Today in (Television) History: A Charlie Brown Christmas
2009-12-09
What the roomful of executives saw upon the first screening was a shock--a slow and quiet semireligious, jazz-filled 25 minutes, voiced by a cast of inexperienced children, and, perhaps most unforgivably, without a laugh track. "They said, 'We'll play it once and that will be all. Good try,' " remembers Mendelson. "Bill and I thought we had ruined Charlie Brown forever when it was done. We kind of agreed with the network. One of the animators stood up in the back of the room--he had had a couple of drinks--and he said, 'It's going to run for a hundred years,' and then fell down. We all thought he was crazy, but he was more right than we were."