Charlie Brown Christmas' Poor Start

"When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' in November 1965, they hated it.

"'They said it was slow,' executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

"Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

"'We told Schulz, "Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,"?' Mendelson says. 'When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, "We've ruined Charlie Brown."?'

"Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50 percent of the nation's viewers."

Bill Nichols, writing on "The Christmas classic that almost wasn't," Dec. 6 in USA Today

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