For day #5, I chose a movie my Mom called her favorite Halloween watch: It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! The music and animation alone are wonderfully nostalgic and seasonal!
As I watched this movie for the first time in years, I was surprised by how anticlimactic it was. There’s no Great Pumpkin, not even a hint of him, and the film ends with Sally furious, Charlie Brown with a bag full of rocks, and Linus stubbornly delusional. Lucy’s the one with the most character development: she mocks Linus for his tradition, but she gets extra candy for him during trick-or-treating. And when she finds Linus missing on November 1st, she brings him home from the pumpkin patch and tucks him into bed. She may act haughty, but she genuinely cares! It’s so sweet.
However, my biggest rush of nostalgia came not from this movie itself, but the memory it awakened within me: the Poptropica island based on it!
I was quite the Poptropica fan as a kid, and I played many of its islands multiple times. Skullduggery is still a favorite of mine! The end of Flash meant that Poptropica, while still an active site, removed many of its iconic older islands! It’s such a tragedy.
But oh man, the flashbacks I experienced from this movie! I distinctly remember loving the Red Baron fighting sequence, followed by an army-crawl escape back to safety, only for my avatar to end up at the Halloween party! Such fun!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can hunt down a way to find that old island. That’s where the true spirit of the season resides for me!
