40th Anniversary of a Classic

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip. In fact, I still am even though they've been in reruns for years. I still have the Peanuts books and collections that I received for birthdays and Christmas as a kid, including some from the very early days of the strip when none of the characters look like they did in later years. My son has been reading them now for several years.

This week the first animated Peanuts special, A Charley Brown Christmas, will celebrate its 40th anniversary. I always loved that show, and there's an article out today about how the show almost never happened:

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "

Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"

Read the whole article. There's some interesting facts about the creation of the first special, and some of the problems they encountered.