A Charlie Brown Christmas was Rejected?!
It may be timeless now - but it wasn't immediately embraced
What films do you watch every December?
My top three are:
Die Hard (obviously a Christmas movie, can be enjoyed anytime in December)
2. It’s A Wonderful Life (Perfect on Christmas Eve)
A Christmas Story (Ideal on Christmas Day)
But when I was a kid, the December viewing staples were the animated TV specials from the 1960s: Rudolph, The Grinch, and A Charlie Brown Christmas.
I was surprised to read an article recently that mentioned A Charlie Brown Christmas was expected to be a flop in 1965.
What?! Why?
And how did A Charlie Brown Christmas become such an enduring holiday classic?
I was curious…
Charlie Brown (via the mind and hands of cartoonist Charles Schulz) first launched as part of the comic strip Peanuts in a handful of newspapers in October 1950.
The antics of the young Peanuts gang – including Charlie, Lucy, Linus, and Sally – caught on with adults.
A decade later, Peanuts had a large following across the United States, and Charlie and Lucy had even appeared in a commercial for Ford.
And the growing popularity of Charlie Brown gave producer Lee Mendelson an idea – one he described as “the best idea I’ve had in my entire life.”
In 1963, Mendelson had just finished making a documentary about baseball player Willie Mays, and decided that the creator of Charlie Brown and Peanuts would make an interesting documentary subject.
Luckily, Charles Schulz’s number was listed in the phone book, so Mendelson give him a ring. He learned Schulz had seen his documentary, A Man Named Mays – and liked it.
Mendelson pitched the idea of the documentary about Charlie Brown during the call, and Schulz invited him over.
A friendship – and creative partnership – was born.
Mendelson and Schulz then pitched their Charlie Brown documentary idea to various agencies – but couldn’t find a buyer.
The project seemed dead.
But then in the spring of 1965, their fate changed.
Coca-Cola was looking to sponsor a show for the holiday season of 1965 to reach their audience – families and children.
Coca-Cola asked their advertising agency, McCann Erickson, for ideas.
Charlie Brown had just graced the April 9, 1965 cover of Time magazine – and John Allen, an executive at McCann Erickson, remembered the Charlie Brown documentary pitch from two years earlier.
Mendelson received a call that would change everything.
“Have you and Mr. Schulz considered doing a Charlie Brown Christmas show?”
“Of course I said, ‘Yes,’” Mendelson recounted.
Mendelson immediately called up “Sparky” (Schulz’s nickname).
“There was a long pause – it felt like an hour though it was probably five seconds.”
“Then Sparky said, ‘OK, come on up.’”
McCann Erickson and Coca-Cola were going to make their decision in one week, so Schulz and Mendelson had to work quickly.
They brought in Bill Melendez, who had worked with Schulz on the animations for the Charlie Brown Ford commercial years earlier, and the three men got to work.
Schulz thought the story could revolve around a Christmas play.
“I had read The Pine Tree by Hans Christian Andersen and threw out the idea of decorating this ‘ugly duckling’ of a tree,” Mendelson said.
The tree would be sad and misunderstood – much like Charlie Brown.
“Bill suggested that we animate some kind of dance sequence, and we wanted to have them skate.
“We also talked about the music: We would have some Beethoven, some traditional, and Schulz had liked so much of the music Vince Guaraldi had written for the documentary.”
“All these ideas were flying around with no form, all in about an hour.”
Schulz wrote an outline that day.
“And that was pretty much what we did. Ninety percent of the show was out of whole cloth.”
But Charles Schulz had a few rules for the project.
First of all, A Charlie Brown Christmas had to be about the true meaning of Christmas.
He wanted to include Biblical text (from the Gospel of Luke) in the special.
When the decision was questioned by Mendelson and Melendez, Schulz responded,
“If we don’t, who will?”
Schulz also wanted his characters to be voiced by real children, not adult actors.
And he refused to use a laugh track (though it was standard at the time).
Schultz sent the outline via Western Union to Atlanta – and a few days later, Coca-Cola agreed to the terms and bought the project.
The trio had never done a project like this, and had just six months before the special would air.
While they worked on the story and animation, McCann Erickson set out to find a television network to air the special.
Halfway through production, McCann Erickson sent executive Neil Reagan to California to meet with Schulz, Mendelson and Mendelez and check on their progress.
The drawings were still black and white, and the pacing of the story was slow.
“This isn’t very good,” he told them.
But there was still color to be added – and music.
Four weeks before they delivered A Charlie Brown Christmas to CBS, Melendez and Mendelson gathered a group of 10 animators to see the first complete cut.
It didn’t go well.
After the special finished, the room turned quiet, and the animators were less than enthusiastic.
But one animator stood up and said, “You guys are nuts – this is going to run for years and years.”
But some of the mistakes – like the illegible white closing credits over a snowy background were “too costly to change.”
As the debut neared, Mendelson and Melendez were worried they were going to turn Peanuts into a flop.
“We thought we’d ruined Charlie Brown,” Mendelson said.
Less than a week before the airdate, CBS executives got a first look at the special.
“The general reaction was one of some disappointment,” said Fred Silverman, a former CBS programming executive.
“That it didn’t really translate as well as we thought.”
“They didn’t get the voices. They didn’t get the music. They didn’t get the pacing,” Mendelson said.
“They said: ‘This is probably going to be the last [Peanuts special].
“But we’ve got it scheduled for next week, so we’ve got to air it.’”
So on December 9, 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on CBS.
And nearly half of Americans watching TV that night tuned in – making it a smash.
Richard Burgheim of Time praised the special for its “unpretentiousness” and “low-key tone.”
“A Charlie Brown Christmas is one children's special this season that bears repeating,” he wrote.
Washington Post TV critic Lawrence Laurent wrote, “Good old Charlie Brown, a natural born loser…finally turned up a winner.”
A Charlie Brown Christmas would later win both a Peabody Award and an Emmy.
“Sparky, Mendelson and Melendez have touched something deep in our American soul with A Charlie Brown Christmas.
As with any great piece of art, as many times that you see it, you take away something new. The humor, the heart, the laughter and the tears.”
-Pulitzer-prize winning editorial cartoonist Mike Peters
And Schulz, Mendelson and Melendez would go on to create dozens of Charlie Brown specials for the next 35 years.
And in 1969, they even got to make the Charles Schulz documentary Mendelson had pitched in 1963 — Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz.
The jazz soundtrack (that so many had questioned) sold five million copies, and was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” American sound recordings in 2012.
![A Charlie Brown Christmas [VINYL]: Amazon.co.uk: CDs & Vinyl](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_K0t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F239c3392-7dae-48b3-a868-1b9311214eed_1500x1500.jpeg "A Charlie Brown Christmas [VINYL]: Amazon.co.uk: CDs & Vinyl")
And A Charlie Brown Christmas became a holiday classic.
It aired on CBS for 35 years, until ABC acquired the rights in 2001. It was still pulling in viewers when Apple+ bought the rights in 2020.
And though so many had doubted Charlie Brown back in 1965, Schulz wasn’t one of them.
Though he suffered from self-doubt and depression, Schulz believed that the audience knew what it felt like to fail — and he had confidence in the characters he created.
When asked why A Charlie Brown Christmas endures, Jean Schulz, the late cartoonist’s wife said:
“I think it has to do with the impact that A Charlie Brown Christmas had on the viewer when he or she first saw it. I think these first impressions are very important to us.”
Or maybe we relate to Charlie Brown because we know how it feels to have the proverbial football taken away — but we keep on kicking!
How’s this for Christmas spirit? Apple+ will be making A Charlie Brown Christmas available to non-subscribers for free from December 22-25.
FUN FACT:
When they heard Guaraldi’s score for the opening ice skating scene, Mendelson thought it would benefit from lyrics.
When the songwriters they approached passed, Mendelson sat at the kitchen table and in 10 minutes wrote “Christmas Time Is Here.”
“The words just came to me,” he said.
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-Beth
this is such a heartwarming back story! Charlie Brown is the best christmas movie of all time
My earliest Christmas memory. I was 1.5 years old when this show debuted. It is sublime.