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| A Charlie Brown Christmas, 1965 |
Today, The Grandma is at home. She has started to prepare Christmas. Altough she is not a believer, she considers this festivity a cultural event and a historic fact to preserve and to enjoy.
She has put a giant Tió in the middle of her living room and she has gone to the public market to buy the ingredients for her Christmas soup.
After visiting the market, The Grandma has relaxed watching TV. She has chosen a wonderful movie named A Charlie Brown Christmas, the first TV special based on the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz that was released on a day like today in 1965.
Before redecorating her house and going to the public market, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a 1965 animated television special, and is the first TV special based on the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz. Produced by Lee Mendelson and directed by Bill Melendez, the program made its debut on CBS on December 9, 1965.
In this special, Charlie Brown finds himself depressed despite the onset of the cheerful holiday season. Lucy suggests he direct a neighborhood Christmas play, but his best efforts are ignored and mocked by his peers. After Linus tells Charlie Brown about the true meaning of Christmas, Charlie Brown cheers up, and the Peanuts gang unites to celebrate the Christmas season.
After the comic strip's debut in 1950, Peanuts had become a phenomenon worldwide by the mid-1960s. The special was commissioned and sponsored by The Coca-Cola Company, and was written over a period of several weeks, and produced on a shoestring budget in only six months. In casting the characters, the producers took an unconventional route, hiring child actors.
The program's soundtrack was similarly unorthodox, featuring a jazz score by pianist Vince Guaraldi. Its lack of a laugh track (a staple in US television animation in this period), in addition to its tone, pacing, music, and animation, led both the producers and the network to predict the project would be a disaster. But contrary to their collective apprehension, A Charlie Brown Christmas received high ratings and acclaim from critics. It has since been honored with both an Emmy and a Peabody Award, and became an annual presentation in the United States, airing during the Christmas season every year since its debut.
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| Charles M. Schulz |
Its success paved the way for a series of Peanuts television specials and films. Its jazz soundtrack also achieved commercial success, selling four million copies in the US. Live theatrical versions of A Charlie Brown Christmas have been staged. ABC currently holds the rights to the special and broadcasts it at least twice during the weeks leading up to Christmas.
On their way to join their friends all skating on a frozen pond, Charlie Brown confides in Linus that despite the onset of Christmas he is still depressed. After Linus' reproach, he visits Lucy's psychiatric booth, and she advises him to get involved in a real Christmas project, directing a nativity play; Lucy relates to Charlie Brown's holiday depression, complaining about always getting toys instead of what she wants: real estate.
En route to the auditorium, Charlie Brown is discouraged when he sees Snoopy decorating his doghouse for a neighborhood lights and display contest, and then even more so when Sally, dictating a letter, asks Santa Claus for either a long and specific list of gifts or just tens and twenties."
Charlie Brown arrives at the rehearsal only to find that the play is being modernized with dancing, lively music and a Christmas Queen (Lucy).
Charlie Brown decides they need a Christmas tree for the proper mood, and Lucy sends him and Linus to get a great big, shiny aluminum tree... maybe painted pink.
At the tree lot, Charlie
Brown finds a small sapling that, ironically, is the only real tree
among the many fakes. Despite Linus' doubts, Charlie Brown is convinced
that once decorated the little tree will be just right. When they
return, Lucy and the others scorn Charlie Brown's choice and walk away
laughing at him; in despair, he loudly asks if anyone knows what
Christmas is all about. Linus says he knows and walks to center stage.
Under a spotlight, Linus quotes Luke 2:8–14, in which angels from heaven
tell a group of initially frightened shepherds of the birth of the baby
Jesus, and then when finished quietly says, That's what Christmas is
all about, Charlie Brown.
More information: Peanuts
Realizing that he doesn't have to let commercialism ruin his own Christmas, Charlie Brown decides to take the tree home to decorate it and show the others it will work in the play. He stops at Snoopy's decorated doghouse, which won the contest, and takes a large red ornament from it to hang on his tree, but the heavy ornament bends the small branch to the ground. Believing he killed the tree, Charlie Brown walks away dejected.
The others, who also
heard Linus' oratory, realized they were too tough on Charlie Brown and
secretly followed him. Linus gently uprights the drooping branch,
ornament and all, and wraps his blanket around the trunk's base. After
the others grab more decorations off of the doghouse and add them to the
tree, even Lucy concedes to Charlie Brown's choice.
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| Charlie Brown & his friends |
They then start humming the traditional Christmas hymn, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. When Charlie Brown returns and sees what they have done with the tree, all the kids shout, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown!
Charlie Brown joins the others singing "Hark" as the end credits roll, and the snow again begins to fall.
By the early 1960s, Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Peanuts had become a worldwide sensation. Television producer Lee Mendelson acknowledged the strip's cultural impression and had an idea for a documentary on its success, phoning Schulz to propose the idea. Schulz, an avid baseball fan, recognized Mendelson from his documentary on ballplayer Willie Mays, A Man Named Mays, and invited him to his home in Sebastopol, California, to discuss the project.
Their meeting was cordial, with the plan to produce a half-hour documentary set. Mendelson wanted to feature roughly one or two minutes of animation, and Schulz suggested animator Bill Melendez, with whom he collaborated some years before on a spot for the Ford Motor Company. Mendelson later stated that he was drawn to doing an animated Charlie Brown after working on A Man Named Mays, noting that Mays was arguably the best baseball player of all time, while Charlie Brown, in a running gag in the strips, was one of the worst, making him a natural follow-up subject to his previous work.
Despite the popularity
of the strip and acclaim from advertisers, networks were not interested
in the special. By April 1965, Time featured the Peanuts gang on its
magazine cover, perhaps prompting a call from John Allen of the New
York-based McCann Erickson Agency. Mendelson imagined he would sell his
documentary, and blindly agreed to Allen's proposal: an animated
half-hour Peanuts Christmas special.
More information: Charles M. Schulz Museum
The Coca-Cola Company was looking for a special for advertising during the holiday season. The bad news is that today is Wednesday and they'll need an outline in Atlanta by Monday, Allen remarked to Mendelson. He quickly contacted Schulz, and the duo got to work with plans for a Peanuts Christmas special.
The duo prepared an outline for the Coca-Cola executives in less than one day, and Mendelson would later recall that the bulk of ideas came from Schulz, whose ideas flowed nonstop. According to Mendelson, their pitch to Coca-Cola consisted of winter scenes, a school play, a scene to be read from the Bible, and a sound track combining jazz and traditional music. The outline did not change over the course of its production.
As Allen was in Europe,
the duo received no feedback on their pitch for several days. When Allen
got in touch with them, he informed them that Coca-Cola wanted to buy
the special, but also wanted it for an early December broadcast, giving
the duo just six months to scramble together a team to produce the
special. Mendelson assured him -without complete confidence in his
statements- that this would be no problem. Following this, A Charlie
Brown Christmas entered production.
Animation for A Charlie Brown Christmas was created by Bill Melendez Productions. Mendelson had no idea whether or not completing a half-hour's worth of animation would be possible given the production's six-month schedule, but Melendez confirmed its feasibility. In actuality, animation was only completed in the final four months of production.
Animation for A Charlie Brown Christmas was created by Bill Melendez Productions. Mendelson had no idea whether or not completing a half-hour's worth of animation would be possible given the production's six-month schedule, but Melendez confirmed its feasibility. In actuality, animation was only completed in the final four months of production.
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| Charlie Brown & Snoopy |
CBS initially wanted an hour's worth of animation, but Melendez talked them down to a half-hour special, believing an hour of television animation was too much. Having never worked on a half-hour special before, Melendez phoned Bill Hanna of Hanna-Barbera for advice, but Hanna declined to give any.
CBS gave a budget of $76,000 to produce the show and it went $20,000 over budget. The first step in creating the animation was to make a pencil drawing, afterwards inking and painting the drawing onto a cel. The cel was then placed onto a painted background. There are 13,000 drawings in the special, with 12 frames per second to create the illusion of movement.
CBS gave a budget of $76,000 to produce the show and it went $20,000 over budget. The first step in creating the animation was to make a pencil drawing, afterwards inking and painting the drawing onto a cel. The cel was then placed onto a painted background. There are 13,000 drawings in the special, with 12 frames per second to create the illusion of movement.
The soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas is an unorthodox mix of traditional Christmas music and jazz.
The jazz portions were created by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Producer Lee Mendelson, a fan of jazz, heard Guaraldi's crossover hit Cast Your Fate to the Wind on the radio not long after completion of his documentary Charlie Brown & Charles Schulz, and contacted the musician to produce music for the special. Guaraldi composed the music for the project, creating an entire piece, Linus and Lucy, to serve as the theme.
When Coca-Cola commissioned A Charlie Brown Christmas in spring 1965, Guaraldi returned to write the music. The first instrumentals for the special were recorded by Guaraldi at Glendale, California's Whitney Studio with bassist Monty Budwig and drummer Colin Bailey. Recycling Linus and Lucy from the earlier special, Guaraldi completed two new originals for the special, Skating, and Christmas Time Is Here. In the weeks preceding the premiere, Mendelson encountered trouble finding a lyricist for Guaraldi's instrumental intro, and penned Christmas Time is Here in about 15 minutes on the backside of an envelope.
The special opens and closes with a choir of children, culled from St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California, performing Christmas Time Is Here and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.
A Charlie Brown Christmas was voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007, and added to the Library of Congress's National Recording Registry list of culturally, historically, or aesthetically important American sound recordings in 2012.
The program premiered on CBS on December 9, 1965, at 7:30 pm ET (pre-empting The Munsters), and was viewed by 45% of those watching television that evening, with the number of homes watching the special an estimated 15,490,000, placing it at number two in the ratings, behind Bonanza on NBC. The special received unanimous critical acclaim: The Hollywood Reporter deemed the show delightfully novel and amusing, while the Weekly Variety dubbed it fascinating and haunting.
Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.
Charles M. Schulz
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