More than 40 years after its debut, A Charlie Brown Christmas has been a staple of the holiday season and an animation classic. This year, for the first time, it will air without the man who animated it, Bill Melendez, who died in September at age 91.
“He was very proud to do what he did with the Charlie Brown strip (by bringing it to animation) and keep it going all those years,” says Lee Mendelson, who fondly recalls his partner in producing 43 TV specials and four feature films starring Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters. “He was just fun to be with. Anybody who met Bill Melendez never forgot him.”
Melendez’s career in animation goes back to the earliest days. Born in Mexico, Melendez was educated in the United States and attended the Chouinard Art Institute, now known as CalArts. He got his first job in animation at the Walt Disney Studios in 1938, working on such classics as Fantasia, Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo.
Active in the Screen Cartoonists Guild, he left Disney after the 1941 animators strike and worked on Looney Tunes shorts under Bob Clampett. Through the 1950s, Melendez was a prolific and award-winning animator of shorts, commercials and industrial films for clients such as UPA, John Sutherland Prods. and Playhouse Pictures.
One such gig was to animate the Peanuts characters for the opening titles of The Ford Show in 1959. That caught Mendelson’s attention a few years later when he was making a documentary on Schulz, and he hired Melendez to do a short animated segment. The documentary never sold, but it did lead to A Charlie Brown Christmas, which came about unexpectedly right after Melendez had formed his own studio in 1964.
“Coca-Cola called and asked if we had ever worked on a Christmas show and I said yes — a made-up answer of course,” Mendelson recalls. “They said, ‘Well, if you can send us an outline by Monday, we’re interested in maybe doing a Christmas show.’ So I had Bill quickly fly up from L.A. and we drove up to Sebastopol, Calif., and we sat down with Schulz and in the next day or two we put the whole outline of A Charlie Brown Christmas together, and then we worked as partners ever after that, for four and a half decades.”
When the special aired in 1965, it was an instant classic. “It was not the first animated special, but it was The Jazz Singer of animated specials,” says Jerry Beck, an animation historian.
The key to the show’s success, Mendelson says, was it was faithful to the comic strip. “He took the comic strip characters and moved them. He didn’t embellish them, he didn’t draw exotic backgrounds and everything. He literally moved the comic strip and because of that all the people who had fallen in love with the comic strip fell in love with the animation,” he says.
As head of Bill Melendez Productions, Melendez was free to take on the projects he wanted, and the company continued to do commercials and non-Peanuts animated specials. But Beck says Melendez also deserves credit for carrying the torch for quality animation on television during the 1970s and 80s, and for providing jobs that kept top talents in the business.
Even though he owned his own studio, Melendez did as much of the animation as he could. “It’s unusual for a director to take large chunks of the animation and do it himself,” says Tom Sito, an animator, animation historian, and friend of Melendez. “If he could he would have done everything himself.”
Sito says Melendez found a way to make his mark by animating the characters, adding sequences like Snoopy dancing on the piano or grabbing Linus’ blanket. “It was Bill’s strength — he would give you the essence of the strip moving, but he found things that are very animatable in it,” says Sito.
The Peanuts specials have since become classics, and continue to inspire new generations of animators. “The Peanuts animated holiday specials always were a big treat for me,” says animator Paul Allen. “Lots of fond memories and a big part of why I love cartoons and animation.”
Despite the acclaim he had earned in his career — including six Emmy Awards and an Oscar nomination — he was skeptical his accomplishments would be recognized. Mendelson says his partner would have been surprised to see his passing written up in such publications from The New York Times to Time Magazine.
“Although he never expected it, I always did,” Mendelson says. “He was truly a great man; he was greater than the sum of his parts.”
About Thomas J. McLean
Thomas J. McLean is a freelance entertainment journalist specializing in animation, visual effects and comic books. He also is the author of "Mutant Cinema: The X-Men Trilogy From Comics to Screen," available now from Sequart.com Books.