline.) The importance of "The Great Pumpkin" to me and my fellows, regardless darkling or normie, cannot be overstated. Elementary school children simply did not miss "The Great Pumpkin." However, it lost much of it's 'weight,' for lack of a better term, once VCR's became available. Prior to those wondrous devices, you literally only had one chance per year to watch "The Great Pumpkin" - that's it. To be a kid & miss "The Great Pumpkin" airing was akin to Linus fainting and missing the arrival of The Great Pumpkin, himself. I recall hearing the tragic tale of one kid on the school bus who had missed the airing the previous night as his house had lost power & we all sat in silent horror at this revelation - a fate worse than death or dentist visit.
Of course, me being me, I had already somewhat prepared for such an unthinkable eventuality by having acquired a copy of the 1967 book adaptation of "The Great Pumpkin." In the 70's, my folks choose to live in the boonies, so losing power for no reason was something that could happen. Fortunately, I never did have to cower in a dark corner, clutching my well worn book copy, silently cursing the Fates for inflicting such an indignity upon me. After all, this was one of those vanishingly rare instances where the book version was objectively not as good as the TV version.
(Just as an aside, my fav Charlie Brown character was always Schroeder. I never gave it much thought, but Schroeder is actually kinda goth with his dark colors, quiet demeanor, & music obsession, so...makes sense. I imagine when he hit his teen years, he joined a goth band, died his hair black, & played wicked dark keyboards at countless gigs.)
Fast forward a few years & I can still vividly recall my profound shock at learning a friend of mine, who owned an early VCR, had recorded "The Great Pumpkin" upon it's previous airing. It was a singular wonder to be able to watch something you could previously only have seen once a year, watch it whenever you want, & not even need to find the most sincere pumpkin patch as prerequisite to do so. It was as if you could reach up into the heavens &, with a simple twist of hand, rewind the celestial sphere back in time to the previous eclipse or passing of Haley's Comet, so staggeringly cosmic in power it seemed. There we sat, watching "The Great Pumpkin" in early December of 1981 & it was a big enough deal to me that I still remember it as if it happened merely a month ago. And I wasn't even really that much into it anymore as I was 11 going on 12 at that point & was eager to put 'childish things' behind me. But I still watched it right the way through. I'm sure it found it's way to most folks VCR's during the 80's, & was officially released on VHS in 1988 & DVD in 2000, so I'm sure nowadays it's a rare household with children which lacks their own copy of "The Great Pumpkin."
Of course, there were other Halloween children's specials eager to rake in the chips like "The Great Pumpkin" did, but none of them ever reached the same level of quality as "The Great Pumpkin." Unlike most other Halloween children's specials, "The Great Pumpkin" has several sequences that, to a child, are legitimately spooky, such as the intro sequence, Snoopy making his way behind enemy lines, & the rising of 'The Great Pumpkin' in the pumpkin patch. I can still recall cynically thumbing through the TV Guide at any given year's new entries & weighing each against "The Great Pumpkin." Be it "Halloween is Grinch Night," "Fat Albert's Halloween Special," or "Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween," all were decidedly lacking. There were some older ones that I'd see on local independent stations that were reasonably good, such as the stop motion "Mad Monster Party" but even that was still a distant second. To this day, no Halloween children's special can hold a Jack-o-lantern to "The Great Pumpkin."
So this Halfway to Halloween, take a 25 minute break to revisit everyone's favorite Halloween special, & may the pumpkin patch in your particular neck of the woods always be the most sincere.
creaturesfromelsewhere 4-29-2024
Rotten Apples & Frontier Justice
Rotten Apples and Frontier Justice
By CowboyJen
My best friend Kendra had a small overbite that she grew into but there were a few boys who liked to tease her about it. One very hot summer day we were riding our horses in the old apple orchard down in what was soon to become a rural suburban development dubbed Woodland Estates. The two brick walls with cement lions on them already graced the entryway of our riding trail.
I was around 11 and she was 10. A few of the boys were riding their bikes up and down the paved road which had been a dirt path a few weeks prior and the novelty of having blacktop was too much to resist. They basically rode up and down back and forth and the speed bumps were great to “get air”.
We ignored them, they ignored us, the way it was meant to be. One boy, and we will never know why, and perhaps he didn’t know either, suddenly felt pretty brave and breached the unspoken boy/girl wall. Maybe having his friends nearby to back him up or maybe to prove he was “a man” or If you believed my mom, it was “his way of showing us he had a crush”. No matter his reasons. He waited until we had dismounted to feed green apples to the horses Beau and Gypsy and veered off the smooth black top. He stood on his pedals to gain speed as he approached and he was bent forward over that K Mart bike’s handlebars as he got closer and closer. We saw him coming and sort of just watched the on coming flurry of feathered hair and Starsky and Hutch T shirt.
This boy, thinking to spook the horses and cause us trouble passed us as close as he could and yelled “Bucky the Buck toothed Beaver!”
Kendra was unphased and so were our seasoned mounts. She took the apple that was meant for Gypsy and hit the boy right in the back of the head from about a 12 foot range. The rotten part splatted in his dirty blonde hair but the solid part made an audible “thud” as it connected to his thick skull. He screamed in pain “shit.. ouch!” and slid his bike sideways in the grass, staining his Sears Husky jeans no doubt. He paused a second on the ground, probably debating if pretending to be really hurt might save him or hoping his friends were on the way. No luck either way so he stood up, picked up his bike and faced us with green grass stains and what was likely sweat, apple juice and tears on his face.
Before he could turn to mount his bike I took my shot. Wham, right in the knee, not as accurate as Kendra but it got his attention. The look in his face was that of a man who suddenly realized he had severely underestimated the enemies he decided to create. Kendra already had two apples in hand and I reloaded while she fired off another shot. One missed, hitting his bike as it dropped to the ground. The other caused him to holler out “stop!” when it hit him in the stomach.
Two tween girls, who both had their own baseball gloves and killed long summer days throwing rocks at trees and golf balls at tin cans are formidable foes. Poor kid realized the error of his ways too late. There was no time for him to formulate a plan. The onslaught of rotten green apples put him squarely in survival mode and he ran to the nearest dwarf apple tree. He hid behind it and tried bargaining. “Stop it you guys!” One, two, three apples whizzed by him and one hit the tree causing a satisfying splatter pattern. “Come on guys.. stop!”. A few more hits and we began to flank him. Our horses calmly grazed the shaded grass and we loaded our arms and moved to flush him from his barrier.
In a moment of what I am sure he thought was brilliance, he grabbed a low branch and swung up, taking a hit to the seat of his pants and one to the back. A hard, well aimed hit in the soft part of the small of his back. I heard it and Kendra said “ooo nailed him”.
Like a squirrel in Traxx Tennis shoes he moved around the tree and climbed up to a more covered branch forcing us to back away to see him better. Kendra seemed satisfied that he was out of range and I followed her lead to walk backwards to the horses. She started to pile up apples and he yelled down “Knock it off you Ass holes, i need to go home”. We bit into and chewed the bitter green apples while sitting on the ground next to our ammunition pile. The other boys had dropped their bikes by the Lion topped brick walls and were sitting on it, watching. The trapped boy noticed them and pleaded “Guys.. come help”. They only responded with “they are just girls” but none of them jumped down to aid him.
It was getting to be suppertime and he decided we had grown tired of watching him. He slowly descended but as he hit the last branch before the ground we pelted him with the squishiest apples we could pick up. The splatter was satisfying but watching him scramble back to his perch was even more so.
We ate snacks from our saddle bags and waited. He tried a few times to make an escape. Once even jumping to the ground and trying to make a run for it. He was not fast enough nor tolerant of pain enough to get more than one step before swiveling and scratching his way back to his previous perch. The funniest attempt was when he tried something he had seen in the movies. “I will come down with my hands up” and as much as we wanted to see that Kendra and I bombarded the tree trunk. Every time he would try the pain of the projectile apples kept him in his place.
In the final stages before the street lamp came on (we had one now) he begged “I’m supposed to be home now. Mom is going to be really mad”. We sympathized slightly, knowing the mom wrath of those kids late for supper or not home right after the darkness triggered the light to come on. But I guess he shouldn’t have hurled that insult. .
The other boys had left, we were bored and. in desperation, and wishing he would not have hogged so much Kool Aid he yelled. “I gotta pee really bad guys.. come ON!”. He had two choices, unzip and pee from the tree, which would expose him just enough that we would have future ammo about “what we saw” or well, not unzip. His body made the decision for him. Enough was enough and we rode past him with a final apple lobbed over his head. We never spoke of that again. Not to him, not to each other, no one. He had done his time. Frontier justice had been served. Lesson learned.
Lessons: Don’t be a bully. If you drink too much Kool Aid and decide to take on two tween girls, it is best to have an exit strategy. Girls can’t always throw as hard as boys their age but their accuracy can be scary good. Girls have more stamina and patience in a stand off than you want to test. Straight girls can and will take it to the next level.