The Christmas classic that almost wasn’t

Wednesday, December 7th, 2005

The Christmas classic that almost wasn’t demonstrates that the network suits can be — gasp! — wrong:

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

“They said it was slow,” executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Comments

  1. Grasspunk says:

    Yeah, on the surface it seems such an oddball. Even though it was from before I was born, it was a huge hit with my kids a couple of years back.

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