Moral Courage for Christmas...
Originally Published December 25, 2020
Turns out my mother was wrong (please don’t tell her I wrote that)…something good did come out of the sixties.
Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz fought to keep the Gospel message in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
From the piece:
“I said, ‘Sparky, this is religion. It just doesn’t go in a cartoon,’” Mendelson said, referencing Schulz’s nickname and the debate over the scene. “He looked at me very coldly and said, ‘Bill, if we don’t do it, who will? We can do it.’ He was right. That’s been the most commented-on little sequences of that show – Linus telling the true meaning of Christmas. But every time I see that scene, I wince. It’s such poor animation, such bad drawing.”
Mendelson later told the Huffington Post, “When [Schulz] said, ‘You know, we’re going to have Linus read from the Bible,’ Bill and I looked at each other and said, ‘Uh oh, that doesn’t sound very good,’ But then Schulz said, ‘Look, if we’re going to do this, we should talk about what Christmas is all about, not just do a cartoon with no particular point of view.’”
Interestingly enough, A Charlie Brown Christmas won an Emmy the very next year, and I am reminded that we must continue to reclaim the industries we’ve lost. In fact, moral courage is what I want for Christmas, not just for myself, but for my fellow Americans, especially those in the Entertainment Industry, Big Tech, Corporate America and Government who are terrified to do the right thing.
If we won’t, then who will?
Tags: Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown, Christmas, Linus, Moral Courage, Peanuts