Merry Christmas from your friends at the Dog Denizens of Genesee Park (DDGP)!
We could regale you with the "story of the first Christmas" or provide an egg nog recipe to celebrate the yuletide. Or we could celebrate what some consider the best holiday program ever produced: A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Hard to believe now, but television executives in 1965 harboredqualms about the Peanuts-inspired Christmas special. Cartoonist Charles M. Schultz, producer Lee Mendelson and director Bill Melendez had to convince the network suits that the national audience would watch an animated Christmas program in which:
- Child actors provide the voices for child protagonists;
- A laugh track doesn't accompany one-liners;
- Characters cynically comment on the commercialism of Christmas;
- Linus quotes "the true meaning of Christmas"... verses from The Gospel According to Luke in the King James Bible;
- An original jazz soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi -- known for the album Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus and the hit "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" -- was used instead of more traditional holiday tunes used in the Rankin-Bass special, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer ("We Are Santa's Elves", "We're A Couple of Misfits", "Holly Jolly Christmas").
Credit Schulz, Mendelson and Melendez for sticking to their convictions and producing what is arguably considered -- with apologies to fans of Rudolph, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (the Boris Karloff animated program, and not the Jim Carrey movie) -- the best made-for-television Christmas special. People today -- 45 years after the program premiered -- immediately understand the reference to "a Charlie Brown tree." You don't have to read Downbeat magazine or listen to KPLU -- both good practices -- to recognize the opening bars of Guaraldi's "Linus and Lucy."
No, the only complaint -- really, more of an observation -- one might have with A Charlie Brown Christmas is that Schulz, Mendelson and Melendez set the bar so high that any subsequent Peanuts television special seemed pedestrian by comparison. For every It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown (1966), He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968), or A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), you have two other programs along the lines of Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown (1975), Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977), Snoopy's Getting Married, Charlie Brown (1985), or You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown! (1994).
As Linus once said in print version, "There's no heavier burden than great potential."
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