“Well,” said Schulz, who died in 2000 at 77, “if Willie Mays can trust you with his life, maybe I can trust you with mine.”
But at the end of the conversation, Mendelson mentioned that he had made a documentary about Willie Mays, the baseball great whom Schulz idolized. Mendelson, then a young documentary film producer, got the familiar brushoff when he called Schulz with a proposal to make a movie about his life and the creation of Peanuts. “Peanuts,” which first appeared in newspapers in 1950, gradually became a cultural phenomenon, the most influential comic strip in history. The publicity-shy Schulz, a Midwesterner who had transplanted to Sebastopol, Calif., had previously spurned numerous TV offers to capitalize on his comic strip.
It’s something about their being traditional that makes them so appealing.”īut like many traditions that in retrospect seem obvious and preordained, the “Peanuts” special almost never happened. “It’s comfort in a difficult world,” Brooks said of “Charlie Brown Christmas,” comparing the special to popular holiday music such as “White Christmas.” “I did a study once of the popular Christmas songs, and they’re almost all from the ‘40s through to the ‘60s. And it hasn’t hurt this year that Fox’s “The Peanuts Movie” has scored at the box office, grossing more than $84 million since its Nov. TV historian and researcher Tim Brooks said that the familiarity of the half-hour Peanuts special is what has helped it last, as boomer and GenX parents reintroduce the program to their own kids.
We got this huge initial audience and never lost them.” “It was just passed on from generation to generation. “It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays,” Mendelson, now 82, said in a recent phone interview from the Bay Area, where he still operates his production company. It became part of everybody’s Christmas holidays.
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