‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ Creators Didn’t Want to ‘Disney-fy’ Charles Schulz’s Characters
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a perennial holiday classic. But back in 1965, when Coca-Cola decided that it wanted to sponsor a Peanuts holiday special, the show’s creators weren’t sure they’d be able to pull it off. They had just six months to put together a 30-minute animated program from scratch. And they had to do it in a way that stayed true to Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’s unique style.
‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ creators were initially critical of their work on the special
As soon as Coca-Cola ordered A Charlie Brown Christmas, a core team consisting of Schulz, producer Lee Mendelson, and animator Bill Melendez got to work. They put together a short-but-sweet story of Charlie Brown’s struggle to discover the true meaning of Christmas amid a sea of greed and crass commercialism. But given the short amount of time they had to work with, the finished product didn’t have the polished look that Melendez would have liked.
“When we saw the finished show, we thought we had killed it,” he recalled in an interview for the book A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition. “It had so many warts and bumps and lumps and things.”
“We all felt an uneasiness after the [first] screening,” Mendelson recalled. “We thought that perhaps we had somehow missed the boat.” Network execs agreed, criticizing the special as “flat” and “slow.” But when the special aired on CBS in December 1965, it was an immediate hit.
Bill Melendez said he didn’t want to ‘Disney-fy’ the Peanuts characters
Where Melendez saw flaws in A Charlie Brown Christmas, others saw charm. Though the team later “fixed up a few things,” the animator said, they “never completely recreated the show.”
“The inconsistencies and little problems seem to make it even more endearing to a lot of people, and [Schulz] never wanted to change it.”
In fact, Schulz – whose nickname was Sparky – loved Melendez’s animation, which he felt captured the spirit of the original comic strip.
“I didn’t try to Disney-fy it,” Melendez said of his approach to bringing Schulz’s work to life on screen. “Sparky understood that we didn’t want to take his characters away from him. We didn’t want to change them, just to make his characters work”
Animating the Peanuts characters for the Christmas special was a challenge
Though Melendez was committed to staying true to Schulz’s vision for his characters, that presented some challenges for him as an animator. He’d previously worked for Disney and Warner Bros., where the style was very different.
“I finally figured out how to turn Snoopy, Charlie Brown, and the other character to hide the facts that they were really flat designs and not three-dimensional,” he said. “At Disney and every other studio in those years, we always animated three-dimensional characters … I had to animate Sparky’s characters in such a way that you wouldn’t see the turns.”
One character who was easy to animate was Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy. (Melendez also ended up providing the voice for the beloved beagle.)
“Snoopy saved me because Snoopy is more like a real animated character. He can do anything–move and dance–and he’s very easy to animate, whereas the kids are nearly impossible! I’ve always had to think quickly and learn to cope with the limitations of the design.”
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