Page 7 - Pop History: A Charlie Brown Christmas

Episode Date: December 8, 2020

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For this time is here. Horrible children. I should have put the lyrics up. How do you not know the fucking words to it? I just know it as just. Park to herald age. Borgene G. This is not starting well.

Are you ready to get P nuts up in this place? Oh, yeah. The true meaning of Christmas. Does Charles Schultz know it? He definitely had a mistress. We'll talk about. All of those things on this episode today. Oh, my God.

Was that mistress, young? Yes, she was, but not illegally young, so don't worry. We won't be crushing all of your dreams today. No. Just a couple. But most of this is actually very, very positive. Yeah, we're talking a little bit about the history of peanuts up until Charlie Brown. He's a clown.

He's a clown. I feel like we never do introduction. So I'm Holden joined by. Jackie and Natalie. Whoa. Today we are talking about my favorite Christmas thing ever. Whatever, they're here, but they're whatever. We're talking about my favorite Christmas thing.

This is Holden's Epi. Yes, this is my special episode. He's a bit of a CB himself, you know. And that's why I'm going to force Natalie to be in attendance while I talk about Christianity in a slightly positive light. I apologize ahead of time. It's very off brand for the network. But it is a part of this episode because I do, do truly love that climactic scene of this film.

a film by film I mean special uh it's like we and and spoiler Muppets Christmas around the corner it's like Jackie has Muppets Christmas I have Charlie Brown Christmas this is like I watch it with my brother every single year I might even Zoom watch it with them this year just to make just to force it a ponsed us are we gonna get one of mine I look at Christmas vacation Christmas vacation we got to do that that's all I want my dad every year definitely we got to do that we will a bad Santa too I would totally do. But yeah, yeah, Natalie, definitely National Olympics Christmas vacation we should also do. These are, you guys are in my wheelhouse

right now, by the way, those are probably my top three favorite. We did Scrooge last year. That's also in the short list. But this one, I think for me, if you want to say, Holden, what exemplifies the feeling of Christmas distilled to its absolute

utter emotion that exemplifies this childlike wonder mixed with this weird adult nostalgia feeling mixed with this bizarre kind of subtle sadness in a way. There's something about it. Maybe it's just those moments of reflection, the fact that the year is almost up, and that is also a part of what the Christmas is all about, how cynical it's all become and how grossly commercialization of it all.

That's my favorite part. I mean, I do love to buy, bye, bye, but I found, and I don't mean in sync, guys. I found this paragraph. that talks about a little bit of why Peanuts specifically is able to create this reaction with Charlie Brown Christmas. And I just thought that it was so beautiful because as someone that we grew up with the original collections of Charlie Brown in the house, my mom was a big Charlie Brown fan growing up. So we had a lot of the old school books of like when they were drawn in a very different way than they are in the special. Cool.

But I love this sentiment. So in the 1950s, Peanuts struck a chord with people feeling guilty over their vague discontent amid historic post-war prosperity. In the 1960s, it expressed the struggle of young people reaching for freedoms and pondering the meaning of existence, like Snoopy wondering why he was put on Earth. He says, I haven't the slightest idea. More than anything, Peanuts upended the belief that childhood is a time of innocence and happiness for a child's pain is more acute than adults.

Charlie Brown reminded people of what it was like to be vulnerable, to be small and alone in the universe, to be human, both little and big at the same time. And it is, Charlie Brown is, it's sad. It is a sad cartoon. The strips are sad. He never wins. And it is about learning life's hard lessons,

young and in a time when we're bouncing around and being like, yeah, but that's okay, I learned it, I learn it, I learn it. And then you look at kids and you think, oh, your emotions don't count as much. Oh, they're just overdramatic. But they're learning all of this for the first time. Do you know how hard that is? Of course they're maniacs. And also experiencing a lot of a horrible kids always experience something they're not supposed to and they have to process those feelings. I think Charlie Brown actually going back and looking at this was really the first experiment into like looking at mental health for kids and that's really important. And yet also shitting on it at the same time with the psychiatric help five cents of Jesus like with Lucy

just being like figure it out essentially. It's very poignant commentary when you get down to it. I never really paid that much attention to peanuts and now I'm very nostalgic for them. I'm like oh man I miss the comic strips. I want to go look at Sunday comics. It's really good.

It speaks to the power of what a simple Sunday strip can have for people, especially because it's, you know, it's on your TV screen over the holidays. It's in your weekly paper. And there's surprising meaning. And I think when you're just like reading the news and then you're like, oh, hitting the crosswords and these dumb one-liner jokes, if you have a Charles Schultz, a Bill Waterson in the mix, and all of a sudden you're like, am I tearing up over this fucking four panel? message, but because

this person put so much heart and so much love into their work. And you feel that in this special and what Schultz wanted to say with this special. This special that came out of nowhere that at the end of the day was much like Charlie Brown's tree itself, this little special that couldn't until it finally

did and won over the whole country. I mean, you know, and became this absolute mainstay, but it had so much doubt behind it. It came out of a failure. It's such a Charlie Brown's story. It came out of a failed documentary. It was a rush job. They watched a rough cut of it and thought they had ruined the peanuts forever. It was, uh, you know, this whole bizarre situation and then,

and then just explodes onto the scene because it's doing something in a Christmas special that no other, uh, uh, Christmas special had done before it, and thus cementing it as this regular thing. And I mean, something for me that it came out in 1965, I believe, right? And, um, you know, three decades later, I'm obsessed with it as a boy myself and now as an adult, something that speaks to both parts of me in that way. And you know, you can laugh your ass off at Snoopy and just enjoy it on this one level. And then watch it 10 years later and be like, oh my God, this is nailing this, again, just melancholic Christmas feeling that I have every year that I think everybody has a little bit of every year because there's just something sad about going home in a way. There's something sad about growing up. There's something sad about the way that we consume.

Especially this year's holidays. This year's holidays are really putting a lot, I don't mean to speak for you guys, but it's putting a lot in perspective for me of what we value, of what our lives are. And I'm being extra introspective this year, which I don't know if I need, but maybe we do. Maybe we do need to take a little bit closer look at how we live our lives of how we treat each other and, you know, why not kick it off with Charlie Brown Christmas,

which also started, it changed the face of primetime specials because it was the first one. It was the one that it opened the door for how the Grinch stole Christmas. It opened the door for Frosty, the Snowman, these other specials that now you also watch every year because they didn't think that they could make a 20-minute special mean anything. And they did. It's 20 minutes for something that has shaped so much. much of how I feel in the holidays. It's 20 fucking minutes long.

Which is, that's crazy. It even opened the door for whatever to get a Christmas special. I'm sorry, did I say whatever I meant Garfield? How? Wow. Do you? Oh, you will never disparage the Garfield. See, the reason why we're doing this special, I just need you guys to know the inside

baseball is because I wanted to do the Garfield holiday specials. But Wisbrough already did Garfield. We could do Garfield. We can do Garfield. No, I guess we can't. I guess we can't. I guess we shouldn't or actually maybe we shouldn't. But either way, whatever.

Also, I guess this might be a good point to mention that it turns out that Apple has purchased Charlie Brown Christmas, which is very funny because it's all about how commercialism is ruining Christmas. But it has put it behind a paywall. So you can't watch it unless you watch it in a very annoying way, which is I found it on YouTube in 15 parts. So that is, yes, a 20 minute special in 15 parts on YouTube. It'll also be available via PBS. I think they're going to broadcast. I hope it's going to be on the app as well. I have that on my Roku. Yes, on December 11th through 13th. But starting

December 4th, you can get it on Apple Plus. At least you can stream it for free. I don't want to give them an ad. No, we don't, but it will be free. So it won't be behind a paywall starting December 4th. So by the time you listen to this, you can watch it. Just you have to watch it on Apple, unfortunately. All right, let's get into it. The Peanuts Christmas special, it all starts with the man, the myth, the legend, Charles

M. Schultz, who created a daily American comic strip called the Peanuts written and illustrated by the man himself. It ran from 1950 to the year 2000. Isn't that crazy? Every single one he did himself. And spoiler alert,

the peanuts, the last strip to air not air, to be printed, happened the Sunday after he died. And isn't that nuts? It's nuts. 17,897 strips published in all. It ran in over 2,600 newspapers with a readership of around 35, 355,000,000 in 75% countries translated to 21 languages, centering around a social circle of young children

and its main characters, Charlie Brown, a kid who is generally bad at life. the series also, of course, ends up with these specials. A Charlie Brown Christmas. The year after that, it's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. I love this. It's another one I would love to cover at some point. I love it. Absolutely fantastic.

That's another one too, which it is the idea that Linus waits in that damn pumpkin patch all night long and he never shows up. You know what's even a better Halloween special is the Garfield one. The Garfield Halloween special. Yes, it is. I guess we can't talk about that. I just can't remember a single thing. that happens in it is the only difference

between those two specials. Yeah, just literally, the one is incredibly memorable. I remember that he says the pumpkin patch all that. And then the other way is like, what even happened in it? I guess the gats on it. Garfield Halloween is actually scary. Yeah, it is. It's actually fucking scary.

When we, like both Henry and I had visceral reactions as we watched it as adults because we were both like upset by the parts still that scared us was when we were kids. And the Garfield special. So, yeah. I guess you should know that already since you covered it, but whatever. Well, I guess it's a special, but either way, Charles M. Schultz, let's talk about him. Raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Schultz loved drawing at an early age and enjoyed drawing his family dog, Spike.

Since the dog liked to eat odd things like pins and tacks, a picture of Schultz drew, a picture of Schultz drew got into Ripley's, believe it or not, credited as drawn by Sparky. Which is a lie. We called him Sparky. Yeah, starting with a lie. Starting with a lie, Izzy. But he's got to mommy problems. I wrote Mommy Problems a lot. And I kept singing, Mommy Problems.

Charles Got him. He's gonna draw Charlie Brown. I sang it a lot to myself. What are the mommy problems? Well, his mom died tragically, and he still refers to it, well, not anymore. But he did refer to it as his greatest tragedy. In fact, he even says when he is asked to recount his biographical timeline, he doesn't begin with his birth, but he begins with the day his mother died. He said that the tragedy compounded by the deep dissatisfaction that even though he far surpassed his wildest childhood dreams of success and became the highest paid cartoonist of the world, his mother never lived to see him publish anything.

Charlie Brown He never got to That's why the adults never talk In any of the stuff Because they're dead Either way Since he also another Charlie Brown element to Schultz He skipped two half grades in elementary school

And ended up the youngest in his class at high school Which turned him into a very shy timid teenager Very Charlie Brownish And one memorable moment from his high school was when his drawings were rejected by his high school yearbook. I feel like every time I do a story about a young animator, cartoonist, what have you, they always first get their stuff published in the high school newspaper yearbook, what have you.

Of course, his stuff got rejected. Turn down. Turn down. Oh, yes. So yes, his mother's death. Also, he is after high school drafted into the army to serve as a staff sergeant with the 20th. armored division in Europe during World War II. He led a machine gun team.

And they only saw combat at the very end of the war. And he said he only had one opportunity to fire his machine gun, but forgot to load it. And the German soldier he would have fired at willingly surrendered. What a Charlie Brown. What a Charlie Brown. But it is interesting, though, because that is why they bring in the snoopy other side of his fantasy life to incorporate what essentially the trauma that the army did on Charles Schultz He also has this line that is, again, another Charlie Brown line,

the Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness. And real rough. But he does openly say again and again how Snoopy becomes eventually the embodiment of Schultz's life course. So when Snoopy glosses over Lucy's insults, it was Schultz accepting his contentious divorce. When Snoopy pursues the Red Baron and afterwards quaffs a root beer with Bill Malden, this was Schultz memorializing his World War II experience and his wartime editorial cartoonist hero. Which Peanut represented his erectile dysfunction? I don't know if he had it because he certainly seemed like he kept his mistress pretty happy for all those years.

There you go. I'm slamming away at that mistress. I was going to say it was the bird. Woodstock. I think the mistress was the piano. Oh, mistress is the piano. Okay. Yeah, play those keys for us.

After the war, he went to Minneapolis and did lettering for a Roman Catholic comic magazine and then took a job at Art Instruction Inc. Where he reviewed and graduated students work, which is the job he would maintain while he got into the comics biz. His first regular cartoon was for St. Paul Pioneer Press with four one panel drawing per issue, referred to as little folks. I hate the name little folks.

And he hates the name Peanuts, which we're going to do because it's such a Johnny Brown there. He hates the name Peanuts. He wanted to be Little Folks. But Peanuts came about because that is the name, the Peanut Gallery from the Howdy Duty Show is where the kids used to sit. So they called it Peanuts and he just wanted to call it good old Charlie Brown. And they wouldn't let him.

He just wanted to be good old Charlie Brown. Yeah. Little folks included a well-dressed boy with the fondness for Beethoven, a dog similar to Snoopy, and even a boy named Charlie Brown. So, of course, that ends up being the focus, and that's what he wants. The character's name was actually first used on May 30th, 1948, in a strip in which you don't actually see him because another boy buried him in a sandbox and then denies that he's seen him when asked.

The first time you see him is actually in the first peanut strip in October 2, 1950, with two other children talking about good old Charlie Brown as he passes by them after which one of the kids says, How I hate him. Brown is, of course, modeled after Schultz, who maintained his shy, withdrawn nature through his life. And also, they both have barber fathers and housewife mothers. Also, many of his friends show the same name.

Schultz was friends with a Linus and a Shermy growing up. Then there's Charlie Brown's unrequited love for a little red-haired girl who was inspired by his real love of Donne. M.A. Johnson, who is an art instruction Inc. accountant that he proposed to in 1950. She turned him down and married another man shortly after what in Charlie Brown. I wrote

Donna Mae Bichson more like. So apparently this woman who was based on the little red-haired girl. So she was dating Charles Schultz at the time and he was dating her and after he got the news from her one day on her

stoop that she chose another man, Schultz returned a few hours later to ask if she'd changed her mind. That wasn't the end of it. Shulz was determined never to put the rejection to rest. Shulz told friends that Johnson rejected him because her mother disliked him, but in fact the decision was Johnson's alone. She wanted only a plain, decent Lutheran life as a housewife, something marriage to a rising cartoonist did not exactly promise. And she married a machinist who had no higher ambition than to take a firefighter exam, as if that's a horrible job, which this is, I don't like that way that this is written.

But for the rest of his life, so this, I have to also, we have to point out, there is this very detailed biography written about Charles Schultz by this dude named David Michaelis. It is, it's called Schultz and Peanuts, a biography. He worked with him for seven years. Now the thing is, is he painted, so we'll call it, keep calling him Sparky. Everyone calls Charles Sparky. He, so he, he painted Sparky as if, like, oh, everyone thinks he's this Charlie Brown kind of guy. When in reality, he's an asshole. Nobody liked him.

Everybody hated Sparky, and he was bad to everybody. And he stood, but, like, he was way too stubborn. And he goes into detail about the mistress that he had, who was 25 years old. who he would send her. There's all these love letters between them where he would include a whole plot line that he eventually brought into peanuts talking about how Snoopy was having an affair

with a girl beagle who has the softest paws. And in two letters from 1970s, Scholes writes that he must cease calling her because his long-distance phone calls to her had been discovered by his wife. Soon after, he created a strip in which Charlie Brown berated Snoopy for his obnoxious behavior when he's not allowed to go see that girl, Beagle. And in other panels, Charlie warned Snoopy, you'd better start behaving yourself. And when Snoopy picks up the telephone, Charlie Brown yells, and stop making those long distance phone calls.

So he just brought it into peanuts. But the thing is that his family is very against the book and what was written about him. They were like, we loved our father. They didn't believe a lot of the perspective that he wrote this biography about. But it's hard to not, like, especially he stands by what he wants. And you will see in Charlie Brown Christmas that he definitely is not going to back down from what he wants. Okay. But I have to add here, this is a lot of these stories are being told from the lens of a bygone era.

Because if you go back to the red-haired unrequited love, it simply sounded like, like he wasn't taking no for an answer from a woman who was not interested at him. And then made it into like a romantic story. It's nice guy, right? It's nice guy thing because I had that. And the lady's like, please leave me alone. And he's like, never. Right.

I love her. And then instead of moving on, he then makes her a character so she can never rest and never not think about Charles Schultz. He'll always be in the back of her mind. Well, he never got over her. Apparently one of his favorite activities later in life was to play a red-haired wig on his knee and slap his own thigh. That is a lie.

None of that happens, but I think that is a funny image when you think about it. Either way. Won't you love me? Why won't you love me? My thigh, baby. Love me, thigh, baby.

So going next to the name thing, I do want to explain, too, that he initially submits his little folks' cartoons to United Features Syndicate. For SoundCloud rapper, huh? Right? Yeah. In order to get into more newspapers

than just the St. Paul Pioneer. press and he did this by presenting a package of comic strips as opposed to the one block panels that they and they took him up on it. There was however another strip already called little folks and his creator chimed in against them using the name and that's why they had to change the name and it was essentially done by someone over at United Feature Syndicate kind of without his say and apparently he hates the name so much that when asked what he did for a living he would respond I draw that comic strip put Snoopy in it, Charlie Brown, and his dog. And he later tried to change the strip's name to Charlie Brown,

but he never could just because the licensing was so complicated. And he was almost at Garfield levels of licensing with Peanuts. Oh, yeah. Not the same as Bill Waterson with Calvin and Hobbs. He, plenty of Snoopy merch to be found all over the place. So that can get really tricky with the name change. Probably lose a lot of money over that. But either way, Peanuts launches, it starts running.

running in October of 1950 in seven newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. Snoopy appeared in the third strip ever, while the other mainstay characters didn't make their first appearance until at least 1951 at first with Violet and Schroeder. Schrodinger's cat is what I can think of. Lucy and Linus first appeared in 1952. Pigpin in 1954.

Sally in 1959, peppermint Patty, who was based on his own cousin named Patricia Swanson, first appeared in 1960. Franklin in 1968 and Woodstock doesn't get into the mix until 1967. He did everything himself like we said and from the script to the finished art and lettering which lent itself to a unified tone with a minimalistic style

and again I think that's why we can all love this and Calvin and Hobbs far greater than we could love Garfield who is essentially like the horror of car comics. You are mean and he's great. You take Garfield away from our show and you disparage Garfield. How dare you? Not in front of us.

You're wearing a Garfield orange sweatshirt. You look like Garfield right now. I am. I do kind of look like Garfield right now. Hi, guys. You do look like Garfield. Go eat lasagna. But also, Linus was Sparky's favorite to draw. And isn't that kind of fun?

Little fun tidbit for you. I like that. That's fun. In the 60s is when peanuts really hit their golden age. The strip really kicks it up a notch, especially with its social commentary. Always an understated situation. The strip includes girls on the baseball team

and the addition of Franklin in a racially integrated school and neighborhood, which was actually a huge deal at the time. And you forget, you're like, wow, yeah, that was like the 60s. That was still a thing. I'd like to talk about that real quick. Yeah, please. Let's talk about Franklin. I think you did a little more digging on Franklin than I did,

and I really think this is a big part of the evolution of peanuts. Well, it also really explains, this is when I go back and forth with what the dude who wrote the biography about Charles Schultz said about him. And then, but it's also like, but this is a man that sticks to his laurels for good and not just for evil. Or his penis. Or his penis is that. So Franklin was born in the awake of Martin Luther King's assassination.

So Harriet Glickman, who was a teacher in Los Angeles. She said, I was a retired teacher at the time. And she said, Dr. King had just been gunned down. in Memphis and I was thinking about him and about having lived through so many years of struggles and the racism and the divisiveness that existed. Her parents had raised her in the Depression era with a strong social conscious. Now this was a culmination that was so painful that I needed to do something. So I decided to write. And my feeling at the time was that I realized that black kids and white kids never saw themselves depicted together in the classroom. So she wrote to

so many different cartoonists with the idea of cartoon integration. Now, Charles Schultz loved her point. He loved the idea, but he also shared that he had a lot of reservations about it because that he, as a white creator, didn't know if he should be writing a black character without he was worried about unintended condescension. So she suggested that she could seek input from her other black friends and black teachers who were also parents to write to him. And she said, with his permission, I shared this letter

and got as many people as she could to write in of what they would like to see represented for their culture in the cartoon. So he decides to do it. He includes, he brings in Franklin on July 31st, 1968. And apparently Sparky faced a question from the head of United Feature Syndicate. And they said, are you sure you want to do this?

And if you know Sparky, you know what his response was because apparently so, like, hundreds of newspapers were going to pull the cartoon because he wanted to integrate the characters. And he said, you either run it the way I drew it or I quit. And this was at the height of peanuts and most of the papers left it in the way that it was.

Yeah, and if they didn't, like he shouldn't want to be in their busted-ass paper anyway. Get out of your stinky paper. True. True that. So let's get into the special itself. I think that's a good lead-up background on peanuts. The hated, I love that he hates that.

I love knowing that now. The Aides of the Ate-Nus. So yes, it all starts with a failure, as we mentioned before. This is a failed documentary on Schultz himself, done by a TV producer named Lee Mendelson. He approached Schultz, who agreed to the project because Charles Schultz, Sparky. I love that you're casually calling him Sparky, like you're besties with him. Sparky. He was like, mostly known as Sparky. That's also

Chevy Chase's nickname for Clark Riswold's nickname. That's right. Yes. Yes. His uncle called him Sparky. That's how he got it, the name. And it was named after a horse in a comic strip called Barney Aguylougle that the boy liked to him.

Barney Googles horse. Or Barney Googhle. Yeah, Schultz loved it as a boy, so that's how the nickname came about. So just real quick, to tape the picture of where Peanuts is this time. So they're working on a documentary called a boy named Charlie Brown. And at this point in time, his characters had recently appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. So this is starting to gain all of this.

So that's why he was like, he never really wanted them to be animated. He never designed them to be animated. That was never really the point. I think that he just wanted them to be a cartoon. But since they were on the cover of time, this is when it started to spark the advertisers to be like, oh, my God. Should we be trying to make money off of this? And they did do a Ford commercial, which is hilariously enough because of how anti-corporate.

Yes. But they did a Ford commercial initially. That's how they first worked together. So all of this is like the combination of some past jobs for a commercial and this documentary that didn't go through. By the way, I do love that the reason why Schultz agreed to do the documentary was because Mendelsohn had just done a documentary on baseball playing great Willie Mays.

And he was a big baseball fan. And he also, And Mendelsohn liked the idea of first covering one of the greatest baseball players of all time and now doing a documentary about one of the worst baseball players of all time, Charlie Brown. The peanuts? The peanuts did a Ford? Yes. They were in a Ford commercial.

I believe Mendelssohn worked with Schultz and even the animator, which we'll get into in a little bit. Why would the peanuts do a car commercial? I don't know. Money money, money. I mean, he licensed the shit. They're all like children. They can't even drive. Yeah, they get hit by the car.

They all die. Yeah, yeah. You're a dead man, Charlie Brown, is the name of the commercial. But either way. Our truck can kill upwards of eight kids and ones. That's a lot of horsepower. Middleton brought in a guy named Bill Melendez to do a little animation for that documentary. And Schultz had actually also appreciated his animation. Middleton did some animation also for that Willie May's documentary.

So anyways, the three of these just sort of have this very natural partnership forming. And they couldn't get a buyer to take the documentary, of course, because that's just so Charlie Brown. No one would take the documentary on Charles Schultz. But it was that Time Magazine cover that ended up getting Middleton hit up with a phone call from an ad agency called McCann Erickson, who was working with the Coca-Cola company. And they wanted to get a holiday special in the book, something for no. you know, to get some notoriety and whatnot. And so... I love it, too, that he immediately...

So he gets this phone call from McKinan-Erickson. They're like, no, no, no, we want a Christmas special. And so what does Mendelsohn say? Yeah, great. We've got that. We've got a Christmas special. We'll get it to you really quick. They even asked him, like, how much money would you need for an animated short?

Mendelsohn had absolutely no idea because they were actually working on an animated short at the time. So he called up Bill Hanna. of Hannah Barbera at this point in time for advice of how much money he should ask for or how he should go about it. Bill Hannah gave him nothing. He refused to give him any of his trade secrets. Oh, whatever.

He refused to help him whatsoever. He never sucks, bro. So Mendelsohn was just like, so he's like, I guess we'll essentially just like, take what you give us, which is $76,000, which if you know, especially animation, even at that time, actually especially at that time, It was not enough money.

They do end up going over budget by about $20,000. $20,000. But yeah, still a very tight budget and a very tight turnaround. So Mendelsohn calls up Schultz. He's literally just like, I think I just sold a Peanuts Christmas special or Charlie Park Christmas special. And Schultz just long pause was like, all right, come on up. Let's work on it. And Middleton also said the bad news is that today is Wednesday and they'll need an outline in Atlanta by Monday.

And we're talking to Western Union, by the way, is how they're going to get. You know what I mean? There's like, there's no fax machines, I think, even at this point. I know. How are they even delivered by horse? By, yeah, probably. Probably. Yeah, so by a fucking deer on roller skates or something. Either way, the two get together and they get an outline done in less than a day. And Schultz's ideas, quote, flowed nonstop, according to Mendelssohn.

Schultz wanted to focus on the childhood stress of putting on a Christmas play, which I think we all, it's so great because I think we're all theater people, background people a little bit or performance people. But the beauty of the Christmas play Is that all those non-performers have to awkwardly be on stage as a sheep Or as a I love it Pig pen as a shepherd

And it's just I love it It's just like Ah, but put them all in it Which is how it goes with kids I think recently I saw a Mimi Like it was a kid that was playing the doorknob In some school play Which I think is absolutely adorable

Our version of that is in the Nutcracker That you know you as a dancer know the parts that the kids get that aren't very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the snowflakes, yeah. I won't reveal which ones, but I know. I just love this too, this line. To create such an unabashedly anti-consumerous story with the backing of both Coca-Cola and CBS was a suddenly radical accomplishment in 1965, as radical as it would be to do it today.

It's crazy that they got away with this. And talking about the anti-consumerism stuff, I think that's best represented with that Christmas tree. Mendelssohn had just read the fir tree by Hans Christian Anderson, which is about a tree so anxious to grow up for greater things that he cannot appreciate living in the moment. Mendelsohn wanted to include a tree that is as sad and misunderstood as Charlie Brown. And Schultz really liked that and ran with it.

The pitch to Coca-Cola included, quote, winter scenes, a school play, a scene to be read from the Bible, and a soundtrack combining. jazz and traditional music more in the Bible passage later but either way the pitch was approved with a six-month turnaround for the special not a lot of time. That is not a lot of time. So I also looked into a little bit more because I wanted to see how was Coca-Cola represented in this? Because again, they're backing this. I was like, why doesn't, why isn't there anything Coca-Cola in it?

Especially in a time period when usually the promoters, I mean, I say a time period. They still do this. If you put a bunch of money into something, they better be drinking fucking Coca-Cola in that special. Right, right, totally. Usually it's more obvious, yeah. Yes, but it was more obvious, but it has since been taken out.

So in the original version of the special, there's a famous scene early on, you know, when all the kids are ice skating on the frozen pond and Linus and Charlie Brown join the group. But Snoopy grabs a hold of Linus's blanket, entangling both Charlie Brown and Linus to spin them off of the ice, right? Charlie Brown hits a tree

then gets covered by snow and this is Charlie Brown Christmas. But where does a linus go? In the original version, he hits a sign advertising Coca-Cola. And that has been taken out. And there's also another time when they're throwing snowballs and you never see what they're throwing snowballs at. And apparently in the original version,

they were throwing snowballs at cans of Coke. But since the advertisement didn't continue past this year, it was taken out after the first showing and never shown again. in subsequent ones because Coca-Cola was not making any more money or giving any more money towards it. Oh, interesting, because they do have the scene of them throwing snowballs still, but I guess maybe there's no Coca-Cola on the can. They took the cans out, yeah.

Or they took the cans off. That's so funny, too, that it's hitting a sign. They're hitting the cans with snowballs. Like, they're abusing the logo. Yeah, that's funny. They're still against it. But that was just like, oh, that makes so much sense. So Schultz wanted to focus on the true meaning of Christmas, as I said.

and this includes the reading of a Bible passage, which Mendelssohn and Melendez had actually had big issues with. Religion was a controversial topic for television at the time. Less than 9% of Christmas TV episodes contained any reference to religion. But Schultz responded to this concern with, quote, if we don't do it, who will? He was a very religious man. We didn't really get into that, but Sparky was,

he said, the life of Jesus remained for him a consuming subject. This is a big part of him making this special. He did believe that religion was lost in the idea of Christmas. And that had been lost in the, quote, general good time frivolity. And so Mendelssohn was like, okay, all right, yeah, sure. We can include religion in it. And he didn't realize that he wanted the entire speech directly from the New Testament. And Sparky would not back down.

And Mendelsohn was like, this is like an entertainment show for families. and Sparky refused to. He's like, that is the point of what I'm trying to do here. So, you know what? Again, man got his way. I don't mean to be a Natalie Jean here, but by the 80s, he considered himself a secular humanist. Oh, okay. That's fun.

Yeah. I feel like this happened to me every year, though, honestly. And again, this is me coming up in a Unitarian church, but they did hold a service on Christmas Eve that we would attend. and I remember every single year would be like, I can't wait to get my hands on that Game Boy. I can't wait to get my hands on all that Ninja Turtle shit. And, you know, all I could think about was what I was Gittens in them's stockings. And every single time, we would get to this church and I would be like,

I can't wait till this is over so I can get home and try to go to sleep, which never really happened so I could wake up and get all my fucking loot. And we'd sit down and I would be reminded of this story. And as much as all of these things have, have gotten, I feel like, badly warped and things like that through certain negative aspects of organized religion. I feel like that basic story of humbleness, of being turned away, of, you know, this small little scene, meaning all of these things for so many years.

And I feel like I would sit there and I would be reminded of this story. And then we'd turn all the lights out and light candles and we'd sing Silent Night. And in that one little moment, every single year, it's like, I'd be brought back to what this whole fucking thing is actually about. And I think that that's why I love this passage in this special. And I also, I need to confess, I've got to say that I am fairly against organized religion, but still growing up, my mom always sang in the church choir. We also grew up, you know, Unitarian and learning about all different things. But she always sang in the church choir and we would always go see her on midnight mass.

to see her saying, and even in my, even in my angriest times, I would still cry at some point during the ceremony because it's the idea of faith. And I do think that as much as I saw this in certain years and I'd be like, oh, they're shoving Christianity down my throat. It's the idea of believing in something. I think that the idea of community and working together and the idea of faith is very beautiful to me. And that's what this special has. And

I think that that is the best part of religion in that also, of course, like my grandmother made me go to service when I was a teenager who was just an absolute ghoul person. Otherwise,

but I always, like that But you've grown up into such a lovely ghoul woman. Oh, thank you. It's the That kind of feeling, it makes me think about my grandmother and about the purest moments of my very complicated family. That quiet sort of candlelit idea of like the sweetness of Christmas is to me the best part of that sort of religious thought mindset. And it is one of the times that can be the most, in my opinion, positive within that. realm. I'm trying to come up with the words to not be completely insulting.

That realm of mystics. The realm. Yeah, I like it. The land of makebelieve. I do. I do think that that connection to that, uh, that we connect to like family and community and, um, getting through the winter because that's essentially what Christmas comes from is just like that time period when we're trying to make it through the darkest time of the year together. And I think that That's a really lovely sentiment. Well, the story of Jesus's birth is kind of I would connect it to Charlie Brown Christmas itself and that it's like, I watch this special with my brother every year.

And it's a story that we share every single year. And we come together on this one story. And I think that that is the beautiful thing when it comes to Christmas and all of this sort of thing that everybody comes together and gets together in a room. And hopefully a humble room that's, you know, more respectable to me than some megature. But they get together in a room and they retell this fucking story and and we all we all live in it for one night. You know what I mean? And hopefully it's not much longer than an hour and we get that out of there.

We go home and crash and enjoy our loot in the morning. But you know, we get together and we rehash this story every year to find deeper meanings in it and just to share in it as a community. I also love it speaks to Schultz's brilliance that he actually forced it in because it's the climax of the episode. So there was really nothing Middelson or Melendez could do to get rid of it. It's kind of a necessary part of the whole thing. And, yeah, I'd also like to point out that even though this is biblical stuff brought in here, that it is like kind of an innocent enough part of the Bible that people who are Jewish or who are different religions can also hopefully enjoy it,

where it doesn't feel like it's necessarily preaching things at you. You just perfectly led me into my quote from Michael Chabone, who is, I believe, Jewish, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. I love The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. And he had a really great quote on it. I still know that chapter and verse of the Gospel of Luke by heart. And no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behavior of self-described Christians or with the ongoing progressive commercialization that in 1965 had already broken Charlie Brown's heart has robbed the central miracle of Christianity of its. power to move me the way any truly great story can. I think that that is it for me.

So anyways, the three meet at Schultz's home and completed the bare-bone script in just a few weeks, which is insane. And by the way, you were like six months for animation to get done. No, no, no. It was like four months. You're right. It was six months from the, I think the phone call to of like, hey, we got this special to, like, we got to write it to the actual premiere of it that apparently they finished the last frame of animating 10 days before the special was scheduled to broadcast.

Christmas specials. Oh yeah, except it was better than just a slice of cheese between two pieces of bread. So either way, while Schultz wrote the script, Melendez is plotting out the animation with a storyboard which contains six panels for each shot and was around 80 pages or so. One debate was over the inclusion of a laugh track, which Mendelson wanted, but Schultz was avidly against, thank you, dude, as he did not want the audience to be informed when to laugh.

I love it. He wanted the experience. The quote was that he didn't want a laugh track to help move it along. He said, let the people at home enjoy the show at their own speed in their own way. And now it is said that because at this time period, laugh tracks were in absolutely everything, that it's possibly what helped keep it as a classic every single year is the fact that that it does seem a little bit more modern because there's no horrible laugh track included in it.

Yeah. Also, can we talk about this casting? Because I didn't think about it until we looked into it. But how important is it that it's actual children and that it's, I love this, Middelson, or was it, Melendez? Who's Melendez? Yeah. Who's the animator?

He did not want, quote, Hollywood kids to perform on the special. Instead, he sent tape recorder's home with employees to get auditions from their children. I think that natural tone of the whole thing, much like the soundtrack itself, it all just, you know, Mendelssohn talks a lot about serendipity and how serendipity he felt played a major role

in this whole thing coming together and his career forever on after that with this partnership between Melendez and Schultz because it just really does feel like the natural perfect combination of music to voice to animation, this raw quality to Schultz's script. Oh, yeah. But in the casting, they hit a snag because they didn't really think about this part, is that most of the cast was too young to read the script. So what they had to do, what Melendez said in an interview for the book, A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Making of a Tradition, that he had to recite the script line by line for the children who couldn't read, including Christopher Shea, who voiced Linus.

So that's part of the reason why some of the lines seem like they're not following in with what is happening. But also that does add to the childlike quality of it. Because how many times the little kid wrote up to you is like, I've got an iguana? And you're like, okay, well, I'm in the middle of cooking eggs. So cool, where's the iguana? You know, it's like they have, they are always jumping from idea to idea. And I don't think that kid has an iguana. He does.

And he's a fucking liar. My favorite in John Mullaney's sack lunch bunch When he's doing the audience test thing With the little kids for the movies So how many of you just ran up to a random adult And just immediately started screaming the plot of the movie And they all like raised their eggs They're raised their hands

Sack bundle He's John Mullaney's perfect But that's another story for another day But either way Casting Charlie Brown was the most difficult And the role went to 8 year old Peter Robbins Who had done some TV and film work already But this really made him a star

Apparently after the special came up kids would run up to him at his school and ask him to quote the lines, which I'm sure never got annoying. The youngest cast. I think it was about five years ago he got arrested for starting some sort of fight in a trailer park. So I think that things really... Is that true? I'm just glad you didn't say anything about sort of children and pornography. No, no, no, no, no.

I think it was just fighting. All right. I'm completely cool with him beating someone up at a trailer park. You know, it just happens sometimes. You would hope that he maybe had to... a little bit of Charlie Brown money left after. But I guess he got it. He probably had a shitty contract. Yeah, yeah. It was a long time ago.

Yeah. Some of those kids, by the way, they had already used in that Ford commercial we mentioned, which was a few years before. So they were six or seven around that time, but they were now 10 or 11, but they still kept them over. Also, another big difference in the special that is unlike, and really all the specials and movies that came after that is completely unlike the comic strip, is that Snoopy doesn't speak.

Sparky wouldn't allow it. He said Snoopy doesn't speak in this world. He was very open about this. So Melendez is the one that voices Snoopy and how does he do it? Because they also were very short on funds. So essentially Melendez just barked and chuffed into a microphone and then he sped up the recording so that it could give it some more like emotive qualities. And they had to even fight for that. Because Sparky was like, he doesn't speak.

But he's got to do something to react. The majority of the cast recording was done in a single day. And apparently this was pretty chaotic. The kids were like running around and being crazy. And by the way, and then I read this. I guess this was like a joke or something. But apparently Jefferson Airplane was recording next door and they came by to get the children's autographs. Ew.

Yeah, I don't know. I was like, what? How many drugs were Jeff as an airplane on at the time? They were like, they were probably, like, thinking they were tripping balls or something. They're like, Go ask Charlie Brown if he'll sign this paper. CBS initially wanted an hour of animation, but Melendez talked them down to a half hour as he felt an hour would be way too much, definitely for them for budget and time reasons.

I know. They're like, yeah, it just, it wouldn't, we wouldn't read as well for an hour. You just, about 20 minutes. That's the perfect amount of time. It started with pencil drawing, which led to inking and painting the drawing into a cell, which was placed on those beautiful painted backgrounds. And speaking of stubborn, so Melendez also was completely unwilling to stray from Schultz's distinctive character designs, which I imagine Sparky really appreciated.

So the way that they were designed were never intended to be animated. So he had a very difficult time, specifically with Charlie Brown's head. its round shape made it difficult to depict Charlie turning around as with most of the characters his arms were also too tiny to scratch his head so that is why Snoopy

in contrast was so like boingy boingee and all around because it was the only character that they were able to actually move around and dance around because like even thinking like we all joke around when we do like the Charlie Brown dancing in the way that they're dancing in the dancing

in the dancing scene and it's because they could turn around or and it was difficult for them to be sideways and that makes so much sense. My, I have the opposite problem. My arms are too long to reach my head. I try and I try and they're just too long. They just go right past it. Yep.

Yeah. Whoop. There are 13,000 drawings in the special with 12 frames per second to create the illusion of movement. But 12 frames per second, that's still quite choppy by today's standards, which I think is pretty clear when you watch it. I like it. I think it makes it fun. I don't know.

I just, I feel like it fits. It gives it a raw feel, which again, I think speaks towards again, ties the whole room together. It's the rug. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know. Yeah. Because that music, that, that, that amateur voice acting, like, it all works for it.

Yeah. It kind of gives it a child, like, feel, I think. Yep. I like that as a roar feel. It's got to be nice. We're talking about cool, good things. Like, Garfield? I guess we can't.

No, we can't talk about Garfield on the show, apparently. No. More like bar, more like barfield. You're a barf. You're, you are, you are puke. And that's what I've got to say about it. Let's get to, I'm just going to shoulder past that one. Oh, you're going to shoulder right into the Vince Guaraldi trio?

Vince Geraldi, not Guaraldi. Guraldi? I don't know how to say it. You know what throwing out there? I don't think I've ever said his last name out loud before. Why would you? I'm pretty sure, but I'm always. also classically terrible at pronunciation.

But I'm pretty sure it's Geraldi. Geraldi. Yes, the soundtrack, which we of course, in the original pitch, they wanted some jazz music in there. It is a mixture of traditional Christmas music and jazz. And all that jazz was done by the Vince Geraldi trio. Geraldi was born and raised in San Francisco, so he's in the mix. Like, they're all over there in the West Coast doing this stuff. And he went on to serve as a cook in the Korean War.

He made his first recording in 1953 as a member of the Cal Jader, trio. And shortly after that, he formed his own jazz trio. And what's interesting is that he was trying to capitalize on Bossa Nova, which was the big thing at the time, like girl from Ipanema is Bossa Nova, and did a Bossa Nova covers album to try and cash in on the genre's popularity. However, it was the one original song that he wrote to fill out the album, which was on the B side. And that song was called, Cast Your Fate to the Wind, that ended up winning him a Grammy and really putting his name on the map. Yeah, 1962, Grammy for Best, original jazz composition.

It's a lovely song. I listened to it earlier. It is on Spotify. Spotify. Spotify till you die. Spotify will not make you cry. Spotify. You're scaring us, which is the opposite. Spotify, you fucking lie.

Of how we feel when we listen to this soundtrack. Because now the soundtrack is, I dare say, almost more famous than the special itself. And this is coming from a man, Sparky, who hates jazz music. And why did he pitch it? So really, it was Mendelssohn that pitched it. Oh, okay. It was Mendelsohn that pitched it because he wanted to work with Vince Geraldi on the documentary that they were making together. He originally heard the song while he was driving.

He heard the song, Cast Your Fate to the Wind, as he was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge. And he said something in my mind said, that's the kind of music that I'm looking for. It's adult-like, but also childlike. It seemed to fit our characters. So he originally brought him in for the documentary, which is how he ended up working on the score for the special. But I think, which they didn't say this, but if I'm picking up what they're putting down,

I think it was more so like, well, we already got this guy in the horn. And his music is great. There wasn't a lot of, we got to get the music for the special. We got to get the soundtracked to think about things. It sounds like. Yeah, they kind of had to jump on shit like a grenade.

What did old Sparky like them? What kind of music was he in two? He was in an early hip-hop. There was some, original hip hop happening. Yeah, little bit of 65. Little friends. Yeah.

That's why Snoopy was named after Snoop Dog. Yeah. Oh. Look at that. That's not true. Also, I will throw out there that, um, again, a little note of serendipity here in this story. When he heard that song over the bridge, he the next day calls the San Francisco

Chronicles jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason and asked him, do you have any idea in the world who Vince Graldi is? And Gleason responded with, yes, it's about. Matter of fact, I'm having lunch with him tomorrow and fucking set up a meeting between them. I think it's like, just another amazing one of those like everything falling into place stories. Not a Charlie Brown moment. Yeah, unfortunately not a Charlie Brown moment. Everything just worked out.

But this was with Mendelssohn, though. So I think that's why. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, that's what happened. And I think that. If Schultz had called him up, it was like, do you know who Fitzgerald is? You'd be like, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to fucking find you and kill you.

Loozer. Oh, go draw your squiggles. That's what he would say to him So the drummer's name was Jerry Grinelli And he has some lovely quotes about the making of it He said, we went in and did it in three hours That's just the way jazz records were recorded I think we even went to work in a club that night

There was a lot of improvisation This pushed the songs into interesting directions Especially the traditional Christmas ones And there were also Some of the songs were pulled from that documentary Such as Linus and Lucy Which I love to because apparently Mendelssohn said that he got a call. He just got a phone call from Geraldie.

And he said, I got to play something for you. And Mendelsohn said, please don't play it over the phone. He said, I got to play it for you before I forget. The song was called Linus and Lucy. And he said, it's probably I would guess, the first time that jazz was ever put into a cartoon. I could be wrong, but it was certainly the first time it had ever been done on an animated network special. and he immediately heard it and knew that the way, he said,

the way they walk along and bounce a little bit, that he captured it in the music the way the quality of kids sounded. And Linus and Lucy, which is the, which is crazy. That's crazy. Da-na-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Which is crazy.

Now that sound is synonymous with Charlie Brown, but it's also called Linus and Lucy, which is kind of thought. What? That's crazy. What? I love this quote from, Mendelssohn about the soundtrack, he said, I have always felt that one of the key elements that made that show was the music. It gave it a contemporary sound that appealed to all ages. Although

Vince had never scored anything else and although I was basically a documentary filmmaker at the time, we started to work together on the cues because we both loved jazz and we both played the piano. So he would bring in the material for each scene and we would go over it scene by scene. Most of the time, the music worked perfectly, but there were times we would either not use something or use it somewhere else. We went through this same process on all 16 shows. By the way, 16. Special. Really? 16? Nuts. Absolutely. Although there was always some leftover music, most of the time, what he wrote and performed is what went on the air. They also worked with the choir, St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael,

California. The choir director was a guy named Barry Mania, who was a perfectionist, which clashed with Mendelso and Giroldi, who, and I think rightly so, wanted the quote, kids to sound like kids and even used a slightly off-key version of Hark the Herald Angels sing. So Christmas time is here, which of course we sang on the top of the episode. Oh my God.

We also did Hark the Herald Angels! Which I also really love. So Lee Mendelso, so again, remember, they are on such a short, short amount of time to make this, that they were struggling to find a lyricist to write the song to the tune, and

it was set to premiere in just a few weeks. So, Lee Mendelsohn sat down with an envelope. He said, I'll never forget this, at our kitchen table and wrote, Christmas Time is here in about 10 minutes. So he was listening to the song that Geraldi made for it, wrote down, and he said, it was a poem that just came to me. I never changed the words to this day. It's only about a minute long. And Vince got a bunch of little kids together to sing it. So he's the one that wrote down the lyrics to Christmas time is here in 10 minutes. Also, very Charlie Brown moment where he's a lot.

hit up a ton of different lyricists to write the song before that and they all turned him down. No, they're like, no, busy, can't. Perfect, perfect. But again, and again, not to go back to the actual story, but I mean, it's all about getting turned away from every end. You know what I mean? Like so it all kind of works perfectly for Charlie Brown. Either way, the sessions, there were three of them, would go so late to the night with, oh, the sessions with the little kids would go so late. of the night which pissed parents off so it would be new kids each session to replace the missing ones they were paid five bucks and one of them remembered going to ice cream after the session for that for all of the singing or for just yeah for just the hark the harold angel one i think just all of the singing was three sessions yeah yeah and uh i could i could just imagine this like

different kids that's funny i love this to write choir director too just being like you have to get it right we'll do it again and get it again they're like no no we like how sloppy it is beat that child. Can someone beat that child? But either way, this is maybe the most Charlie Brown of the whole story is here with just weeks to go. Mendelsohn gets together with Melendez and 10 other animators

to watch the first complete cut of the show. Mendelsohn said when it was finished, it was very quiet in the room. Bill and I were concerned that it seemed slow and that perhaps wasn't going to be received very well. Others in the room were less than enthusiastic. However, one animator in the back of the room stood up and said,

guys are nuts. This is going to run for years and years. Still, Mendelsohn and crew thought, quote, we'd ruined Charlie Brown. And also CBS hated it. They found it slow, amateurish, and tonally inconsistent. Mendelsohn said CBS executives did not get the voices. They didn't get the music. They didn't get the pacing. And so CBS was like, I guess we'll run it because now we kind of have to. They say that if it wasn't supposed to run literally within the next, scheduled for the next week, if that wasn't the case, it probably never would have seen the light of day, which is fucking crazy. I can't believe that because CBS executives are never wrong about anything. I know, right. It's never been wrong. I know. I wrote, of course

they did not get it in my notes. And also before that, and this is an interesting thing, the ad agency sent a person named Neil Reagan to go check out how the progress was going on the special and apparently thought it was like a disaster as well. But weirdly was like tight-lipped about it to the ad agency, which again was this little moment of like good graces for them to actually be special liver. Were people just freaking out because it was just such out of the formulaic version of things? Because everybody is treating this like this living nightmare is happening in front of them. And it's like, it's not that bad.

But they're in they're shitting on the people, the ad advertising agency. that give them money that they run on. There's religion involved, which they did not want to fuck with. And the fact that there's jazz music in a kids show. This kids thing, it's really, it is, even for their standards in the mid-60s, it's slow-paced. Yeah. And again, I think that slow pace is what adds like this warmth to it that again makes us, keeps us coming back to it over and over again.

But they didn't know that at the time. I know. Growing up in the Vine generation, I still found it captivated. I loved it. See, but this is the thing, because also in remembering, if you think about, like, it's the late 50s in a time when, you know, things were becoming a little bit more fake, like the aluminum trees, like showing, and, you know, it's the beginning of, like, credit cards and living outside of your means and all that kind of stuff of like, no, but we're in the throes of people spending money that they don't have. You can't tell them not, too. Yeah, and how would we have plastic bottle island in the middle of the ocean without that time? Yes, that's where the whales get to beach themselves, which technically is a vacation for them.

Yeah, exactly. It is. Yeah, that was the advent of the plastic pet, you know, with the tagline, throw your dog against the wall. It's not real. It doesn't air. And all the dogs are getting thrown against the wall. It was... They were trying to come up. They were like, can we make a plastic woman for a house? housewife? Like they were trying to develop the technology to do that. Now they have. It's great.

Well, how do we get rid of all these murderous rages? But either way, this little special that could debuts on December 9th, 1965, half the country tunes into watch. The other half was watching Bonanza, but that's okay. We'll give them a pass. Over 15 million people tuned into this thing. Mendelsohn said, the next morning, I walked into my neighborhood coffee shop and everyone was congratulating me. That's when I knew we might have something. It was awarded with a Peabody Award, which is a huge deal as well as an Emmy for Outstanding Children's Program. I love seeing the guys in their suits receiving their award and just clearly so pleased this trio, this partnership that is cemented and lasting for 38 years between Schultz, Mendelsohn and Melendez. Obviously, so many more specials came out after that.

Such a massive hit. And I just love to see it because it wasn't even Charlie Browned by the viewers. Like, everybody was just like, this is fantastic immediately out of the gate. It wasn't like a cult following kind of thing. No. Do you have anything else? I have one final quote, and that's it. No, it's just that it is, it's so beautiful.

And the fact that with Apple Plus and what they've done to it this year, the fact that you cannot get it anywhere else, except on Apple Plus, it's like, do you, have you watched Charlie Brown Christmas? Have you, that's the opposite of what it's supposed to bring out in people. But again, I think that I'm watching it this year in a very different perspective than I have in years before. Right. And I do feel in the same way that I feel like I'm crying through a lot of movies that I haven't cried through holiday-wise in a very long time. I cried. I cried. I cried. So it's just going to be one of those years.

watch it, watch it alone, watch it with family. Cry. Let's get the tears out. I can't help it. You don't even have to tell me to cry. I can't stop. No, but please hold it and share with us the Michael Trump quote. It's a short little quote just and I completely agree with it though. That show in its plot, characters and perhaps above all in its music captures an authentic

bittersweetness. The melancholy of this time of year. Like no other work of art, I know. Agreed. I think it is just. timeless, absolutely beautiful, and it actually forces you to tap into what this shit is really about outside of the fucking running out to the mall and screaming at your fucking family and, you know, Aunt Lucifer's getting into the eggnog again. Oh my God, sick, yeah. I don't know why they named her Lucifer.

You know, she sounds cool. Yeah, bring her over to her house to hang out. Aunt Lulu, oh yeah, I sent her over to you guys. She's coughing all over the place. She's coughing into her hands and rubble. and rubbing everybody's faces and stuff. She's a blast. There's a lot to unpack of that.

Oh, yeah, she's the best. But either way, yeah, I think it really, for 20 minutes, every single year I sit down, and I remember what this shit's about. And I think it's beautiful that that can happen for people on their TV. You don't even need to go to a church for it. You can just sit down and just take all of that in it.

It's not just, you know, the biblical stuff in there. Obviously, it's not even close to just that. I think every single scene, in that special speaks towards something meaningful when it comes to Christmas and when it comes to the fucking human spirit. I mean, I also think about how this time, not to get too dark,

but how, you know, it's around this time that the most people take their own lives. And there's a lot of just hard, rough feelings going on. Just remember to be good to each other. Yeah, just be good to each other. Be a good person. Just like Sparky Christ did. Yeah, just like Sparky Christ.

Oh, my God. Why haven't we been calling him Sparky Christ? this entire time. Only his mistress is allowed to call him that. We know that, yeah. And only while he's completely just slamming so hard away at her. She's dressed in a woodstock costume.

Oh, of course. We love you guys. I hope you have a oh no, we're not. I'm sorry. I'll be better. That's how, yes, this is how we're entering. Whereas Sparky Christ rails on his little Woodstock mistress. That is where

we end it. Happy fucking holidays. My name is Jackie Zabrowski can follow me on Instagram at Jack that worm. I needed that. I'm Natalie G. following me at the Natty Jean and you follow us at page 7 LPN. And I am

Holden McNeely. You can follow me by just catching me in a dark alleyway and just walking slowly behind me as I go home. No, please don't encourage that. It's a bit of a bella. He is. Twitch.TV forward slash Hold Nader's Ho. Check me out on that. Check out Patreon, patreon.com forward slash page 7 podcast.

Honestly, happy holidays to everybody. We love you. We'll get through this together. Yes. Or it's 2021 when you're listening to this. And you're like, what the fuck are they even talking about? Oh, are you having a great? I'm fun.

Walking around. What is it like in the future? What does the world smell like? All right. Have a good one. Everybody. Bye, cutie. Bye.

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