Product: A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Rating: 5.0
The very first PEANUTS cartoon...and four decades later, still the best
I have been a PEANUTS fan practically since I first learned to read (around the age of 2, if my late mother's oft-retold story is to be believed). I alternated as a kid identifying the most with poor, picked-on, stumble-plagued Charlie Brown and bookish, thoughtful, sibling-harassed Linus van Pelt. In the wrong hands, animating these beloved characters (quite possibly the greatest ever created for a comic strip) for the first time could have been disastrous. God must surely have guided "Sparky" Schulz to the gentle-hearted animation team of Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelsohn, who gave his creation the care and love it deserved; and them, in turn, to jazz great Vince Guaraldi for his inspired musical score (where do you think that famous PEANUTS theme music -- "Linus & Lucy" -- first came from?).Read Mendelsohn's out-of-print 1970 book, CHARLIE BROWN & CHARLIE SCHULZ, or the more recent A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS anniversary-edition book for the full story behind the making of this timeless classic -- and the tremendous risks they took in making it the way they did and airing it that first time on CBS in 1965. You'll appreciate its magic, humor and warmth all the more when you know how perilously close it came to not being made or aired at all -- or worse, bombing in the Nielsen ratings and preventing the making of all the specials, feature films and even Broadway musicals (!) that followed.All the silliness and the sentimentality only serve to make it more of an enduring treasure. And that powerful, climactic moment, when the gang's resident philosopher, Linus (what an utterly fitting choice!), takes poor lost Charlie Brown and friends -- and all of us -- back to old school on the real reason for the season, with that sweet, simple reading of a few lines from the King James Gospel of Luke, can still move even a jaded, bitter "recovering Catholic" like me to tears. It remains the finest artistic rebuke to the ever-worsening commercialization of Christendom's holiest day since Stan Freberg's edgier, more satirical audio recording "Green Chri$tma$" of a decade earlier (and sadly, both are even more relevant today than they were back then).If only poor Mr. Schulz could have lived to see his baby reach this milestone anniversary. It consoles me to know that, at the end of his life, all the cards, letters and E-mails he got in hospital surely made him realize that he had created something for the ages, to last well beyond his own lifetime. May new generations of children take A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS -- and all the rest of the wonderful world of PEANUTS -- to their hearts forevermore...and grow up to share them with their own kids.