Of Purple Prose and Arboreal Pumpkins

Artwork by Joseph Mugnaini

Ray Bradbury reportedly wrote The Halloween Tree in 1967 as a response to It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Seems he and his kids thought the pumpkin deity’s no-show was a cheat. If true, that has to have been one of the most egregious instances of “not getting it” of all time.

The first version of Tree was a script for a Halloween special to be animated by Chuck Jones. When nothing came of it, Bradbury turned the story into a book, published in 1972. He was finally able to get his cartoon with Hanna-Barbera in 1993. It is a very long cartoon.

I missed the novel when it came out. It might well have made the intended impression on me, sweeping my 12-year-old self up in the rediscovery of the forgotten, or misunderstood, origins of Halloween. When I finally came to read it a couple of years ago, I realized that I had made the attempt sometime before but dropped it out of shear irritation. Man, is it overwritten! Just the description of perfect Pip, “greatest boy who ever lived,” is a textbook example of How to Alienate Your Reader in Ten Words or Less.

Being something of a completist (beyond being a rooter for underdogs, which may partly explain the Pip-hate), I made sure to watch the animated movie. I’d read the raves. “Classic!” etc, etc. But here we are again with the purpling of Pip. The dog-like devotion of the four friends (eight in the book) who set out to meet him for trick-or-treating is actually alarming. I also find my eyes rolling at the sex change given Henry-Hank, costumed as a witch in the book but here become a girl, Jenny. It’s odd how some reviewers applaud the revisionism while dismissing as peculiar the notion of a boy dressed as a female on Halloween—something that I assure you was not so uncommon, was in fact considered good fun, in the 1960s (see Oct. 21, 2018.) So much for our grand twenty-first-century sensitivities.

But really, the main problem for me with the show (and the book) is the scattershot nature of the history lesson. Traveling through time, we visit Egypt, Stonehenge and druids and broom fields (it’s especially murky here), the gargoyles of Notre Dame, and Día de los Muertos. What about, oh, I don’t know, Ireland? Meanwhile, there’s selective bubble bursting about the role of the supernatural in all this. At one point we’re counseled that witches were only persecuted people too clever for their own good. But what about all the spirits the show has served up so far? What about that pact the kids later make with their scolding guide Moundshroud—with Death? Forget about fun and fantasy, trick or treat. One begins to feel Bradbury/Moundshroud is just a Killjoy.

One complaint, or acknowledgment, that even many of the program’s advocates make is that the animation is poor. Yes, it’s Hanna-Barbera, so we’re not getting the expressiveness and fluidity of Chuck Jones. But the background artwork is actually quite nice, often really beautiful. Occasionally, it even reminds me of the evocative backgrounds in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Which I think most of us can agree is the definition of classic.

The Halloween Tree on IMDb