For many people, this time of year is incomplete without Charlie Brown trying to find the true meaning of Christmas. I honestly suspect that, if he hadn’t died on Christmas—the news was just announced today, I believe—not many people would’ve known the name at all beyond “jeez, I know I’ve heard that somewhere.” As it is, his death is hitting people harder than it would have otherwise, because pop culture familiarity is a strange thing.

There was more to Lee Mendelson than his decades-long role as producer of all things Peanuts for TV. For one thing, he’d done two documentaries for TV before connecting with Schulz at all. While working for a television channel in San Francisco, he found some footage of the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair and built it into The Innocent Fair, which became the start of the channel’s Peabody-winning series San Francisco Pageant. He then did a documentary about Willie Mays, A Man Named Mays. Apparently, this is when he first read the Peanuts strips about Charlie Brown’s baseball team, and he decided that the obvious next step from making a film about the world’s greatest baseball player was to do something with the world’s worst baseball team.

That was not A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has no baseball in it at all, for obvious reasons. No, it was a documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which Wikipedia says is called Charlie Brown and Charles Schulz. However, it did feature several of the things we’d come to know of the Peanuts cartoons on TV, including music by Vince Guaraldi. In fact, “Linus and Lucy” was composed for it. And while a lot of people are listed as themselves, for the documentary bits, it’s also the first time the Peanuts gang was animated.

After A Charlie Brown Christmas, which was as much a happy confluence of people being willing to do what Mendelson wanted to do as anything else, there were literally dozens of teamings with Mendelson and the Peanuts gang. Everything from It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown to the Oscar-nominated (for song score) film A Boy Named Charlie Brown. (A different one, the musical.) Such flash-in-the-pans as It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown and such classics as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Even a couple of regular shows, including the to-my-mind-underrated This Is America, Charlie Brown.

But you want not-Peanuts? Well, he did a lot of Cathy specials, it seems. He was an executive producer on Garfield and Friends. And I bet you didn’t remember that there was a Mother Goose and Grimm TV show back in the ’90s. I certainly didn’t. And in not-newspaper comic-related, there’s a documentary called From Yellowstone to Tomorrow, about the National Park Service. No Man’s Valley, an animated TV special about the endangered California condor. Travels With Flip, about Flip Wilson. And, in 1970, Hot Dog, an attempted Saturday morning SNL for kids. That starred, among other people . . . Woody Allen. Which implications aside was a weird choice. But he also brought It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown to TV. So more hits than misses.