Charlie Brown’s first Christmas

As executive producer, Mendelson even got to try his hand at songwriting. At the last minute, they decided the opening instrumental for “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was slow to start.

“I tried a few Hollywood songwriters I knew but they were too busy,” he said. “So in desperation, I sat down and wrote the poem ‘Christmas Time is Here’ on an envelope in 5 or 10 minutes.”

Vince Guaraldi recorded the song with a choral group in San Francisco and that became the opening number. Over the years, the song has been covered over 100 times, by everyone from Mariah Carey to Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney.

Despite the enduring success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Mendelson still remembers piling into a Hollywood screening room three weeks before the CBS-TV premiere and being less than impressed with the final product.

And there was a last-minute panic. “We noticed they’d misspelled Schulz as ‘Schultz’ in the credits,” he said. “That we were able to fix.”

“After we watched the show, Bill (Melendez) and I looked at each other and we both thought we had missed the boat, that somehow it wasn’t working,” he said. “And one of the animators stood up and said, ‘You guys are crazy. This show’s gonna run for 100 years.’ In a couple of years, we’ll be halfway there at 50.”

Bay Area freelancer John Beck writes about entertainment for The Press Democrat. You can reach him at 280-8014, john@sideshowvideo.com and follow on Twitter @becksay.

ART DISCUSSION
What: Lee Mendelson and Charles Solomon talk about “The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation”
When: 1 p.m. Saturday
Where: The Schulz Museum, 2301 Hardies Lane, Santa Rosa
Admission: $5 kids (under 4 are free) and $10 adults
Info: schulzmuseum.org