When will A Charlie Brown Christmas air in 2019?
When and where will A Charlie Brown Christmas air in 2019?
When and where will A Charlie Brown Christmas air this year?
The beloved Christmas tradition, the first of the numerous Peanuts specials, will air on Thursday, December 5 at 7 p.m. CT on ABC.
According to the 2000 book A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition, written by Lee Mendelson and edited by Antonia Felix, the special came about because of a documentary that Mendelson, who was working for CBS News at the time, made about Charles Schulz.
The documentary would have included about a minute of animation done by Bill Melendez, a former Disney and Warner Brothers animator who animated the Peanuts characters in a series of Ford commercials.
The documentary ultimately never made it to air, but Coca-Cola executives liked the animated segment and wanted to sponsor a Christmas special, so in about six months Schulz, Mendelson and Melendez had whipped together a fully-organized production, using mainly local kids from the San Francisco area for the voices.
These boys and girls became the core of the cast for the first handful of specials, which also included It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, among others.
A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired on CBS on Thursday, December 9, 1965, and became immensely popular with viewers, despite CBS executives’ uncertainty with the slow, deliberate pacing and simple animation faithfully reproduced from the comic strip’s pages.
Charlie Brown is having trouble with understanding what Christmas is all about, feeling that things have gotten way too commercialized – even Snoopy is busy decorating his doghouse to win a prize in a contest.
Lucy has the idea to make him the director of the neighborhood’s Christmas pageant, and the rehearsal goes about as well as they ever do. (But that makes for a good production – an odd-yet-true theater rule of thumb).
Fed up with his management style, everyone else suggests that Charlie Brown go pick out a tree, where he selects the scrawniest, most pitiful sapling imaginable.
Along the way, Snoopy reads a newspaper, skates happily on the pond, dances to Schroeder’s piano music, kisses Lucy (much to her horror), and wins first prize in the decorating contest.
Other famous scenes include Lucy and Schroeder at the piano, a consultation at the psychiatric booth, and Linus’ recitation of the Christmas story from Luke 2:8-14 (in the King James Version, since most other Bible translations were a decade into the future).
Finally, the special ends with the kids re-decorating Charlie Brown’s scrawny tree and singing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
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Again, A Charlie Brown Christmas airs on Thursday, December 5, at 7 p.m. CT on ABC. Will you be watching?