Of all the beloved Christmas specials that either used to be, or still are, shown on television, A Charlie Brown Christmas has to be one of, if not the best. 40 years old this season, and having in it something that you won’t see outside of Christian broadcasting — a reading out of the New Testament, ie Luke’s story of Christ’s birth.

The story of how this program came to be is here.

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% of the nation’s viewers. “When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked,” says Melendez, 89. “They actually liked it!”

8PM tonight on ABC — if you miss it you’ll have to exclaim, “Good grief!” (db)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Christian Fundamentalists, Media Doin' It Right. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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