Charlie Brown and Snoopy and the original Peanuts gang have survived nerly 60 years in television. The original animated half-hour holiday special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, premiered on Dec. 23, 1965.
I was eight that Christmas and already a devoted Peanuts follower. I used to clip Charle’s Schultz’s comic strip out of the Toronto Star every day and glue them into a scrapbook. I had dozens of the Fawcett Crest paperback collections which originally sold for 40 cents at the local Loblaws grocery store at Six Points plaza in Etobicoke.
Television has changed a ton since that special first aired. It was a black and white world back then, and you had to catch it the one and only time it aired. If you missed it, you were a blockhead.
I watched it right from the start, right from the part where Snoopy, skating with the rest of the kids, grabs Linus’ blanket in his teeth, swings him around and pitches him smack into a sign which read, “Brought to you by the people in your town who bottle Coca-Cola.”
Advertisers were all about the “brought-to-you-by’s” back then. The plug for coke was pulled after that initial broadcast airing on CBS. That makes sense, but there are many other nips and tucks to that original Christmas special, which for several years now has streamed exclusively on AppleTV+.
Other changes are just clean-ups. The original team behind the special, Bill Melendez and executive producer Lee Mendelson, were rushed getting the animated half-hour delivered to CBS in just five months of production (before computers). Post-production began nine days before the broadcast. With their short cut animation, Melendez and Mendelson felt they had ruined cartoonist Charles Schulz’s legacy.
advertisement
That was never the case. The special won a Peabody after that first airing and continues to entertain new generations. Still, there were minor flaws and continuity problems that were addressed over the years. As can be seen in the above side-by-side comparision posted on YouTube, Lucy brushes snow off her psychiatrist desk — which briefly was snowless — and a sound effect has been added. When Snoopy hammers decorations all over his dog house, a jaunty new theme, “Surfin’ Snoopy” (from a 1966 special) has replaced the less jazzy and overplayed “Christmastime is Here” theme. And so on and so on.
There are plenty of tiny changes, for example, during the scenes where Charlie Brown is rehearsing the Christmas play. Some were simply choices director Melendez always wanted to make, including louder or added sound effects. Snoopy, who he himself vocalized (in sped up squawks and howls), does a throaty “Bleh” in later years after Lucy reacts to him kissing her. The added effect punches home the sight gag.
More commercial time was allowed since those first Peranuts specials were first aired in the mid-’60s, so there are also a few edits for time.
What survives intact, remarkably, is the entire passage from Luke 2:8-14 that Linus recites on stage at the Christmas pageant. Schultz himself insisted this bible reading was sacred and would not brook calls to remove it originally. The annual holiday special also retains its overall anti-commercialism vibe, which lands better these days sans commercials on a streaming platform.
If you have time, watch the entire comparision above but be warned: it is almost as long as the original Charlie Brown special.
