Costume Quest and the Mystery of the Great Pumpkin
Halloween isn’t just horror; it’s also sweet, goofy mysteries. #comic #strip #videogame
Welcome back to Artcade, as we edge toward a night teeming with monsters and sugar. You decide what to be scared of. If you’re stuck at a Halloween party yawning at the usual costumes (the toilet-paper mummy, the “sexy” witch, the door-to-door energy contract salesman), here’s something to jolt the evening: an episode of Artcade! Okay, maybe not a jolt, but hey, we tried. Isn’t that what really counts? Enjoy the read!
A few years ago Many years ago I used to read Peanuts without even knowing they were called “Peanuts.” I didn’t know who Charles M. Schulz was either, but I loved Charlie Brown, Snoopy, the dust-cloud kid, and the whole gang. I’d stumble across them in a summer comic or a stray newspaper page, so I read them out of order and lost the thread of the subplots. Every now and then I’d land on a Halloween strip and come away puzzled. Linus would spend the night in a pumpkin patch waiting for what the Italian edition called “Il Grande Cocomero,” literally “the Great Watermelon.” Who on earth was that? No one except Linus seemed to know. Thankfully, Linus explains to an uninterested Snoopy what the Great Watermelon means to him.
On Halloween night, the “Great Watermelon” rises from the watermelon patch he deems most sincere,
then takes flight, bringing gifts to all the children in the world who have been good!
Linus is convinced that every Halloween the Great Watermelon rises from the most sincere pumpkin patch and brings gifts to the children who believe. He writes letters about it, evangelizes his friends, and waits out in the field while everyone else goes trick-or-treating. Nobody else believes him, least of all Lucy. The Great Watermelon never shows, Linus shivers through the night, and the ritual resets the following year. It’s faith, stubbornness, and comic melancholy all rolled together. In other words, pure Peanuts.
But why did the Italian strips keep saying “watermelon” when Linus was clearly sitting in a sea of pumpkins? I kept hoping to come across a strip that would clear it up, yet once Halloween passed Linus would pick up his blanket and move on. Maybe he had bigger problems. As a kid, even the whole security-blanket thing felt a bit odd. I didn’t stumble on the answer until many years later, when I started reading Peanuts in English: Linus was waiting for the Great Pumpkin. It turned out to be an absurd translation quirk. How was that even possible?
Doesn’t she know it’s Halloween? Doesn’t she know I’m waiting for the Great Watermelon? I can’t go home now...
Over time I learned a few stories: one says the translator preferred a masculine noun in Italian that echoed Santa Claus and thought “watermelon” sounded funnier; another theory pins it on Oreste del Buono, who is said to have decided that “Great Pumpkin” wasn’t poetic enough; a third suggests that “watermelon” felt more Mediterranean and familiar at a time when Halloween wasn’t mainstream in Italy; maybe all of the above. None of the explanations fully convince me, and I sort of love that. It keeps the birth of the “Great Watermelon” a delightful little mystery running alongside Linus’s own saga with the Great Pumpkin.
Set on Halloween night, Costume Quest 2 puts you in the shoes, or rather, the costumes, of Wren, Reynolds, and their friends. The cartoony art and a steady drip of humor keep things breezy, even with a ruthless dentist cast as the villain.
Because of his thorny past (which the game reveals as you go), the dentist declares war on candy and sugar. It sounds like a Don Quixote–level crusade, but with a strange talisman and a few superpowered allies he tips the world into a full-blown dystopia where kids are taught that sugar is deadly poison.
Costume quest 2 is a very simple RPG where each kid wears a costume with its own special powers. You can find more as you explore, and they’re all wonderfully silly. Halloween here has the same light, mischievous flavor as Linus in the pumpkin patch, and the game proves that against dystopias you sometimes only need cardboard, tinfoil, and the courage to ring the wrong doorbell.
Double Fine Productions (2014) Costume Quest 2 [Video game] [Adventure] [6½ hours] (Xbox Series X) [Windows, OS X, Linux, Wii U, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 3/4/5, Xbox 360/One/Series S] Midnight City, Majesco Entertainment
Information Desk:
Costume Quest 2 doesn’t pick up directly from the end of the first game (Costume Quest) but from the finale of its expansion, Grubbins on Ice. If that sounds like needless homework, skip the prequel and dive right into the sequel. If curiosity nags you, you can skim the plot online.
The official Peanuts site has a Great Pumpkin page with printable games and coloring sheets for the small humans in your life (or the one inside you).
At its peak, Peanuts ran daily on 2,600 newspapers across 75 countries. Not bad at all.
My last two coins
Who decided horror has to yank us out of our seat? Is there a cabal of cardiologists mandating a jump scare every five minutes? Or am I just extra sensitive to anything that barges into the flow of a story? With Alan Wake 2 I jolt constantly; it’s not what happens, it’s how. If something snaps onto the screen out of nowhere, my hair stands up. I suspect that if Disney made Goofy pop into frame without warning, I’d react the same way. Is it just me? Until the next episode, ciao!