When ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ Was Too Christmas For CBS
The ‘60s were a weird decade. There was, of course, all that hippie business, but also, people ate a lot of food molded into Jello and couldn’t imagine a better time than turning the hose on a length of plastic and hurling themselves upon it. Hey, there was a war on. People were coping however they could. It was right in the middle of this ridiculous decade that Charles M. Schulz, Bill Melendenz, and Lee Mendelson made A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The TV special was unique for its time, not only for being the first television appearance of the relatively new Peanuts characters but for sticking to simple animation, eschewing a laugh track, and featuring the recitation of a Bible verse. “Whaaaat?” we hear you say. “Jesus? On TV? In America?” No, you’re right, we don’t hear you say that because the only person more popular than Jesus in American media right now is Timothee Chalamet.
Key words: right now. When Schulz wrote the climax of the story, in which Linus explains “what Christmas is all about” by quoting the Gospel of Luke, his partners were nervous. “Bill and I looked at each other and said, ‘Uh oh, that doesn’t sound very good,’” Mendelson remembered, “but then Schulz said, ‘Look, if we’re going to do this, we should talk about what Christmas is all about, not just do a cartoon with no particular point of view.’”
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CBS executives were on M. and M.’s sides. “The Bible thing scares us,” they told the team, nervous that modern audiences would complain about the shoehorning of religion into family television. Yes, you read that correctly. “They were freaking out about something so overtly religious in a Christmas special,” explained Melendez. Yep, you’re still not having a stroke (probably). In fact, the only thing that saved the special was that it was too late to pull it or change it. The network had run ads, and back then, ads actually had to deliver on their promises.
Of course, the audience didn’t care. No one complained, or at least not in enough numbers for the media to report it. There’s been a handful of controversies in recent years, mostly about advertising or performing the special in schools, but one state attorney general argued it was actually illegal not to include the Bible verse in such displays. As another ‘60s icon basically said, the times, they are bananas.
