Almost anyone in our society today would be able to recognize something about the Peanuts franchise or about "A Charlie Brown Christmas," be it the characters or the music or something else entirely. The faces of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the theme of the original Christmas special, the "happiness is..." line--these are all deeply ingrained in our culture in the United States today, and all come from the popularization of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." But did you know that this beloved Christmas special had a bit of a tumultuous development phase?
The conception for "A Charlie Brown Christmas" began early in 1965 when the Coca Cola Company wanted to sponsor a Peanuts based Christmas special. The project was spearheaded by three men--Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, animator Bill Melendez, and Producer Lee Mendelson. The team was given a tiny time period of less than a week to present an outline to Coca Cola, and were eventually constrained to an astonishingly low six month span to prepare the special for the air by December, 1965. In "The Making of A Charlie Brown Christmas," a documentary made to commemorate the process of the show's inception, Mark Evanier, an animation historian, stated, "Doing a Christmas special in six months is not humanly possible. It's one of those situations where you'd be thrilled that you got it done at all, let alone that it was any good." The three worked tirelessly to get through the entire storyboarding and animating process as quickly as possible.
They hit a couple snags during this time, however. Animator Bill Melendez struggled to translate the Peanuts characters from their still images in comic strips to fully animated cartoon characters. In fact, he faced so much difficulty in this regard that the first time he saw the finished episode, he thought he had "ruined Charlie Brown." Another bump in the road came when the creator Charles Schultz and producer Lee Mendelson insisted on having children voice the characters instead of professional adults. This led to some difficulties with young children voicing young characters such as Charlie Brown's sister, Sally. The kids sounded amateurish and eventually took criticism from the network.
Perhaps the most significant hurdle to overcome during development was in regards to the scene near the end of the episode in which Linus recites a few verses from Luke chapter 2 in the King James Bible, telling Charlie Brown that these verses contain "what Christmas is all about." Schultz was the one to propose they use the verses in the special since he had commonly made Biblical references in the comic strips, usually through Linus's character. Schultz met criticism on this idea, with many saying that something as sacred as Biblical texts shouldn't be used in a cartoon, seen as being somewhat childish and crude. According to Mendelson, Schultz responded to the negative opinions on his idea by simply saying, "if we don't do it, who will?"
Eventually, the network was persuaded to air the special the way it was, Gospel message completely intact. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" aired on CBS on December 9th, 1965. The executives planned to air the episode once and then let it die because they didn't expect it to succeed. Of course, their expectations were decimated when the round-headed characters became the second-most-viewed program that week as well as the most watched Christmas special in history up until that point. The special has aired on national television every year since 1965 and remains an integral part of American Holiday Culture to this day.
