Before the steady stream of Emmy and Grammy nominations and Oscar consideration came The Idea — the one that producer-director Lee Mendelson, nearly a half-century later, calls with a certain zest “the best idea I’ve had in my entire life.”
“I’d just made a documentary about the best baseball player in the world,” says Mendelson, 77, referring to his award- winning NBC work about Willie Mays. “So I decided to make a documentary about the worst baseball player in the world.”
That would be Charlie Brown.
Mendelson read a “Peanuts” strip about the perennially losing kicker and thought: Why not make a documentary about the cartoon’s creator?
Mendelson called fellow northern California resident Charles Schulz — “his phone number was listed right in the book,” the producer recalls — and proposed the documentary. Fortunately, Mendelson says, Schulz had seen “A Man Named Mays” and liked it. “Sure, come on up,” Schulz replied, so Mendelson motored up from San Francisco to Sebastopol, and right there in the heart of wine country, the inspired ideas began to ferment and a 38-year friendship and creative partnership took root.
By 1965, the two men — working with veteran Disney and Warner Bros. animator Bill Melendez — collaborated on their first work, the holiday special “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” a TV show that took chances and defied certain conventions (eschewing even a laugh track) and, ultimately, remained utterly authentic to the trio’s collective vision.
The debut of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” would capture not only the Emmy and Peabody awards but also roughly half the people watching television across America. And its place in the nation’s holiday hearth has remained fixed ever since. The special celebrates its 45th anniversary this month, and ABC next will air it Thursday (7 p.m. KMGH-Channel 7). It’s also viewable at .
As viewers tune in to see a sparse and wilting Charlie Brown Christmas tree — a conifer embodiment of Chuck’s hard-luck seasonal mood — a question about this beguilingly humble cartoon perseveres: Why, precisely, does “A Charlie Brown Christmas” endure?
“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,” says Jean Schulz, the late cartoonist’s wife. “It might have been as a child sitting with parents. Or it might have been adults in their 40s or 50s who were delighted to see a meaningful, adult-themed show that brushed aside the platitudes that surround public dialogue and then passed this on to their children and grandchildren.”
In his recent autobiographical book “Manhood for Amateurs,” the Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Chabon wrote of the “Peanuts” special’s lasting appeal.
“That show, in its plot, characters, and perhaps above all in its music, captures an authentic bittersweetness, the melancholy of this time of year, like no other work of art I know.”
Part of the magic of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Mendelson says, is the evocative appeal of the music. It was in 1963 that the producer was in a car heading across the Golden Gate Bridge when he heard Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Mendelson was struck by the jazz track and contacted Guaraldi to write music.
“He said, ‘I’ve got to play this thing for you,’ ” Mendelson recounts. “I said, ‘I hate to hear it over the phone,’ but he insisted. He played (what became) ‘Linus and Lucy.’ It was jazz for adults but still had a childlike quality.”
Mendelson and Schulz’s first collaboration was the planned documentary, which featured the cartoonist drawing and discussing “Peanuts.” The strip launched in October 1950 in only a handful of newspapers, but by 1963 had amassed a large national following.
The two men shopped their new project to agencies but, to the producer’s surprise, they couldn’t land a buyer.
Early in 1965, however, Coca-Cola came calling. Executive John Allen remembered the “Peanuts” pitch. Now, he had a counter pitch.
“Charlie Brown was getting huge by April 1, 1965, when Time magazine put ‘Peanuts’ on its cover,” Mendelson says. “We got a call from (ad agency) McCann Erickson, which had Coca-Cola as a client.
“They weren’t interested in a documentary, but they said: ‘Have you and Mr. Schulz considered doing a Charlie Brown Christmas show?’
“Of course I said yes.” Mendelson called Schulz with the pitch: “There was a long pause — it felt like an hour, though it was probably five seconds. Then Sparky said, ‘OK, come on up.’ ”
After the initial call to Mendelson, Coca-Cola and McCann Erickson were going to make their decision in one week’s time. Translation: In an era when Western Union was their fastest form of written communication, Mendelson and Schulz had only a few days to cobble together an outline.
They immediately brought aboard Melendez, who several years earlier worked with Schulz on a Ford account featuring “Peanuts” but had never headed the animation of a full-length cartoon.
Schulz insisted on one core purpose: “A Charlie Brown Christmas” had to be about something. Namely, the true meaning of Christmas. Mendelson and Melendez asked Schulz whether he was sure he wanted to include Biblical text in the special. The cartoonist’s response, Mendelson recalls: “If we don’t do it, who will?”
The result — Linus’ reading from the Book of Luke about the meaning of the season — became “the most magical two minutes in all of TV animation,” Mendelson says.
