Lee Mendelson, Producer Of ‘Peanuts’ TV Specials Dies at 86

Lee Mendelson, an Emmy-winning producer of more than 50 animated Peanuts TV specials, including A Charlie Brown Christmas, has died, he was 86.

Mendelson died on Christmas Day in Hillsborough, CA, following a protracted battle with lung cancer, his family told the Palo Alto Daily Post.

Mendelson was born in San Francisco, California, but grew up in San Mateo, graduating from San Mateo High School. He entered Stanford University in 1950, where he majored in English.

After graduating in 1954, he spent three years in the Air Force where he served as a lieutenant. He then worked several years for his father, a vegetable grower and shipper.

Mendelson’s career in television began in 1961, when he started working at San Francisco’s KPIX-TV, where he created public service announcements. A fortunate find of some antique film footage of the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair led to Mendelson’s first production, a documentary entitled The Innocent Fair. The documentary was the first in a series on the history of the city, San Francisco Pageant, for which Mendelson won a Peabody Award.

In 1963 Mendelson left KPIX to form his own production company. His first work was a documentary on Willie Mays, A Man Named Mays. Shortly after the documentary aired, Mendelson came across a Peanuts comic strip that revolved around Charlie Brown’s baseball team. Mendelson thought that since he’d just “done the world’s greatest baseball player, now [he] should do the world’s worst baseball player, Charlie Brown.”

Mendelson approached Peanuts creator Charles Schulz with the idea of producing a documentary on Schulz and his strip. Schulz, who had enjoyed the Mays documentary, readily agreed. The 1965 documentary, Charlie Brown & Charles Schulz, was the beginning of a 30-year collaboration between Schulz and Mendelson.

While Mendelson was attempting to find a market for the Schulz documentary, he was approached by The Coca-Cola Company, who asked him if he was interested in producing an animated Christmas special for television. Mendelson was, and he immediately contacted Schulz in regards to using the Peanuts characters. Schulz, in turn, suggested hiring animator and director Bill Meléndez, whom Schulz had worked with while creating a Peanuts-themed advertising campaign for the Ford Motor Company. Mendelson also hired jazz composer Vince Guaraldi after hearing a Guaraldi-composed song while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge.

After a hurried six-month production period, A Charlie Brown Christmas aired December 9, 1965, on CBS. The show went on to win both the Emmy and Peabody Award and was the first of over 40 animated Peanuts specials created by Mendelson, Meléndez and Schulz. In addition, they collaborated on The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show, which ran on Saturday mornings during the 1980s.

In 1968, Mendelson produced the documentary Travels with Charley, based upon the book by John Steinbeck.

Mendelson founded and headed Lee Mendelson Film Productions, a Burlingame, California-based television and film production company. Mendelson Productions has produced over 100 television and film productions, winning 12 Emmys and 4 Peabodys, as well as numerous Grammy, Emmy, and Oscar nominations. He has a wife, Ploenta, and four children. Mendelson died on December 25, 2019, from lung cancer