Lee Mendelson, a San Francisco-based TV producer, was a friend of "Peanuts" creator and Bay Area resident Charles Schulz in the mid-1960s, working with Schulz to sell a "Peanuts" television show and getting nowhere despite Mendelson's success with a special on San Francisco Giants baseball player Willie Mays that had aired on NBC. Then, on a Friday afternoon in 1965, Coca-Cola's advertising agency, McCann-Erickson, contacted Mendelson's office to ask if he and Schulz had a format for a "Peanuts" Christmas special to air on TV for the soft-drink company to sponsor. Mendelson said yes, and he was told to send the format to New York by Monday - special delivery.
Mendelson thanked the agency representative, hung up the phone, and quickly dialed Schulz - not to tell him he'd sold their Christmas format, but to tell him that they needed to come up with one by late Saturday morning to send to New York. Usually, a format for an animated TV special took a month to develop.
Schulz was not angry at Mendelson at all. In fact, Christmas had always been a favorite topic of his in his strip, and he had several ideas of how a format could be executed. They managed to work out a rough outline and get it sent to New York in time for the deadline. In spite of the downbeat plot of Charlie Brown being depressed about Christmas, the absence of Santa Claus, and the religious overtones of the storyline, Coca-Cola sponsored it on CBS - reluctantly. It was so low-keyed and serious, no one thought it would be a hit. The animators used real children's voices for the characters. Snoopy didn't talk like other cartoon animals. The colors were all muted. There was even same political paranoia involved ("We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket," Lucy says. "It's run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know."). And what was up with that piano jazz from Vince Guaraldi? Yet "A Charlie Brown Christmas," a simple little animated-cartoon story about trying to find the true meaning of Christmas through a Nativity play and showing love to a scraggly little Christmas tree - a real tree - caught the imagination of Americans and defined Christmas like no other Christmas special had done before - not even "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" of the year before, 1964 - and no other has done since.
Lee Mendelson died at 86 on Christmas Day this past week - sort of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on July 4, 1826 - and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - now airing on ABC every December - is greatest legacy. It revolutionized animated holiday storytelling, and he, Schulz, and their partner Bill Melendez would produce many more "Peanuts" holiday specials with the same light touches and subtle messaging about the holidays - Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine's Day - that the Christmas special had. Mendelson had helped set the template with his choice of Guaraldi's music and his interest in Hans Christian Andersen's' "The Fir Tree," the latter prompting Schulz to come up with the story of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree; those elements of simplicity would reverberate in the simple storytelling of future "Peanuts" specials.
Mendelson would take that same approach to animated features. It was in 1969 - December 1969, fifty years ago this month - that the first "Peanuts" movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, premiered. It gave humility and pathos to Charlie Brown's plight as a loser in a delightful story in which he discovers his talent for competing in spelling bees and makes his way to the national spelling contest. It brought the same uncluttered plot development and melancholy touches to the big screen that had worked on television, and it, along with the 1968 Beatles animated movie Yellow Submarine, set a new standard for cartoon movies. The late sixties were a fruitful period for movies for adults and more mature adolescents seeking deep, honest movies that did away with Old Hollywood proprieties, and there were many movies of that sort released in 1969, such as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Mendelson and Schulz, however, saw an unintended consequence in the trend toward mature films in that movies were becoming much less family-oriented and that there were no movies to take children to. In 1969 the only other major movie for kids was the Disney studio's The Love Bug, the movie that made a Volkswagen named Herbie a movie star. A Boy Named Charlie Brown, in the more grown-up milieu of the New Hollywood that was emerging in the wake of Walt Disney's death, shone like the evening star. It also had a perfect message for kids. Like Herbie, Charlie Brown was a plucky underdog, and like the animated Beatles of Yellow Submarine, he was daring and adventurous, but the movie also reminded us that not everything works out the way we want it to.
Another producer like Mendelson (below) couldn't compete in today's tech-happy, computer-animation-driven, blockbuster entertainment world. We should be happy that he came along at the right time and played a bigger role in bringing Charles Schulz characters to life than anyone except Schulz himself. RIP.
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