Photo: Apple TV.
The 1965 broadcast A Charlie Brown Christmas has become a holiday staple. But it almost didn’t get on the air.
Have you watched A Charlie Brown Christmas lately? There’s a backstory. I find it fascinating how projects like this get broadcast in the first place. Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors was under crazy time pressure before NBC showed it on Christmas Eve, 1951. (The singers “received the final passages of the score just days before the broadcast.”) The one-act opera has since been performed the world over, not just on television.
Stephen Lind, Associate Professor of Clinical Business Communication at the University of Southern California, wrote about Charlie Brown at the Conversation.
“The 1965 broadcast has become a staple . … But this beloved TV special almost didn’t make it to air. CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different from the upbeat spectacles they imagined audiences wanted. A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice? No laugh track? Humble, lo-fi animation? And was that a Bible verse? It seemed destined to fail – if not scrapped outright.
“And yet, against all the odds, it became a classic. The program turned ‘Peanuts’ from a popular comic strip into a multimedia empire – not because it was flashy or followed the rules, but because it was sincere. …
“The ‘Peanuts’ special came together out of a last-minute scramble. Somewhat out of the blue, producer Lee Mendelson got a call from advertising agency McCann-Erickson: Coca-Cola wanted to sponsor an animated Christmas special.
“Mendelson had previously failed to convince the agency to sponsor a ‘Peanuts’ documentary. This time, though, he assured McCann-Erickson that the characters would be a perfect fit.
“Mendelson called up ‘Peanuts’ comic strip creator Charles ‘Sparky’ Schulz and told him he had just sold A Charlie Brown Christmas – and they would have mere months to write, animate and bring the special to air.
“Schulz, Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez worked fast to piece together a storyline. The cartoonist wanted to tell a story that cut through the glitz of holiday commercialism and brought the focus back to something deeper.
“While Snoopy tries to win a Christmas lights contest, and Lucy names herself ‘Christmas queen’ in the neighborhood play, a forlorn Charlie Brown searches for ‘the real meaning of Christmas.’ He makes his way to the local lot of aluminum trees, a fad at the time. But he’s drawn to the one real tree – a humble, scraggly little thing – inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale ‘The Fir Tree.’
“Those plot points would likely delight the network, but other choices Schulz made were proving controversial.
“The show would use real children’s voices instead of adult actors’, giving the characters an authentic, simple charm. And Schulz refused to add a laugh track, a standard in animated TV at the time. He wanted the sincerity of the story to stand on its own, without artificial prompts for laughter.
“Meanwhile, Mendelson brought in jazz musician Vince Guaraldi to compose a sophisticated soundtrack. The music was unlike anything typically heard in animated programming, blending provocative depth with the innocence of childhood.
“Most alarming to the executives was Schulz’s insistence on including the heart of the Nativity story in arguably the special’s most pivotal scene.
“When Charlie Brown joyfully returns to his friends with the spindly little tree, the rest of the ‘Peanuts’ gang ridicule his choice. … Gently but confidently, Linus assures him, ‘I can tell you what Christmas is all about.’ Calling for ‘Lights, please,’ he quietly walks to the center of the stage.
“In the stillness, Linus recites the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, with its story of an angel appearing to trembling shepherds. …
“ ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men,’ he concludes, picking up his security blanket and walking into the wings. The rest of the gang soon concludes Charlie Brown’s scrawny tree isn’t so bad, after all – it just ‘needs a little love.’ …
“ ‘The Bible thing scares us,’ CBS executives said when they saw the proofs of the special. But there was simply no time to redo the entire dramatic arc of the special, and pulling it was not an option, given that advertisements had already run.”
And thus, commercialism pushed something nocommercial over the finish line.
More at the Conversation, here.
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