By Brian Boone
Here’s a holly jolly look into at what’s probably the most beloved holiday TV special of all time, and the one that made comic strip characters into enduring pop cultural icons: A Charlie Brown Christmas.
HAVE A COKE, CHARLIE BROWN!
In 1965, Coca-Cola told its ad agency, McCann-Erickson, that it wanted to market its products to children more, specifically by sponsoring an animated Christmas special. Ad man John Allen thought a Peanuts special would work, as the comic strip starring Charlie Brown and Snoopy had just reached peak popularity with a Time cover story. Allen approached Lee Mendelson, filmmaker of an obscure documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown, who assured him that he was already hard at work on a Peanuts special. He wasn’t — but then he had to tell Peanuts creator Charles Schulz he’d agreed to make one. Coca-Cola paid for the production, and in the first few airings, billboards for the company appear throughout A Charlie Brown Christmas — which ironically presents a message of anti-commercialization.
IT’S JAZZ GREAT VINCE GUARALDI, CHARLIE BROWN!
Jazz group the Vince Guaraldi Trio provided the music for A Charlie Brown Christmas, and a few dozen other Peanuts animated specials. They got the gig because one day when producer Lee Mendelson was thinking about what kind of music he’d need for Peanuts media, the trio’s jazz instrumental and unlikely pop hit “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” came on the car radio when he was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. Fate was cast — Mendelson contacted Guaraldi and offered him the gig. He wrote and recorded the theme song for all Peanuts specials, titled “Linus and Lucy” after two characters, and provided all the arrangements of holiday favorites for A Charlie Brown Christmas.
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THE NETWORK ISN’T THRILLED ABOUT THIS, CHARLIE BROWN!
CBS president James Aubrey hated specials — they messed up viewers’ habits, he thought — and cartoons — he thought they belonged on Saturday mornings and were just for kids. Mendelson waited two months after Aubrey was fired and pitched the idea to CBS CEO Frank Stanton, a friend of Schulz. Executives didn’t like the special, finding it slow and too full of Guaraldi’s jazz. But the network was contracted to air it, and it proved extremely popular — half of all American households tuned in to watch the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas in December 1965.
YOU KILLED AN INDUSTRY, CHARLIE BROWN!
While it still gets big ratings whenever it airs on TV in the 21st century, some things from A Charlie Brown Christmas are pretty dated, particularly the animosity to the very-1960s fad of candy-colored aluminum and thus artificial Christmas trees. Charlie Brown and Linus pick out a tree at a lot, and find one shabby, biological tree, superior in their minds to the flashy, artificial, and superficial aluminum ones. These were a real thing in 1965, and A Charlie Brown Christmas was so influential and popular that it killed the fad. Manufacture of such trees peaked at 150,000 units in 1964; by 1970, they were out of production.