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# Charlie Brown Christmas' Poor Start
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/3408/
- Published: 2005-12-21T18:00:24.000Z
- Updated: 2005-12-21T18:00:24.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Holidays, #wpChunk

> "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*

[*Washington Times* Link](http://www.washtimes.com/culture/culturebriefs.htm?ref=thedailyeudemon.com).