A Charlie Brown Christmas (1964)
Back in 1964, Charles Shultz and Peanuts were already a quickly growing cultural phenomenon
- just like Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" was in the early nineties. Lee Mendelson, a producer of television documentaries, had just completed a project on Willie Mays, considered one of the best baseball players of his day, and decided that his next project would be about the worst baseball player of the day - Charlie Brown. Mendelson completed filming of the biography, but before the documentary was sold, a Coca-Cola representative asked him off-handedly if Shultz had ever considered a television Christmas Special for his characters. Mendelson lied unabashedly. "Absolutely!," he said, and promised the executive a copy of the outline within the next two working days.
He excused himself, and phoned Shultz with the good news that the Christmas Special had been sold. "What Christmas Special?" Shultz asked. "The one we're going to write tomorrow." responded Mendelson. The project also eventually included animator Bill Melendez, who had done Peanuts animation for a Ford Falcon commercial a few years earlier, and the jazz artist Vince Guaraldi.
CBS was concerned about the obvious religious overtones of the show, and rejected the program completely. At the last minute, they relented. And the rest, as they say, is television history. |
