{"id":5843,"date":"2019-12-28T21:59:07","date_gmt":"2019-12-29T05:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/?p=5843"},"modified":"2019-12-28T21:59:07","modified_gmt":"2019-12-29T05:59:07","slug":"lee-mendelson-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/2019\/12\/lee-mendelson-rip\/","title":{"rendered":"Lee Mendelson, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By now, most of my readers will have seen that Lee Mendelson, producer of Peanuts specials for decades, passed away on Christmas Day &#8211; the day celebrated by his most famous work, <em>A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em>, created by the key team of Mendelson, Melendez, Schulz, and Guaraldi (all now gone, alas.)<\/p>\n<p>While I met Lee &#8211; had a nice meal and a nice chat with him &#8211; I don&#8217;t have any great stories about him. My pal Mark, who worked closely with Lee on the TV series\u00a0<em>Garfield and Friends<\/em>, has started <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newsfromme.com\/2019\/12\/27\/a-lee-mendelson-story-part-i\/\">writing some tales<\/a> (including mentioning some Peanuts animation that was produced but never aired.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/cbcs.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-5844 alignright\" src=\"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/cbcs-226x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"226\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/cbcs-226x300.jpg 226w, https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/cbcs.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 226px) 100vw, 226px\" \/><\/a>Relevant to the focus of this blog, Mendelson wrote four books on the history of Peanuts: the 20th anniversary book\u00a0<em>Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz<\/em>, the 30th anniversary book\u00a0<em>Happy Birthday Charlie Brown<\/em>,\u00a0<em><a id=\"amznPsBmLink_6817904\" class=\"amzn_ps_bm_tl\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Making-Tradition\/dp\/0062272144\/ref=as_li_bk_tl\/?tag=aaugh-20&amp;linkId=8b492b20426eb5013afc016fab36bfc3&amp;linkCode=ktl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword=\"A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition\" data-amzn-link-id=\"8b492b20426eb5013afc016fab36bfc3\">A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Tradition<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"amznPsBmPixel_6817904\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; height: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;\" src=\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?source=bk&amp;t=aaugh-20&amp;bm-id=default&amp;l=ktl&amp;linkId=8b492b20426eb5013afc016fab36bfc3&amp;_cb=1577597935692\" alt=\"\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" border=\"0\" \/><\/em>, and\u00a0<em><a id=\"amznPsBmLink_2319841\" class=\"amzn_ps_bm_tl\" href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Its-Great-Pumpkin-Television-Classic\/dp\/0062344838\/ref=as_li_bk_tl\/?tag=aaugh-20&amp;linkId=8d1c683b0b6748e2893880ca8e8df6a4&amp;linkCode=ktl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" data-amzn-ps-bm-keyword=\"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic\" data-amzn-link-id=\"8d1c683b0b6748e2893880ca8e8df6a4\">It&#8217;s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"amznPsBmPixel_2319841\" style=\"border: none !important; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; height: 0px !important; width: 0px !important;\" src=\"https:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?source=bk&amp;t=aaugh-20&amp;bm-id=default&amp;l=ktl&amp;linkId=8d1c683b0b6748e2893880ca8e8df6a4&amp;_cb=1577598061873\" alt=\"\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" border=\"0\" \/><\/em>. These are light but entertaining books, written in an engaging style.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;d be without some great work, and Peanuts would not have the same place in the world that it has today.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m glad he was around.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By now, most of my readers will have seen that Lee Mendelson, producer of Peanuts specials for decades, passed away on Christmas Day &#8211; 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, &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5845,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","filesize_raw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5843","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animated-peanuts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5843","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5843"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5843\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5843"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5843"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5843"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}