The Most Famous Christmas Special Actually Has A Dark History

In December 1965 director Bill Melendez sat in a movie theater and watched the completed version of A Charlie Brown Christmas... and he hated every minute of it. Melendez turned to producer Lee Mendelson, who sat in horrified shock next to him, and repeated a line from the now-famous TV special: “We’ve killed it.” Only a few days later, though, both men would be proven wrong beyond their wildest dreams…

But they couldn’t have known then just how special this little project was. A year before, Mendelson was fresh off the failure of his TV documentary A Boy Named Charlie Brown — which never even made it to air. Was it possible, then, that Charlie Brown would never make it out of the newspaper?

Then a representative from Coca-Cola asked Mendelson about the possibility of them doing a Charlie Brown-starring animated show that Coca-Cola could sponsor. Mendelson agreed — even though the deadline was tight. The story goes that Coke told Mendelson on a Thursday that they wanted an outline by Monday. So Mendelson's first call was to Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind Charlie Brown.

The pair created an outline the next day. “The first thing Schulz had said was, 'If we can talk about what I feel is the true meaning of Christmas, based on my Midwest background' — he was a real student of the Bible — 'it would really be worth doing,'” Mendelson told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2000. The pitch was soon accepted, but there was another catch: the special had to be ready by Christmas.