He painted it for his daughters a few years before he watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" with them in '66. Their shared dissatisfaction with the short inspired him to write his own Halloween special, with the imagery of this painting serving as the basis for his story.

While animator Chuck Jones loved the idea... MGM shuttered their animation department soon after agreeing to produce it. So in '72, Bradbury turned the script into a popular novella. That was finally adapted into animation by Hanna-Barbera in 1993.