A Charlie Brown Christmas by Lee Mendelson

The early Peanuts specials made use of both untrained kids and professional actors: Peter Robbins (Charlie Brown) and Christopher Shea (Linus) were working child performers, while the rest of the cast consisted of 'regular' kids coached by Melendez in the studio. When Mendelson told Schulz he didn’t see the Peanuts special being any different, the artist got up and left the room for several minutes before coming in and continuing as if nothing had happened. In the ‘60s, it was standard procedure to lay a laugh track over virtually any half-hour comedy, even if the performers were drawn in: The Flintstones was among the series that used a canned “studio audience” to help cue viewers for jokes. A Charlie Brown Christmas was going to have a laugh track. (It evened out: Schulz, Mendelson, and Melendez wound up earning roughly $5 million total for the special through 2000.) 4. Melendez wound up getting a paltry $76,000 to cover production costs. Instead, he proposed a half-hour, but had no idea how much the show should be budgeted for when he called colleague Bill Hanna (of Hanna-Barbera fame) for advice, Hanna refused to give out any trade secrets. Melendez felt the short lead time-only six months-made that impossible. When Coke executives got a look at the Schulz documentary and caught Charlie Brown on the April 1965 cover of Time, they inquired about the possibility of sponsoring an hour-long animated holiday special. CBS and Coca-Cola only gave them $76,000 to produce it. The finished documentary and its brief snippet of animation cemented Schulz's working relationship with the two and led Schulz to agree when Mendelson called him about a Christmas special. The cartoonist had seen and enjoyed executive producer Lee Mendelson’s documentary on baseball player Willie Mays, A Man Named Mays when Mendelson proposed a similar project on Schulz and his strip, he agreed-but only if they enlisted Melendez of the Ford commercials. Schulz capitulated to a full-length special based on the professional reputations of his two collaborators. Willie Mays played a part in getting it made.

The spots were animated by Bill Melendez, who earned Schulz’s favor by keeping the art simple and not using the exaggerated movements of the Disney films- Bambi, Dumbo-Melendez had worked on previously. He relented for Ford Motors-he had only ever driven a Ford-and allowed Charlie Brown to appear in a series of commercials for the Ford Falcon in the early 1960s.

His stock reply: “There are some greater things in the world than TV animated cartoons.” Since the debut of Peanuts in 1955, Charles Schulz and United Press Syndicate (which distributed the comic strip) had gotten a steady stream of offers to adapt the characters for film and television the artist was also directly petitioned by young readers, who would write Schulz asking when Snoopy would come to some kind of animated life.

A Charlie Brown Christmas by Lee Mendelson