2 minute read
A Charlie Brown Christmas
by Mandy Wilson
The world first met members of the Peanuts gang when the comic strip began running in seven newspapers on October 2, 1950, but for kids of my generation, the 1965 premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas is what first introduced the characters as friends we would welcome back for the holidays for decades to come.
Seen in more than 15 million homes, the special captured nearly half of all American viewers at the time and received both an Emmy and a Peabody Award.
Broadcast exclusively on PBS stations this year as part of an agreement with Apple TV+, the special airs on GPB Sunday, December 19 at 7:30 p.m.
Feeling down about the commercialism of Christmas, Charlie Brown becomes the director of the gang’s holiday play. Can he overcome his friends’ preference for dancing over acting, find the “perfect” tree and discover the true meaning of Christmas?
For me, this special is synonymous with the holidays of my childhood, as the first notes of “Christmas Time Is Here” are intermingled with the memories of crackling fires, the sound of anxiously ripping wrapping paper from presents and the hum of my mother’s mixer in Christmas cookie batter.
But A Charlie Brown Christmas wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the Coca-Cola Company. In a 2017 interview with GPB, the special’s executive producer, Lee Mendelson, explained how a representative of the McCann Erikson advertising firm called on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in June of 1965 to ask if they had ever considered doing a Christmas special. Although Mendelson recalls that the answer to Coca-Cola was yes, there was no plan, and he, along with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez got together the next day and drafted an outline in two hours which they sent to the company by Western Union. And the rest, as they say, is history.
