IT'S CHRISTMASTIME AGAIN, CHARLIE BROWN
Celebrated classic that almost wasn’t celebrates 50 years
Good grief, TV executives can be such blockheads.
Back in 1965, when CBS bigwigs got their first peek at “A Charlie Brown Christmas” during a meeting with its creators, they thought they had a flop on their hands. The animation was deemed too crude, the pace too sluggish, the story too thin. And that offbeat jazz soundtrack? It was all wrong for a children’s show.
AAUGH!
“We sat there in complete despair,” says Lee Mendelson, who directed and served as executive producer for the “Peanuts” special. “I remember them saying, ‘We’ll put it on one time, and that will be it.’ We thought we had ruined Charlie Brown.”
Of course, they had done nothing of the sort. When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted Dec. 9, 1965, nearly half the country watched it. Charles Schulz’s low-key protest against holiday materialism went on to become a beloved staple of family traditions and a landmark of pop culture known around the world.
This year, the “Peanuts” program celebrates its 50th anniversary with an airing preceded by a star-studded salute hosted by Kristen Bell and written by Mendelson. And one more time, millions will gather around their TV sets to watch Linus take center stage to recite a Bible passage, Snoopy domi-
nate a house-decorating contest and a forlorn Charlie Brown bestow love upon a runty little tree.
“I read somewhere that President Obama and his wife rank it as their favorite Christmas show,” says Mendelson, 82. “And Tom Hanks was on ‘Ellen DeGeneres’ talking about how the holiday season doesn’t really start until ‘ A Charlie Brown Christmas’ comes on. And, of course, the music is played everywhere. … The whole thing is just surreal.”
Mendelson is relaxing in his spacious Hillsborough home, where reminders of the yuletide classic he made with Schulz and animator Bill Melendez abound. Among them: The Emmy and Peabody awards won by the show are displayed in a glass cabinet, colorful “Peanuts” action figures sit atop a shiny white piano, and out in the backyard is a 7-foot statue of that roundheaded kid with his emaciated tree.
“Can you imagine the reaction of my neighbors when they saw that thing being trucked in here?” he says with a laugh.
It’s easy to understand why Mendelson, a Stanford grad and documentary filmmaker who started his career at KPIX, holds a special place in his heart for “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” It’s the show that put him on the map and paved the way for a 30-year collaboration with Schulz that spawned more than 40 animated “Peanuts” specials.
The concept for the program came together quickly over a weekend when he and Melendez met with Schulz, then living in Sebastopol. The trio had agreed to whip out a show to be sponsored by Coca-Cola, even though none of them had ever produced a half-hour animated special.
Schulz, who then taught a Sunday school class, suggested that they have Linus read from the Bible about the birth of Jesus. Mendelson and Melendez shot each other skeptical looks.
“I spoke up gingerly. I had never heard of anything so serious being done in an animated cartoon,” Mendelson says. “But Schulz just said, ‘Well, if we don’t do it, who will?’ And, of course, that became the climax of the whole show.”
Schulz and his collaborators went on to flout convention in several other ways. They eschewed a laugh track, and instead of using adult actors to supply the voices of the kid characters — as was typical in those days — they relied on actual children, some from Mendelson’s neighborhood.
For the music, they tabbed San Francisco resident Vince Guaraldi, whose work Mendelson first heard on the radio during a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge.
“I always loved jazz,” Mendelson says. “And I loved his music, because to me, it was both adult and childlike — adult in its improvisation and childlike in its beats and melodies.”
The production, which was crammed into just six months, necessitated 13,000 individual drawings and some quick thinking on all fronts. Mendelson, for example, wrote the lyrics for the opening song, “Christmastime Is Here,” on an envelope in about 15 minutes. Guaraldi then scrambled to recruit a children’s choir from San Rafael to record it.
The rush job led to a few visible blunders. In one scene, Pigpen briefly vanishes from the screen midsong. In another, Schroeder’s fingers come off the piano, but the music continues to play. Charlie’s tree loses, then miraculously regains, a few branches.
“We had all kinds of Charlie Brown-like goof-ups going on,” says Mendelson, who managed to correct one very embarrassing miscue before the airdate: Schulz’s name had been misspelled in the credits.
So under-the-gun was production that the show didn’t get delivered to CBS until a week before its scheduled debut — a development that proved to be fortuitous.
“I really believe that had we given it to them much earlier, they wouldn’t have aired it. They would have just killed it,” Mendelson says. “But it was so lastminute that there was no time for anyone to stop it.”
Schulz, Melendez and Guaraldi have died, leaving Mendelson as the lone link to the show’s core creative team. In his home office, he keeps one of only three original hand-painted cels that remain from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
“In those days, we threw that stuff away,” he says with a sigh. “Can you imagine that? Tossing out 13,000 Picassos?”
Mendelson still takes time every year to watch the humble little special with his seven grandchildren, who range in age from 1 to 25. And he still marvels at its ability to stir emotions.
“It all goes back to Charles Schulz,” he says. “He dealt with eternal truths and was ahead of his time in so many ways. He had the first comic strip to deal with feelings, and that was the first animated TV show to deal with feelings. He was a philosopher, an entertainer and an artist. And everything came from that fountain of genius.”