Charlie Brown turns out to be a 'Christmas' winner
LOS ANGELES — 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.”
A week before the December 1965 premiere, they screened it in New York for CBS, where two executives watched in silence. One of the bosses said, “Well, you gave it a good try.”
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, “A 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.”
ABC, which acquired the rights to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in 2001, will precede this year’s golden anniversary telecast today with an hourlong special, “It’s Your 50th Christmas, Charlie Brown,” hosted by Kristen Bell and including original music and guest appearances by Kristin Chenoweth, Matthew Morrison, Sarah McLachlan and others.
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.
Like many traditions that in retrospect seem obvious and preordained, the “A Charlie Brown Christmas” almost never happened. The publicity-shy Schulz, a Midwesterner who had transplanted to Sebastopol, Calif., had previously spurned numerous TV offers to capitalize on his comic strip. “Peanuts,” which first appeared in newspapers in 1950, gradually became a cultural phenomenon, the most influential comic strip in history.
Mendelson, then a young documentary film producer, got the familiar brushoff when he called Schulz with a proposal to make a movie about his life and the creation of Peanuts. But at the end of the conversation, Mendelson mentioned that he had made a documentary about Willie Mays, the baseball great whom Schulz idolized.
“Well,” said Schulz, who died in 2000 at 77, “if Willie Mays can trust you with his life, maybe I can trust you with mine.”
The cartoonist asked what the story would be. “Something you’re going to write tomorrow,” Mendelson replied.
Schulz quickly sketched a story line about Charlie Brown’s humiliating effort to direct the school play.
