It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Charles Schulz’s classic tale of religious zealotry and a town’s rock-giving hatred of one sad little boy, has long been a staple of Halloween season TV. And, like many holiday programs, Pumpkin has earned its classic status more through a combination of nostalgia and charm than laugh-out-loud jokes.
Luckily for us all, the crew at Rifftrax (a.k.a. Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy) have teamed up with Mashable to give the classic cartoon the nasty, funny, darkly satirical edge it’s always secretly needed. So if you’ve ever wanted to hear perennial football puller Lucy Van Pelt get called a “stone cold [beep],” or see her brother Linus compared to the Heaven’s Gate cultists, now’s your chance. Nelson and crew have even thrown a bone to the nonagenarians in the audience with an Audie Murphy joke, certain to tickle their funny bones and 23 their skidoos.
The 4-minute video is intended to promote Rifftrax’s upcoming lampooning of the 1997 Jon-Voight-gets-eaten-by-a-snake classic Anaconda, which will be streaming live to theaters across America on Oct. 30. And if you’d like to watch It’s The Great Pumpkin without a bunch of wiseasses cracking jokes over it, ABC will be doing their traditional broadcast on Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. ET.