Just finished watching It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on Apple TV.  It's nice the streamer is allowing people to watch it for free between Friday and tonight, but it should be on broadcast TV (and at that it should be on CBS, where I remember watching it when I was really young).  But I'm glad I'm still able to watch it as it's my Halloween tradition.

Saying that, it's dated as hell.  Not just the animation, but the increasingly anachronistic and, I think, troglodyte thinking that passed as humor back in 1966, when it was broadcast for the first time.  Let's face it: Lucy is a bitch.  Yeah, she brought her little brother Linus in from the cold, but that's the least a big sister should do.  All the "blockhead" references get tiresome after the third time and, frankly, a bit hurtful after the tenth.  And they all pile on Charlie Brown so hard I go from feeling sorry for the dude to thinking that Charles Schultz is throwing a pity party for himself.  (There was a biography about him that painted him as all-too human, his anxieties and biases shading the reputation of a comic strip artist that inked a certain age of childhood so indelibly in the newspaper every day.)

Saying that, I think the subplot of Snoopy as the WWI flying ace remains one of the most psychedelic and brave pieces of animation ever made.  Apparently, Executive Producer Lee Mendelson told The Washington Post that Snoopy flying on his doghouse like it's a Sopwith Camel is "one of the most memorable animated scenes ever."  Not going to disagree.