How Schulz’s Charlie Brown Became a Big Hit--on TV

Charlie Brown--the star of Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip, which will have its last original run in newspapers around the world on Sunday--was always a problem for television. Big head, little feet, simple animation style and a sidekick who thought in broad, often literary terms but only uttered a “bark” here and there.

While cartoonists and commentators have paid tribute to Schulz’s work as a print cartoonist, as CBS will tonight in a special “Good Grief, Charlie Brown: A Tribute to Charles Schulz,” what has generally been overlooked is the impact of “Peanuts” on television animation.

When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” premiered on CBS on Dec. 9, 1965--it has been rerun every year since--network executives were worried that viewers wouldn’t show up. They did, with the show commanding a 47 share, which meant nearly half the TV sets in the country were tuned in. Viewers approved, and critics soon weighed in too, hailing it a Yuletide classic.

Yet the first “Peanuts” special had an unlikely journey from concept to the small screen. In reality, “Charlie Brown Christmas” was a hastily made experiment that was initially regarded as a failure by its creators.

The origins of the show go back to 1963, when independent film producer Lee Mendelson decided to follow his documentary about Willie Mays with a film about Schulz. Mendelson, who is serving as executive producer with Rand Morrison on the CBS tribute, felt the strips on Schulz’s drawing board were too static and suggested adding short animated sequences. Schulz agreed and asked his friend Bill Melendez, who had directed the “Peanuts” commercials for the Ford Falcon in 1957, to do the animation.

Mendelson made “A Day in the Life of Charles M. Schulz” on spec. Over the next year, he took it to all three networks and more than 20 advertising agencies: No one would buy it. But in May 1965, John Allen of the McCann-Erickson agency contacted Mendelson and Schulz. Coca-Cola was looking for a special. Could they could do an animated “Peanuts” Christmas show?

The two men hastily prepared a rough scenario; a few days later, they received a telegram confirming its sale and work on “A Charlie Brown Christmas” began.

Television’s first fully animated special had been a 15-minute adaptation of Stravinsky’s ballet “Petroushka,” which appeared as a segment of “The Music Hour” on NBC in 1956. More typical were the one-hour versions of children’s stories produced during the mid-’60s, such as “Return to Oz” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” or the TV retelling of “A Christmas Carol” starring Mr. Magoo (1962).

Schulz and Mendelson felt they could tell a better story if the “Peanuts” special were only a half-hour. Melendez agreed, knowing it would be impossible to produce an hour’s worth of animation on such a short schedule anyway. CBS, McCann-Erickson and Coca-Cola agreed to the shorter length.

“I didn’t know what to charge,” recalls Melendez, who as a successful commercial director had never budgeted a film longer than 60 seconds. “They told me they’d give me top dollar--what they gave Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. I said, ‘They’re not going to make the picture--you want them to set the budget?’ ” But it was a take-it-or-leave-it deal, which he took, getting paid about $76,000 to make the special, which ended up costing him closer to $96,000.

In retrospect, Melendez feels “those dumb budgets” helped them make a better film. It forced the invention of a limited style of movement that fit Schulz’s minimal drawings.

“Charlie Brown has a big head, a little body and little feet; he can’t walk the way a normal human would,” Melendez explains. “After several experiments, I decided, because of their size, these kids would take a step every six frames, or four steps a second: click-click-click-click. If we had tried to move them in full, Disney-style animation, it would have been a disaster.”

In another break with tradition, the artists used children for the characters’ voices, rather than adult actors. The children were mostly nonprofessionals, and some of them were too young to read their parts--leaving Melendez to read the lines and have the children repeat them.

Snoopy posed a special problem. In the strip, he never spoke, but he thought in words. Melendez planned to use an actor to verbalize Snoopy’s thoughts, but Schulz vetoed the idea, saying, “Nope, he’s a dog and he doesn’t speak. He barks, he thinks, but he doesn’t speak English.”

Melendez recorded himself doing various sounds and speeding them up, trying to find something that sounded like a dog’s bark at the same time it communicated Snoopy’s feelings. He planned to have an actor redo the noises, but the sound editors used his temporary track when time grew short. Everyone liked the results, and Melendez has supplied Snoopy’s “voice” ever since.

The “Peanuts” artists chose jazz musician Vince Guaraldi, whom Mendelson found with the help of a San Francisco critic, to provide the score. Guaraldi’s upbeat tunes suited the simple animation and gave the program a strong musical identity.

The most famous moment in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” comes when a discouraged Charlie Brown asks, “Isn’t there any who knows what Christmas is all about?” Linus says he does and recites the Gospel According to St. Luke. Melendez remembers he was shocked when he came to that scene in the script: “I said, ‘Sparky [Schulz’s nickname], we can’t have that--this is religion, it just doesn’t go in a cartoon.’ He just looked at me very coldly with his blue eyes and said, ‘If we don’t do it, who will? We can do it.’ And he was right.”

Mendelson recalls that when he showed the special to two CBS vice presidents, “they didn’t try to hide their disappointment. ‘Too slow . . . the kids don’t sound pro . . . the music all wrong . . . the Bible thing scares us . . .’

“I thought we had killed it,” adds Melendez.

They hadn’t. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” drew a 47 share when it premiered in 1965, and a 57 share when it was rerun the next year. It also won an Emmy and a Peabody Award.

The success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” made the half-hour format the standard for animation for the next 35 years, and set the pattern for prime-time adaptations of comic strips, including “Garfield” and “Cathy.”

Looking back at that first, uncertain attempt to bring Charles Schulz’s world to television, Melendez concludes, “We caricatured life very much in the way that the strip did. And what made the strip so incredibly popular was that it was a caricature of life, but in a very human fashion.”

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“Good Grief, Charlie Brown: A Tribute to Charles Schulz” can be seen tonight at 8 on CBS. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).