Episode 954: The Problem with Lucy Is That She’s Right

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Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather spread the good news of The Great Pumpkin (He has sprouted!), and settle down for a chilly autumn night’s vigil over It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Pete lays out the competing exegeses of Linus’s faith: absurdist satire of religion in the form of a half-remembered druidic vegetable cult, or just a boy who mixed up Halloween and Christmas. We’ll never know, because if the Pumpkin doesn’t come, we weren’t in the “sincerest pumpkin patch” to begin with.

The crew tackle Linus, who keeps faith with tradition, Lucy, whot reats the holdiay as a carnivealesque inversion, Charlie Brown, who is a mockery of mid-century gender roles, and finally Snoopy who, in a world where adults are absent or reduced to wah-wah-wah, manages to smuggle in the adult world. This means war, in the genuinely perilous Red Baron sequence and subsequent 1917-esque escape across France, ending of course at a halloween party where Schroeder’s World War I songs bring his shell-shock back to the surface.

Matt’s two-year-old has, of course, the last word: “Snoopy has long ears.”

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• It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Wikipedia)
• Peanuts (Wikipedia)
• Garfield: His 9 Lives (Wikipedia)
• Manichaeism: Its History and Writings (Literature and History podcast)
• Peanuts Vaccination Arc (Tumblr)
• The first Peanuts strip (Reddit)
• “Charles Schulz’s final comic strip brought Peanuts to an emotional end” (Polygon)
• Jim Davis (cartoonist) (Wikipedia)
• Mark 10:13–16 (King James Version, Bible Gateway)
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wikipedia)
• Carnivalesque (Wikipedia)
• The Phantom (Wikipedia)
• Mister Ed (Wikipedia)
• 1917 (Wikipedia)