How I Met Your Mother’s Memorable ‘Slutty Pumpkin’ Episode Was Inspired by This Halloween Kids’ Classic

• How I Met Your Mother co-creator Craig Thomas opened up on the How We Made Your Mother podcast about the inspiration for the show’s first Halloween episode, “The Slutty Pumpkin”
• Thomas said they were inspired by It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and wanted to compare Josh Radnor’s Ted Mosby to Peanuts’ Linus
• Thomas also explained why the show did so many holiday episodes — but also why they skipped them some seasons

How I Met Your Mother’s very first Halloween episode owes a debt to a spooky season classic — It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Josh Radnor, who starred as Ted Mosby, and series co-creator Craig Thomas talked about the episode on their recap podcast How We Made Your Mother. They discussed the episode, season 1, episode 6, titled “The Slutty Pumpkin,” in their April 28 episode, and answered fan questions about the installment in their May 1 episode. 

In the episode, Radnor’s Ted reveals his annual Halloween tradition — attending the same party on his apartment building’s roof where, four years earlier, he met a girl dressed a sexy pumpkin. They hit it off, but she wrote her number on a Kit Kat wrapper, and he lost it. Every year, he attends again, hoping to reconnect, and wearing the same costume, a hanging chad, a then-dated reference to the 2000 presidential election.

“The inspiration was, ‘Let’s rip off It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,’ ” Thomas, 49, explained of the first idea for the Halloween episode. So then the “slutty” Halloween costume “had to” be a pumpkin, even though it’s not necessarily the most obvious sexy costume. “That decision was made for us when we decided to ruthlessly rip off Charles Schulz,” he added.

The episode, Thomas said, was a “love letter” to the Peanuts special. He also thought “there’s such a comparison” between Peanuts’ Linus and HIMYM’s Ted, who have “a sort of hopefulness.” 

“This is an episode about Ted having faith and Ted sort of doing this ritual each year,” Thomas said, adding it was a way to get to know Ted better.

Radnor, 50, noted that Thomas and co-creator Carter Bays were “ big fans” of “holiday classics” and loved putting their own twist on them. “It’s like Shakespeare stole all these plots and updated them and made them his own,” he said. He added that “weird stuff” happens when people put on costumes. 

Thomas said they “loved” doing holiday episodes and were “so excited” when they had good ideas for them. “But if you didn’t, it was very daunting,” he said. “And that’s why some years we did them and some years we didn’t … We did a couple of really good holiday-themed episodes in the first couple seasons.”

But later, when they didn’t think they were going to “live up” to those episodes, they were too “scared” to do it again and not “live up to the grand tradition” they had made.  

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As for “The Slutty Pumpkin,” Thomas said the installment was “defining” for both Ted and Cobie Smulders’ Robin Scherbatsky. “We’ll use the Peanuts kind of hook to show an episode where Ted seems crazy for having this faith the way that Linus does, but in the end, faith is a good thing,” he said. 

Thomas also pointed out that the show has a fun Easter egg. In it, viewers learn Ted is a big fan of a cappella music. An a cappella group in the episode sings the Peanuts’ “Linus and Lucy” theme under one whole scene in the episode. 

As for the “slutty pumpkin,” Thomas said Ted knows it’s “absurd,” but “the slutty pumpkin is just representative of hope.”

In the series, both fans and Ted do eventually meet the “slutty pumpkin.” In the season 7 episode titled “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns,” which aired in 2011, Ted finally reconnects with the mystery woman, whose name is Naomi. Katie Holmes guest-starred in the role. 

And though Ted learns she’d been looking for him too, they soon realize they have no chemistry and are only clinging to that old optimism they had about it.