Charlie Brown’s first Christmas

Lee Mendelson remembers mustering the courage to call Charles Schulz one morning back in 1963. The former KPIX-TV producer had just started his own company and had a hit with a Willie Mays documentary that aired in 30 million households on NBC.

“A couple of weeks later I was reading Peanuts and the thought came to me,” he says. “We’d just done the world’s greatest ballplayer. Why don’t we do the world’s worst ballplayer?”

So he looked up Charlie Brown’s creator in the phonebook and gave him a call. At first, Schulz said he wasn’t interested and would rather focus on the comic strip he drew every day in his Santa Rosa office. But when he heard Mendelson was responsible for the Mays program, he changed his tune.

“I always remember this,” said Mendelson. “He said,‘If Willie Mays can trust you with his life, I guess I can trust you with mine.’”

Charles M. Schulz, center, accepts the Emmy Award for “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which first aired on CBS Dec. 9, 1965, with producer Lee Mendelson, right, and director/animator Bill Melendez.

The rest is TV history. Along with animator Bill Melendez, they would team up for classics like “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” some of the most memorable and widely quoted holiday programs to ever air.

This weekend, the Schulz Museum brings in Mendelson and Charles Solomon, author of the new book, “The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation,” for a behind-the-scenes look at how the magical TV specials were created. It’s an event just as much for parents as it is for kids.

“It’s a tribute to the animators that’s never really been done before,” Mendelson says.

Every year around this time, as four hour-long specials roll out in a six-week span (this year for the first time in HD), Mendelson is reminded of something Schulz once told him.

“‘There will always be a market for innocence in this country,’ Sparky said to me.‘It doesn’t matter when it’s produced,’” he said.

You can see it not only in the message of the first 1965 special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which condemns the over-commercialization of the holiday, but also in the simple, stripped-down animation that perfectly matches the the slow, meditative pacing of the comic strip.

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