Month: October 2015

8 fun facts about It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

The Peanuts animated special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is celebrating it’s 49th year on the air this year. It airs tonight on ABC. Kids today can watch it whenever they want, but when I was a kid it was appointment television.

Here are eight fun facts you may not know about it:

  1. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the third animated Peanuts special to air on TV, preceded by the epic Charlie Brown Christmas the year before and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars! CBS asked for another “blockbuster” and this one delivered.
  2. This was the first Peanuts special to use the naming device of a phrase, followed by “Charlie Brown.” All the specials thereafter used this naming scheme.
  3. Animator Bill Melendez and director Lee Mendelson always insisted that children’s—not adult’s–voices be used in the specials. The one exception is Snoopy, who was voiced by Melendez himself for the first time in Pumpkin, and for the rest of the cartoons for nearly 40 years.
  4. In the scene where Lucy is looking at the TV Guide, her own picture is on the cover.
  5. The idea of Snoopy pretending to be the famous World War I “Flying Ace” fighter pilot, first imagined in the comic strips, came from Charles Schultz’s son Monte, who was obsessed with WWI aircraft and suggested the idea to his dad.
  6. Snoopy’s Flying Ace persona became a good luck charm for NASA’s Apollo astronauts and a symbol of safety for NASA. The Apollo 10 crew even brought aboard a painting of the Flying Ace into space and named their lunar module “Snoopy” because it was to skim the moon’s surface and snoop around for a landing spot for Apollo 11.
  7. Kathy Steinberg, the little girl who voiced Sally, had trouble pronouncing the word “restitution.” The solution was to have her voice each syllable separately and then splice it together.
  8. Kids were so upset about Charlie Brown getting rocks that they mailed candy to him care of CBS.

Courage: What is it?

When I think of the word courage, for some reason my mind immediately goes to the image of the lion tamer putting his head into the mouth of the circus lion. Courage as impressive bravery in the face of fear. The kind of courage it takes to do big things, like parachute out of an airplane, or rescue a child from a burning building.

But then, speaking of lions, I also think of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. I must confess that most of the time I feel more like the Cowardly Lion than the lion tamer.

Courage is not only needed for the big things. It takes courage to do little things as well, because sometimes little things loom large and intimidate us with fear. Like a young man asking a girl out on a date. Or the glance in the rear view mirror of flashing blue lights gaining on you.

And then there are the large, menacing trials of life that seem to consume us and tap our reserves of joy and peace until we are as dry as a bone. The death of a loved one. That cancer diagnosis. The boss from hell. Lingering financial issues.

The word that all these situations have in common is, wait for it… FEAR.

There’s a meme floating around the Interwebs that basically says: The Bible says “fear not” 365 times, one for each day of the year, so that we’ll be reminded every day to face the day with courage.

There’s only one problem with that nice, greeting-card thought. It’s not really true. I don’t know the exact amount of times the phrase is in the King James Version—maybe about 70. But the fact is the Bible does address fear and it does give us hope.

My goal in my study has been to walk through the Bible examining what it says to me about courage and “fearing not.”

The word “courage” itself originates from the Middle English word corage. Cor in Latin and cuer in Old French means “heart.” The word originally meant the heart as the source of emotions.

Today courage means:

  • the ability to do something that frightens one
  • the ability to do something that you know is difficult or dangerous
  • strength in the face of pain or grief
  • the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear
  • bravery
  • mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty

I’ve learned something about fear as I’ve studied courage. You don’t somehow make the fear go away, and then act in courage. Courage is confronting your fears; it’s the strength to press on in the face of fear.

Michael Hyatt says, “Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is the willingness to act in spite of my fear.”

Or as Franklin Roosevelt said, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.”

What do you think of when you think of the word “courage”?

Take courage, my friend

“2015: The Year of Courage.”

That’s what I see when I look in my journal on the page dated January 4, 2015.

I remember writing it. And I also remember how I felt when I wrote it: totally devoid of courage.

Nearly a year earlier, my sister had succumbed to cancer and had gone on ahead to her heavenly blessing. I felt like we were still reeling from the grief of watching her slip away in hospice.

My mother was getting sicker, in her tenth year of Alzheimer’s ravaging her mind and beginning to cruelly deprive her of control of bodily functions. Meanwhile, my father, in his nineties, was struggling to care for her.

Personally, I felt the weight of all of this, and the black void of depression was beginning to envelop me. I knew that big decisions were ahead for Mom and Dad, and yet I was struggling with the grief of losing my sister, which revived the grief of losing my other sister 30 years prior in a car accident. Plus the grief of slowly losing my mom, her life fading way over a period of years. And in the midst of this I was supposed to carry on with my job and my family. It was all too much.

As I looked ahead to the year 2015 that early January morning, I knew there was one thing I needed above all others. One word that encapsulated what I needed most from Christ at that moment: Courage.

At that moment, I began a journey that I am still on today. It’s a journey to glean what I can from God’s Word about what it means to have courage, the kind of courage that Christ gives His children.

I’m excited to bring you along on this journey as I share what I’m learning. Because one thing I have learned this year is clear: Everyone is either in a time of trouble, or just experienced trouble, or is about to head into trouble. And, thus, everyone needs courage.