Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown

Today marks the 57th anniversary of the debut of A Charlie Brown Christmas on CBS, sponsored by Coca-Cola. It was the second of what I call the Big Three animated Christmas specials. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted in 1964, Charlie Brown in 1965 and How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 1966.

Each became an annual tradition on TV. Each was well-written, well-voiced and well-animated. Each was a totally different style of animation. Because of all that, each became a cash cow for its producers.

Rudolph used stop-action animation, the most expensive way of animating at the time. It also lasted an hour while the other two were half-hour specials. It told the story of the importance of misfits. 

Grinch was animated under the direction of Chuck Jones -- he of Road Runner fame -- that carried the socialist anti-commercial message of Dr. Seuss narrated by Frankenstein's monster (Boris Karloff) and sung by Tony the Tiger (Thurl Ravenscroft). You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch is now a Christmas carol.

But only Charlie Brown mentioned Jesus. That made it the most controversial of the three and almost kept it off the air. The sponsor, the network and even the producer felt putting Christ in Christmas would turn audiences off. In TV you can have flying reindeer and a green Martian-like creature tell the tale of Christmas, but you can't have Christ. Why, an atheist might object.

Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, insisted on four things. No laugh track, jazz music, children would voice his characters, and the meaning of Christmas would be the birth of Christ and the hope He gave the world. The final scene of the cartoon was Linus reciting from the Gospel According to Luke.

Producer Lee Mendelson had talked Schulz into the project and hired animator Bill Melendez to make it a cartoon.

Jennings Brown wrote six Christmases ago, "CBS executives didn’t think jazz belonged in a cartoon. They also challenged Schulz’s decision to use untrained children instead of professional adult voice actors. They especially couldn’t understand why children would use such big words. (Lucy: 'We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.' Charlie Brown: 'Don’t think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. Maybe carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchadnezzar.') This, despite the fact that for about 15 years, Peanuts characters had spoken with advanced vocabularies.

"Schulz even got pushback from his own team. Mendelson suggested a laugh track would save the show and Schulz responded by standing up and walking out of the room. When Schulz, a Sunday school teacher, said Linus should recite from the Gospel of Luke, Mendelson and Melendez protested. 'We looked at each other and said, ‘Well, there goes our careers right down the drain.’ Nobody had ever animated anything from the Bible before, and we knew it probably wouldn’t work. We were flabbergasted by it.'

"Of course, now Mendelson realizes that Linus’s segment probably made the entire project work. 'That 10-year-old kid who recited that speech from the Bible was as good as any scene from Hamlet,' he says."

Actually, it is the other way around. Hamlet is fiction trying to be as good as the reality of Christ's birth and life.

But as Bugs Bunny famously said to the cannibal, let's not be splitting hares.

The controversy and doubts behind the scenes did not register with TV viewers. The special pre-empted The Munsters and was the No. 2 show in that week's ratings, behind only Bonanza.

Charlie Brown, Rudolph and the Grinch created an industry. Rankin/Bass, which produced Rudolph, would go on to make about a dozen Christmas (and later New Year's, Easter and Groundhog Day) specials.

40 years or so after Charlie Brown debuted, Hallmark began its Christmas rom-coms which now seem to run year-round. The Lifetime channel joined in as has the Great American Family channel. Mainstream movies such as A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and Elf became annual Christmas events. ("Call me elf one more time.")

But only Charlie Brown makes Christ the meaning of Christmas.

Liberals tell me there is no War on Christmas. 

Hmm.

At any rate, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.