A Charlie Brown Christmas
Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the classic TV show “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This holiday delight debuted in 1965 and has been aired on TV during the holiday season every year since. Most everyone knows the beloved story by heart, but here are some fun facts you might not know…..
* The voice actors were cast from kids in the director’s neighborhood. Charles Schulz wanted to bring believable voices to the characters he created, so the producers cast real children to give life to the “Peanuts” gang instead of adult voice-over artists. Professional child actors were cast in the roles of Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy, but the rest of the children lived in director Bill Melendez’s southern California neighborhood. Melendez and Schultz wanted to preserve the innocence and voice to make the cartoon more realistic, funnier, and edgier.
* Some of the children were so young they couldn’t read the script. Melendez said he had to recite the script line by line to the children who couldn’t read, including Christopher Shea, who voiced Linus.
* Schulz refused to let CBS insert a laugh track that was a standard for TV comedies at the time.
* Musician and composer Vince Guaraldi’s ensemble of holiday jazz music for the show became just as famous and as much of a yuletide favorite as the cartoon. However, Schultz was not a big fan since he thought jazz music was awful. But despite his feelings, Schultz decided to use Guaraldi’s music with a mix of traditional Christmas hymns because it created a bubbly, childlike tone for the show.
* Linus’ “True Meaning of Christmas” speech was almost cut from the show. Schultz was a religious man, and he had insisted in the early days of production that the script feature some religious overtones, particularly a passage from the St. Luke Gospel about the birth of Jesus Christ, to bring some meaning to the holiday, that “had been lost in the general good-time frivolity.” The producers agreed to include a Nativity scene. Still, by the time the script was finished, producer Lee Mendelson realized he had included an entire minute-long speech directly from the New Testament. This led to arguments between Schultz and the producers. Mendelson insisted that the special was an “entertainment” show and that the speech would scare off advertisers by narrowing its audience. Thankfully, the now-iconic speech survived the final cut and has aired in the special every year since.
