I always felt it was a lovely collaboration, and the collaboration lasted a very long time.” Bill would be the one to know how to liven it up and make it funny, and then Lee was the businessman who had to talk to the television stations and the advertisers. “They let Sparky lead: He came up with the idea of Lucy only wanting money, and Charlie Brown being depressed because he can’t get into the Christmas spirit. “It was Sparky who started out saying, ‘This is the story,’” Jean says of the trio’s creative process. But he had to sell that idea to his collaborators, including Mendelson and director Bill Melendez. When Schulz sat down to outline A Charlie Brown Christmas, one of the thematic points at the forefront of his mind was the increasingly commercial nature of the holiday season. (Photo: United Features Syndicate/Courtesy Everett Collection) But the original, uncut version of A Charlie Brown Christmas is available on DVD, Blu-ray and via digital delivery means like Netflix, ensuring continued life to the visionary efforts of Charles Schulz.Charlie Brown and Linus wrestle with the meaning of Christmas in A Charlie Brown Christmas. The special has been hacked by various network television editors seeking to stretch out commercial breaks and lessen controversial aspects. Like other Christmas classics, A Charlie Brown Christmas has lived on for decades with seasonal re-runs on television. A few months later, Charles Schulz and Lee Mendelson found themselves onstage accepting an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program. A Charlie Brown Christmas drew in 15.4 million viewers, placing it second in the ratings that week after Bonanza. Half of America tuned in – and they loved it. It was scheduled with no expectations of success and great fears that it might, in fact, create a backlash of sorts for CBS. But they had just a week to preview the special and a commitment to Coca-Cola to air it. In short, the execs at CBS hated A Charlie Brown Christmas. The voices had been done by real kids, not adult actors. With just a few months to produce Schulz, Mendelson, and animator Melendez put together a special that comprised of all the wrong elements necessary for a successful television special: There was not enough action. “CONFIRM SALE OF CHARLIE BROWN FOR CHRISTMAS TO COCA-COLA FOR DECEMBER BROADCAST AT YOUR TERMS WITH OPTION ON SECOND SHOW FOR NEXT SPRING. But Coke responded with a just a short telegram: Schulz and Mendelson’s one-page outline proposal was thin on details that likely would have been rejected by the corporate-minded CBS. It was commissioned by Coca-Cola, not CBS television. It is important to note the distinction of the creative process behind the creation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The cartoonist’s response, Mendelson recalls: “If we don’t do it, who will?” Mendelson and Melendez asked Schulz whether he was sure he wanted to include Biblical text in the special. Otherwise, Schulz said, “Why bother doing it?” There was talk of a Christmas play and a sad Christmas tree.Ĭharles Schulz insisted on one core purpose: “A Charlie Brown Christmas” had to be about something. Working by the seat of their pants they tossed out ideas for what Christmas would be like for Charlie Brown. Mendelson nonchalantly agreed it could be done and in the rushed fashion, he and Schulz crafted an outline for what would become A Charlie Brown Christmas. The documentary never went anywhere but visionary advertisers at Coca-Cola saw the beauty of an animated Charlie Brown and asked Mendelson if Schulz could craft a Peanuts Christmas special for TV. Set to original music composed by Vince Guaraldi the animated clip was the foundation for what others hoped would be a jump of Charlie Brown and gang from the newspaper comic pages to American television. That documentary featured a 2-minute animated segment of Peanut characters brought to life by Disney animator Bill Melendez. In 1963 television producer Lee Mendelson produced a documentary on Schulz, who had emerged in American pop culture due to the successful run of Peanuts, a comic strip featuring the now-familiar characters of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and gang. Schulz’s impact on Christmas is measured not by his work in print but for his animated Christmas television special that almost never saw the light of day. He was nearly right: the last Peanuts strip ran just a few hours after Charles Schulz passed away in the year 2000. That story, and countless regular human emotions and stories like it, were continuously conveyed in the comic strip that he vowed would outlive him. When he was in first grade, his mother helped him get valentines for everybody in his class so that nobody would be offended by not getting one but he felt too shy to put them in the box at the front of the classroom, so he took them all home again to his mother. Schulz himself was the model for the central character of the strip, Charlie Brown.
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