The Unlikely Story Behind “A Charlie Brown Christmas”
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, few thought a quiet cartoon about a sad little tree could work on television. But Charles Schulz believed that A Charlie Brown Christmas would speak to people in a way that noise and spectacle never could. The animation was rough, the dialogue understated, and the jazz soundtrack unlike anything audiences had heard before. But when it aired in December of 1965, families across the country sat down to something that felt simple and true. Lee Habeeb shares the story of how the now-famous festive cartoon special was made.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
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| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.6 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:26.6 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.6 | You know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to And we continue with our American stories. |
| 1:05.0 | This one, how a Charlie Brown Christmas came to be, and almost didn't. |
| 1:10.1 | Americans fell in love with the show when it first |
| 1:12.2 | aired on television back in 1965. It's been a part of our lives ever since. But the story of how |
| 1:19.3 | Charles Schultz's A Charlie Brown Christmas came to be is itself an American classic. So too is the |
| 1:26.1 | story of how it almost didn't come to be. |
| 1:29.2 | But first things first, the 30-minute Christmas special wasn't birth by the creative |
| 1:34.4 | urge. |
| 1:35.2 | It was commissioned by a commercial sponsor looking to turn the nation's most beloved newspaper |
| 1:40.6 | cartoon strip into an animated TV special. |
| 1:44.8 | Here's Lee Mendelsohn, who produced the special, |
| 1:48.1 | telling the story of how this special came to be. |
| 1:51.7 | Would your creative group be interested in doing a Christmas special for Coca-Cola? |
| 1:55.9 | Have you thought about doing one? |
| 1:57.3 | I said, oh, absolutely, we think about it all the time. |
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