Linus has been sitting in that pumpkin patch for sixty years. For two days next month, watching him do it costs nothing. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown streams free on Apple TV on October 17 and 18, with no subscription and no trial required.
The same arrangement covers the other two Peanuts holiday specials later in the year: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving on November 14 and 15, and A Charlie Brown Christmas on December 12 and 13. Each one opens for a weekend and then goes back behind the $14.99 monthly subscription. An iCloud account is still required to press play, which is how a free weekend earns its keep.
The Halloween Special Lost Its Broadcast Home
The free window means more for the Halloween special than for the other two. Apple took exclusive rights to the Peanuts library in 2020, ending a run on network television that began when CBS premiered Great Pumpkin on October 27, 1966 and continued at ABC from 2001. The move to streaming drew enough complaints that Apple and PBS announced a deal that November for ad-free broadcasts of two of the specials.
Those two were Thanksgiving and Christmas. Great Pumpkin was left out, and it has not been part of a broadcast deal since. So the October 17 and 18 window is the only way to watch it this year without paying Apple.
The Great Pumpkin Never Shows Up
The special belongs on a horror site because it withholds the payoff a children’s cartoon is supposed to deliver. Linus waits all night in a cold field for a figure nobody else believes in, and the figure does not come. Charlie Brown works an entire neighborhood and collects a rock at every door. Snoopy’s World War I flying ace sequence, scored by Vince Guaraldi, is a dog hallucinating being shot down over France. Nothing resolves. Linus is carried home shivering and still promising to be back next year.
Few horror movies manage a bleaker ending, and it is why the special has outlasted every other Halloween cartoon of its era. The lesson on offer is that you can believe in something completely, do everything right, and still spend the night alone in a field.
October 17 is also the day the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa marks the special’s 60th anniversary with a screening, crafts and live music from 1 to 5 p.m. Jason and Sean Mendelson, sons of producer Lee Mendelson, are scheduled to talk through the making of the special at 2 p.m.
The free weekend lands in a crowded stretch of Halloween programming. AMC brings back FearFest with the Crypt Keeper as host, and Netflix is dropping roughly two dozen horror movies on October 1.
Sixty years on, the ending has not moved: no Great Pumpkin, no candy, and Linus insisting he will do it all again. Two days is a narrow window for something that has been running on faith that long.
