“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was almost cancelled before it aired!
The special, which is a staple of the Christmas season nowadays, was the very first animated work from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts strip.
When CBS TV executives saw the special they were dismayed. It was slow, it had no action, there were no professional voice actors (they were all kids!) and they did things that ‘couldn’t be done on network television’ like read passages from the Bible.
They wanted to cancel the special…
