Lee Mendelson, RIP

Animated Peanuts

By now, most of my readers will have seen that Lee Mendelson, producer of Peanuts specials for decades, passed away on Christmas Day – the day celebrated by his most famous work, A Charlie Brown Christmas, created by the key team of Mendelson, Melendez, Schulz, and Guaraldi (all now gone, alas.)

While I met Lee – had a nice meal and a nice chat with him – I don’t have any great stories about him. My pal Mark, who worked closely with Lee on the TV series Garfield and Friends, has started writing some tales (including mentioning some Peanuts animation that was produced but never aired.)

Relevant to the focus of this blog, Mendelson wrote four books on the history of Peanuts: the 20th anniversary book Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz, the 30th anniversary book Happy Birthday Charlie BrownA Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition, and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic. These are light but entertaining books, written in an engaging style.

In the past month-and-a-half, there have been several hours of primetime network TV devoted to work he produced. Without his efforts on the small screen and the big one, we’d be without some great work, and Peanuts would not have the same place in the world that it has today.

I’m glad he was around.

Share the news!
Animated Peanuts
A Summer Musical: The Dolores Report

The animated special Peanuts: A Summer Musical is coming out on Friday, as discussed before. And yet here I am on Thursday, covering it. What sort of secret inside access did I have that let’s me do this? Easy, I live on the West Coast. It’s already Friday on the East …

Animated Peanuts
Dolores CONFIRMED!

That is genuinely Dolores, the obscure Latina Peanuts character from the filmstrips, in the new special that releases this coming Friday. I’ve had it confirmed by the director of the special, who is half Latin himself. He indicates that she will not be the only character of such heritage in …

Animated Peanuts
Officially, it’s a “Super Chubby”

When I reviewed the 2015 book adapting the TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, I had this to say: The book that’s titled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (adaptation by Kara McMahon, art by Scott Jeralds) takes basically the whole special and simplifies everything. It briefly tells you that Charlie …