on schultz
“Merry Christmas,
Charlie Brown!”
How Charles Schulz brought meaning to the holiday—through television.by David Michaelis
By the mid-1950s, it seemed that the whole world was clamoring for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, according to David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins, $34.95). Peanuts had mushroomed from a syndicated comic strip into a powerful brand that included games, toys, clothes and greeting cards. In 1959, the first Peanuts commercial aired, pitching Ford Falcons, and television producers were predicting that animated cartoons would replace Westerns as the medium’s next big fad. After all, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner and Dennis the Menace were appearing in their own TV series. Still, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz wasn’t ready to commit to a producer, director and team of animators. But that was about to change—and in a fashion that no one could have predicted.
FOR MORE ABOUT DAVID MICHAELIS' SHULTZ AND PEANUTS, SEE "STAR BOOKS". —Waynette Goodson
No one was readier than Charles Schulz to write a parable about commercialism when Lee Mendelson telephoned one Wednesday in May 1965 to announce that he had just sold a Christmas show to Coca-Cola.
For ten years, Schulz and United Feature Syndicate had been turning away offers to put Peanuts into film and television animation. Children wrote constantly to ask when Snoopy would be on TV, and he gave each the same brisk reply: “There are some greater things in the world than TV animated cartoons.” Then in late 1963 Lee Mendelson, a thirty-year-old independent producer in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, persuaded him to sit for interviews as part of a documentary about his life and work, A Boy Named Charlie Brown—a kind of ironic companion piece to Mendelson’s first film, A Man Named Mays, about the San Francisco Giants’ great centerfielder.
Mendelson had gotten his start in television in 1960 as a production assistant at KPIX-TV, the CBS station in San Francisco. His Willie Mays film had been broadcast to acclaim on NBC in October 1963, and he hoped to bring that production’s level of originality and imagination to the Schulz documentary by including the Peanuts characters in a brief segment of animation, for which, at Sparky’s [Schulz’s nickname] insistence, he had brought in Bill Melendez, the Disney animator who had earned Schulz’s respect by not Disneyfying the Peanuts gang when he made the Ford commercials. Melendez, an animator on numerous Mickey Mouse cartoons and films such as Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo, had established his own production company in Los Angeles by 1963. Schulz trusted him to place Charlie Brown and the others into animation without changing their essential qualities, either as “flat” cartoon characters or as his cartoon characters.
Melendez had never before produced a half-hour program, but when he met with Mendelson and Schulz in Sebastopol over Memorial Day weekend to flesh out ideas for the script—to be written by Schulz, storyboarded by Melendez, and animated by Melendez’s team of fifty artists—they had six months and a budget of $150,000 with which to create a running film from more than ten thousand hand-painted cels—a production that would usually be completed over the better part of a year.
Theirs was a highly productive collaboration, each bringing something characteristically valuable to the work. They made production decisions immediately: whether to hire adult actors to imitate children’s voices, as was traditional in animated children’s programs, or to find children with Screen Actors Guild cards and just enough experience to read the parts. “This is where Schulz was smart,” Melendez later said, “he let us do it”—leaving Lee and Bill to audition some forty-five kids, ages six to nine, and then train the cast of seven principals, some of them too young to read, yet who, under Melendez’s close direction, delivered their lines with startling clarity and feeling. The children’s voices paid off most strongly when addressing the show’s more adult themes; children, after all, are consumers at heart—what child ever worried about the commercialism of Christmas? But the aloneness and isolation of being lost in melancholy thoughts at a compulsorily happy time would come through in A Charlie Brown Christmas with limpid authenticity, enunciating those heartaches that are peculiar to childhood.
The show’s soundtrack was among its most original and powerful strengths, the children’s voices projecting over a spare, uncluttered background that imposed no ambient undernoise and no uproarious prerecorded laughter—something Mendelson had suggested at the Memorial Day weekend meetings “to help keep it moving along.” Schulz loathed the hyena hilarity of canned merriment and rightly judged that an audience would not have to be told when and where to laugh; Mendelson countered that all comedy shows used such tracks. “Well, this one won’t,” said Sparky firmly. “Let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way.” Then he rose and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Mendelson, shocked, turned to Melendez. “What was that all about?”
“I guess,” replied Melendez, “that means we’re not having a laugh track!”
Mendelson later called it their one disagreement; Schulz termed it the production’s biggest decision. Melendez recalled that in their frequent meetings over the months and years ahead, as more than seventy animated specials were matched to the calendar of national holidays and rituals, Sparky “was very sensitive and you had to be very careful not to open that window for anything. You could make fun of something, but if you hit home, he would really withdraw.”
On the subject of scoring and music for A Charlie Brown Christmas, however, Schulz put aside his own tastes—indeed, his prejudices—and, fortunately, deferred to the producer. Two months later, he told a reporter, “I think jazz is awful ”; he had once said to his friend Philip Van Pelt, who himself played trumpet, that “the only kind of jazz that I really like is that sort that has a trumpet in the combination.” But for the Christmas show he agreed that they should try to mix traditional hymns with “that jazz music” that they had used in Mendelson’s documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown.
Left to himself, Sparky might well have chosen only traditional music for the special (Schroeder plays Beethoven’s “Für Elise” in the school auditorium), but, as with so many other matters in his life as creator of Peanuts, jazz would simply happen to Charles Schulz—a bubbly, childlike, but also sophisticated and bluesy jazz. The Grammy Award–winning composer Vince Guaraldi was known to jazz musicians as “Dr. Funk.” Like others whose talents became layered in with the Peanuts phenomenon, Guaraldi gave Schulz’s work a contemporary musical signature that proved to be exactly right for his characters. The catchy rhythm of “Linus and Lucy,” a modest but witty piano piece that Guaraldi had composed for the Mendelson documentary and played at the Monterey Jazz Festival, became the centerpiece of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and eventually a pop music standard. But it was the slower, mixed-mood, improvisational pieces in Guaraldi’s jazz suite, especially “Christmas Time Is Here” (lyrics by Mendelson) that elicited the unarticulated emotions lying below the holiday’s joyful surface.
Mendelson and Schulz initially agreed that the show would include outdoor winter scenes and that staple of children’s Christmases, the school play, Sparky recalling the terrors of having to memorize lines for such roles as his performance as the letter “A” in the D Street School’s pageant in Needles [California, one of Schulz’s childhood homes]. Lee and his wife had read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree” to their children the previous year, and when he suggested that the show somehow involve a comparable motif, Sparky seized upon the idea: “We need a Charlie-Brown-like tree.”
In the pool at Coffee Lane [Schulz’s home] over Memorial Day, Schulz remarked to Mendelson that the true meaning of that holiday—called Remembrance Day in his childhood and observed as a time to honor the nation’s war dead—had been lost in the general good-time frivolity. The same had become increasingly true of the religious observance of Christmas, but Sparky insisted that the season’s true meaning could be found in the Gospel according to St. Luke, and they agreed that the show would somehow work in the Nativity story.
But Mendelson had not realized just how much of the Gospel Schulz intended to include in the movie. When Sparky began work on the script, he “proudly announced,” as Lee recalled it, that there would be “one whole minute” of Linus reciting the Gospel (not reading it, as in the strip).
“But this is an entertainment show, Sparky,” said Mendelson (“gingerly,” he later recalled).
Network broadcasting in the three-channel world of the early 1960s was driven by a single, impossible mission: to please everyone and offend no one. Not only would the show have to pass muster ahead of time with its commercial sponsor and network executives, but it would also be vulnerable to the aftershocks of government regulation and popular taste, all of whom and which pretended that, so far as the world of national entertainment was concerned, religion—or, more exactly, religious differences—did not exist.
Sparky insisted: “We can’t avoid it—we have to get the passage of St. Luke in there somehow.” He looked at them for a moment in silence, and then turned his “strange blue eyes” on Melendez, and said, “Bill, if we don’t do it, who will?”
From Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David Michaelis. Copyright © 2007 by David Michaelis. Published by arrangement with Harper Collins Publishers.
/ / /
TIMELESS TUNESAs of January 2007, it ranked second in Billboard ’s Top Holiday Albums, right after Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Why anything would rate higher than Vince Guaraldi’s score to A Charlie Brown Christmas is anybody’s guess. Tastes change over time—but not that much. In the 42 years since the album’s release, it has never been out of print. And when a digitally remastered version of it came out last year, the reaction, by some, was indignant: “The entire album has a sound that is too ‘modern,’ thanks to current digital reverb technology,” wrote one Amazon.com reviewer. “I think I’ll ditch this edition and go buy that 1988 reissue,” wrote another.
This isn’t just nostalgia talking, but a visceral response to Guaraldi’s sprightly standards, such as “Linus and Lucy” and “Skating.” Yes, in our mind’s eye, we can see Charles Schulz’s cartoon characters bobbing and shuffling to the laid-back jazz beats and bluesy riffs, but it’s the emotional highs and lows that we all experience during the holidays that are so expertly woven together in various tracks: Revelry blends with reflection in “Christmas Time Is Here”; the traditional and trendy fuse seamlessly in the jazz-inflected “O Tannenbaum” and “Greensleeves.”
And why shouldn’t they be seamless? Guaraldi was a master. The San Francisco native and session man had honed his chops in beatnik nightclubs in the 1950s, and also experimented with Latin forms and sacred music. It was his 1963 tune “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a throwaway B-side, that won him a Grammy and street cred among jazz aficionados, and the wider recognition that led him to Schulz and the Peanuts gang. How lucky for us that Fate stepped in.
—Nancy Oakley
Charlie Brown!”
How Charles Schulz brought meaning to the holiday—through television.by David Michaelis
By the mid-1950s, it seemed that the whole world was clamoring for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, according to David Michaelis, author of Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins, $34.95). Peanuts had mushroomed from a syndicated comic strip into a powerful brand that included games, toys, clothes and greeting cards. In 1959, the first Peanuts commercial aired, pitching Ford Falcons, and television producers were predicting that animated cartoons would replace Westerns as the medium’s next big fad. After all, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner and Dennis the Menace were appearing in their own TV series. Still, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz wasn’t ready to commit to a producer, director and team of animators. But that was about to change—and in a fashion that no one could have predicted.
FOR MORE ABOUT DAVID MICHAELIS' SHULTZ AND PEANUTS, SEE "STAR BOOKS". —Waynette Goodson
No one was readier than Charles Schulz to write a parable about commercialism when Lee Mendelson telephoned one Wednesday in May 1965 to announce that he had just sold a Christmas show to Coca-Cola.
For ten years, Schulz and United Feature Syndicate had been turning away offers to put Peanuts into film and television animation. Children wrote constantly to ask when Snoopy would be on TV, and he gave each the same brisk reply: “There are some greater things in the world than TV animated cartoons.” Then in late 1963 Lee Mendelson, a thirty-year-old independent producer in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, persuaded him to sit for interviews as part of a documentary about his life and work, A Boy Named Charlie Brown—a kind of ironic companion piece to Mendelson’s first film, A Man Named Mays, about the San Francisco Giants’ great centerfielder.
Mendelson had gotten his start in television in 1960 as a production assistant at KPIX-TV, the CBS station in San Francisco. His Willie Mays film had been broadcast to acclaim on NBC in October 1963, and he hoped to bring that production’s level of originality and imagination to the Schulz documentary by including the Peanuts characters in a brief segment of animation, for which, at Sparky’s [Schulz’s nickname] insistence, he had brought in Bill Melendez, the Disney animator who had earned Schulz’s respect by not Disneyfying the Peanuts gang when he made the Ford commercials. Melendez, an animator on numerous Mickey Mouse cartoons and films such as Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo, had established his own production company in Los Angeles by 1963. Schulz trusted him to place Charlie Brown and the others into animation without changing their essential qualities, either as “flat” cartoon characters or as his cartoon characters.
Melendez had never before produced a half-hour program, but when he met with Mendelson and Schulz in Sebastopol over Memorial Day weekend to flesh out ideas for the script—to be written by Schulz, storyboarded by Melendez, and animated by Melendez’s team of fifty artists—they had six months and a budget of $150,000 with which to create a running film from more than ten thousand hand-painted cels—a production that would usually be completed over the better part of a year.
Theirs was a highly productive collaboration, each bringing something characteristically valuable to the work. They made production decisions immediately: whether to hire adult actors to imitate children’s voices, as was traditional in animated children’s programs, or to find children with Screen Actors Guild cards and just enough experience to read the parts. “This is where Schulz was smart,” Melendez later said, “he let us do it”—leaving Lee and Bill to audition some forty-five kids, ages six to nine, and then train the cast of seven principals, some of them too young to read, yet who, under Melendez’s close direction, delivered their lines with startling clarity and feeling. The children’s voices paid off most strongly when addressing the show’s more adult themes; children, after all, are consumers at heart—what child ever worried about the commercialism of Christmas? But the aloneness and isolation of being lost in melancholy thoughts at a compulsorily happy time would come through in A Charlie Brown Christmas with limpid authenticity, enunciating those heartaches that are peculiar to childhood.
The show’s soundtrack was among its most original and powerful strengths, the children’s voices projecting over a spare, uncluttered background that imposed no ambient undernoise and no uproarious prerecorded laughter—something Mendelson had suggested at the Memorial Day weekend meetings “to help keep it moving along.” Schulz loathed the hyena hilarity of canned merriment and rightly judged that an audience would not have to be told when and where to laugh; Mendelson countered that all comedy shows used such tracks. “Well, this one won’t,” said Sparky firmly. “Let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in their own way.” Then he rose and walked out, closing the door behind him.
Mendelson, shocked, turned to Melendez. “What was that all about?”
“I guess,” replied Melendez, “that means we’re not having a laugh track!”
Mendelson later called it their one disagreement; Schulz termed it the production’s biggest decision. Melendez recalled that in their frequent meetings over the months and years ahead, as more than seventy animated specials were matched to the calendar of national holidays and rituals, Sparky “was very sensitive and you had to be very careful not to open that window for anything. You could make fun of something, but if you hit home, he would really withdraw.”
On the subject of scoring and music for A Charlie Brown Christmas, however, Schulz put aside his own tastes—indeed, his prejudices—and, fortunately, deferred to the producer. Two months later, he told a reporter, “I think jazz is awful ”; he had once said to his friend Philip Van Pelt, who himself played trumpet, that “the only kind of jazz that I really like is that sort that has a trumpet in the combination.” But for the Christmas show he agreed that they should try to mix traditional hymns with “that jazz music” that they had used in Mendelson’s documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown.
Left to himself, Sparky might well have chosen only traditional music for the special (Schroeder plays Beethoven’s “Für Elise” in the school auditorium), but, as with so many other matters in his life as creator of Peanuts, jazz would simply happen to Charles Schulz—a bubbly, childlike, but also sophisticated and bluesy jazz. The Grammy Award–winning composer Vince Guaraldi was known to jazz musicians as “Dr. Funk.” Like others whose talents became layered in with the Peanuts phenomenon, Guaraldi gave Schulz’s work a contemporary musical signature that proved to be exactly right for his characters. The catchy rhythm of “Linus and Lucy,” a modest but witty piano piece that Guaraldi had composed for the Mendelson documentary and played at the Monterey Jazz Festival, became the centerpiece of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and eventually a pop music standard. But it was the slower, mixed-mood, improvisational pieces in Guaraldi’s jazz suite, especially “Christmas Time Is Here” (lyrics by Mendelson) that elicited the unarticulated emotions lying below the holiday’s joyful surface.
Mendelson and Schulz initially agreed that the show would include outdoor winter scenes and that staple of children’s Christmases, the school play, Sparky recalling the terrors of having to memorize lines for such roles as his performance as the letter “A” in the D Street School’s pageant in Needles [California, one of Schulz’s childhood homes]. Lee and his wife had read Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree” to their children the previous year, and when he suggested that the show somehow involve a comparable motif, Sparky seized upon the idea: “We need a Charlie-Brown-like tree.”
In the pool at Coffee Lane [Schulz’s home] over Memorial Day, Schulz remarked to Mendelson that the true meaning of that holiday—called Remembrance Day in his childhood and observed as a time to honor the nation’s war dead—had been lost in the general good-time frivolity. The same had become increasingly true of the religious observance of Christmas, but Sparky insisted that the season’s true meaning could be found in the Gospel according to St. Luke, and they agreed that the show would somehow work in the Nativity story.
But Mendelson had not realized just how much of the Gospel Schulz intended to include in the movie. When Sparky began work on the script, he “proudly announced,” as Lee recalled it, that there would be “one whole minute” of Linus reciting the Gospel (not reading it, as in the strip).
“But this is an entertainment show, Sparky,” said Mendelson (“gingerly,” he later recalled).
Network broadcasting in the three-channel world of the early 1960s was driven by a single, impossible mission: to please everyone and offend no one. Not only would the show have to pass muster ahead of time with its commercial sponsor and network executives, but it would also be vulnerable to the aftershocks of government regulation and popular taste, all of whom and which pretended that, so far as the world of national entertainment was concerned, religion—or, more exactly, religious differences—did not exist.
Sparky insisted: “We can’t avoid it—we have to get the passage of St. Luke in there somehow.” He looked at them for a moment in silence, and then turned his “strange blue eyes” on Melendez, and said, “Bill, if we don’t do it, who will?”
From Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, by David Michaelis. Copyright © 2007 by David Michaelis. Published by arrangement with Harper Collins Publishers.
/ / /
TIMELESS TUNESAs of January 2007, it ranked second in Billboard ’s Top Holiday Albums, right after Danny Elfman’s soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Why anything would rate higher than Vince Guaraldi’s score to A Charlie Brown Christmas is anybody’s guess. Tastes change over time—but not that much. In the 42 years since the album’s release, it has never been out of print. And when a digitally remastered version of it came out last year, the reaction, by some, was indignant: “The entire album has a sound that is too ‘modern,’ thanks to current digital reverb technology,” wrote one Amazon.com reviewer. “I think I’ll ditch this edition and go buy that 1988 reissue,” wrote another.
This isn’t just nostalgia talking, but a visceral response to Guaraldi’s sprightly standards, such as “Linus and Lucy” and “Skating.” Yes, in our mind’s eye, we can see Charles Schulz’s cartoon characters bobbing and shuffling to the laid-back jazz beats and bluesy riffs, but it’s the emotional highs and lows that we all experience during the holidays that are so expertly woven together in various tracks: Revelry blends with reflection in “Christmas Time Is Here”; the traditional and trendy fuse seamlessly in the jazz-inflected “O Tannenbaum” and “Greensleeves.”
And why shouldn’t they be seamless? Guaraldi was a master. The San Francisco native and session man had honed his chops in beatnik nightclubs in the 1950s, and also experimented with Latin forms and sacred music. It was his 1963 tune “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” a throwaway B-side, that won him a Grammy and street cred among jazz aficionados, and the wider recognition that led him to Schulz and the Peanuts gang. How lucky for us that Fate stepped in.
—Nancy Oakley
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