This is an IHeart podcast. And we continue with our American stories and more Christmas season stories.

This one, how a Charlie Brown Christmas came to be and almost didn't.

Americans fell in love with the show when it first aired on television back in 1965.

It's been a part of our lives ever since. But the story of how Charles Schultz's A Charlie Brown

Christmas came to be is itself an American classic.

So too is the story of how it almost didn't come to be.

But first things first, the 30-minute Christmas special wasn't birth by the creative

urge.

It was commissioned by a commercial sponsor looking to turn the nation's most beloved newspaper cartoon strip into an

animated TV special. Here's Lee Mendelson, who produced the special, telling the story of how

this special came to be. Would your creative group be interested in doing a Christmas special

for Coca-Cola? Have you thought about doing one? I said, oh, absolutely, we think about it all the time. And he said, well, we need an outline down in Atlanta on Monday. It was Wednesday. So send us what you have, and we'll see what happens. So I called Mr. Schultz on the phone. I called Mr. Melendez, because we'd worked together on the documentary two years before. And I said, I think I just sold a Charlie Brown Christmas. And they said, what's that? And I said to Schultz, that's something you're going to write tomorrow. So Bill flew up from Hollywood, and I drove up from San Francisco, and he did write it on a Thursday. Those days, we sent it by Western Union on a Friday. And Monday,

they called up and said, okay, let's do it, Charlie Brown Christmas. The team worked fast. They had only

three months to create a script, record it, make a soundtrack, and create 30,000 animation

cells from scratch. And this was all before the days of computer animated design.

When the special was finished, it wasn't a hit with network executives.

The first problem was the laugh track, or the lack thereof.

It was unimaginable to produce TV comedy without it back in the 1960s.

Schultz thought more highly of the viewers. He didn't believe they needed

to be queued to laugh at predetermined moments. Another disagreement involved the voice work. CBS

executives wanted to use adult actors who pretended to be kids. Schultz believed that using

children gave the characters more authenticity. The CBS executives also had a

...