Repelled by the commercialism he sees around him, Charlie Brown tries to find the true meaning of Christmas.
Global – When they finished making “A Charlie Brown Christmas” 50 years ago, the producers sat back and looked at their work. And they thought: Good grief.
“We just thought it was a little slow, and it was certainly not a traditional Christmas show,” said Lee Mendelson, the producer who persuaded “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles M. Schulz to adapt his popular strip about lovable loser Charlie Brown and his childhood friends into an animated holiday offering.
“When you’re too close to something, you get a little worried.”
Fifty years ago, producer Lee Mendelson argued that religion had to be kept out of prime-time entertainment.
Charles Schulz was insistent: “We can’t avoid it.”
A week before the December 1965 premiere, they screened it in New York for CBS, where two executives watched in stony silence. When the lights came up, one of the bosses told Mendelson, “Well, you gave it a good try.”
A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first prime-time animated TV special based upon the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. It was produced and directed by former Warner Bros. and UPA animator Bill Meléndez, who also supplied the voice for the character of Snoopy. Initially sponsored by Coca-Cola, the special aired on CBS from its debut in 1965 through 2000, and has aired on ABC since 2001.
For many years it aired only annually but is now telecast at least twice during the Christmas season. The special has been honoured with both an Emmy and Peabody award.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is also one of CBS’s most successful specials, airing annually more times on that network than anything else.
That humbly received TV special is now marking an unbroken half-century of annual telecasts, becoming a leading part of pop culture’s holiday canon. In a world filled with memes, “Charlie Brown Christmas” offers a number of its own, from Linus’ blanket-improvised shepherd’s headpiece during the school play rehearsal to Snoopy’s gaudily decorated doghouse to the gang’s inimitable dance moves during the jazzy theme, “Linus and Lucy.”
How has an animated special that looked as destined for failure as Charlie Brown himself wound up enduring so long?
“It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays,” Mendelson, now 82, said in a recent phone interview from the Bay Area, where he still operates his production company. “It was just passed on from generation to generation. … We got this huge initial audience and never lost them.”
TV historian and researcher Tim Brooks said that the familiarity of the half-hour Peanuts special is what has helped it last, as boomer and GenX parents reintroduce the program to their own kids. And it hasn’t hurt this year that Fox’s “The Peanuts Movie” has scored at the box office, grossing more than $84 million since its Nov. 6 release.
“It’s comfort in a difficult world,” Brooks said of “Charlie Brown Christmas,” comparing the special to popular holiday music such as “White Christmas.” “I did a study once of the popular Christmas songs, and they’re almost all from the ’40s through to the ’60s. It’s something about their being traditional that makes them so appealing.”
Simply put… a Charlie Brown Christmas reminds us that sometimes, we overthink this whole Christmas thing.
“Charlie Brown, you’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem,” Linus says.
Sources: A Charlie Brown Christmas
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