Lights, Please? An Appreciaton

THIS STORY WAS first posted on Christmas Eve, 2005. It's sort of a tradition to post it every Christmas Eve now. And I don't really feel like writing anything else today. This year we lost the great Bill Melendez, Animation Director, voice of Snoopy, and kind of an inspirational figure to me -- he died at the age of ninety-one.

He'll be missed. A lot.

Hold tight to those you hold dear this Christmas. And Peace unto you and all that.


It's not such a bad little tree.

All it needed was a little love.

In 1993, I was still a TV producer, and I got a good TV-producer like break. A gallery in Yorkville was selling cels from "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and they were bringing in one of the creators of that landmark 1965 special to do some interviews. I pitched the story. My producer wasn't sure. I re-pitched the story. We wanted a way to do a fun Christmas-like story, but since our show was about media, it was kind of hard to come up with an angle that wasn't the usual, "Oh, has the selling of Christmas gone too far?" I made every argument I could think to make, but the Producer still wasn't budging. I tried to tell him that baby-boomers might not understand the significance of a Charlie Brown Christmas, but to people just a bit younger, it was everything. No dice. Finally, I got him on the content: that hoary old "has the selling of Christmas gone too far?" I said, "How can you not want to do a story on this special? They basically anticipated that whole question by about 20 years." When I pointed out the similarities between the philosophy underpinning our show, and A Charlie Brown Christmas, I got a bit of traction. So I dug in. I was doing the story.

Jose Cuauhtemoc Melendez was born in Mexico in 1916, which would make him 89 years old now. To the world, he was known as Bill Melendez, and besides working on Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo, he was there during the birth of all those classic Warner Brothers Cartoons. The man worked with Bob Clampett.

When it came time to animate Charles Schulz's Peanuts world, it was Bill Melendez who did a lot of the heavy lifting. He and his team came up with all the groundbreaking stuff we don't even think about anymore: they resisted the impulse to have Snoopy talk (Snoopy's unique vocalisations would eventually be performed by Melendez himself,) they decided to use real kids for the voices, and brass bleats for the voices of all the adults. They hired Vince Guaraldi.
Most of all, they resisted any attempts to cute-up or pull punches with the rather melancholy, serious subtext that beats at the heart of that special.

It's an amazing feat, now, looking back at this thirty-year-old special, and soberly realizing that practically none of those decisions would likely have stood today, in our market-researched and thoroughly-picked-over network culture. I mean -- a jazz soundtrack?

But Melendez and his team stuck to their guns. Sparky Schulz trusted them, and the result is, at least to my eyes, a special that is enduring because it manages to be both simple and profound all at once.

I loved Charlie Brown when I was a child. I went through a cartooning phase when I was in Florida -- obsessed with the Disney types, wondering at why Mickey went from his stylized and interesting 40's guise to the bland, more-childlike visage of the 1970's. I loved Bugs, and Daffy, but most of all, above all -- I loved Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Linus. Especially Linus.

I guess even then I was destined to drift into writing.

In my drawing phase, I would work tracing, trying, erasing, trying to reproduce the comics that I saw over and over again. There were two things I could never get. Linus' head gave me trouble long after I perfected the Charlie Brown circle. The blanket never seemed right. And though I could do a passable Snoopy on his doghouse, I never could assay what for me was the vision of Snoopy at his most sublime: the dog dancing.

Flash ahead to 1993, and on a cold December day, I'm with my cameraman in this tiny, tony Yorkville gallery. And in walks Bill Melendez. He was a sprightly 77-year-old then, with a thick head of hair and his signature mustache trimmed and crisp, turning up at the sides with a Salvidor Dali-like puckishness. He shook my hand firmly -- so firmly that I mimed the old "ow, that handshake is too much" schtick. And that's when I got to hear the laugh.

You can tell a lot about a man about the way he laughs. Melendez's laugh was long and uninhibited, the laugh of a man who does what he wants, and knows that what he does has an impact. It was the laugh of a man for whom joy was a daily visitor; who savored the good in life. In short, it was the laugh of a guy who'd come up with something iconic like A Charlie Brown Christmas, that speaks through being, not preaching.

I don't remember too much about the interview anymore. He knew I was about the age -- the age of his first audience, the same age as the first of the Sesame Street kids. He talked about the creation of that early special, and his characters, and what you got from working with children over adult voice actors. He spoke warmly and admiringly of Sparky Schulz, and gave a few tips and tricks and well-worn stories from the creation of Charlie Brown and his friends over the years.

All too soon it was over. I had a big old smile on my face and so did he. He'd been drawing for part of the interview (gotta get those cutaways,) just doodles, really. But once we were done and the cameraman started breaking down the equipment, I said to him, "you know, this interview really meant a lot to me." I explained the history, being a kid in Florida, the obsession with drawing, and then I did something that I couldn't believe. I said, "You guys actually made me want to do this." And I pulled out a pad and within thirty seconds, I'd drawn my best Snoopy-on-a-doghouse. And I gave it to him, and he smiled. What the hell was I doing? This is why I'm not a journalist. So there I am beating myself up and he just smiles at me and says, "you have to sign it. And date it." And I did, and he took it, and gingerly put it inside his portfolio. And I said, "I feel a little dumb right now. You just need to know that the work you did, And Charles Schulz... it's just meant more to me than I can say."

And he nodded, and he said, "can you do anything else from Peanuts?" And I smiled and clocked through my specialties. And I confessed that no matter how, or when, I could never master Snoopy Dancing, or Linus.

And so he sat down and drew me two drawings. They hang framed in my apartment, now. One is a glorious Snoopy in mid canter, and it's signed, "A Dance for Denis." The other is a simple 12 x 17 of Linus with Woodstock, and it says, "To Denis, Who Draws."

I look at these every day. Amidst the writer's block and the life problems, the rough patches and the joyful noises, the crunchy and the smooth, they never, ever fail to make me smile, or remind me of the generous spirit who produced them.

I don't have the Christmas spirit this year. It's just been lacking all round. Too much bustle, too many parties, too much smug preening over stupid things-- like the "War on Christmas."

But this morning among my Bah, Humbug I looked up at those drawings that I know so well, and I caught something new in Snoopy's eye and it just made me laugh. And suddenly, I want to throw on that Vince Guaraldi. There's the spirit. What took you so long?

I guess that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.