This column, and Celebrating the Living, are now scheduled out some time in advance. (I’m aware of the risk on the latter, at least—we’re hitting the anniversary of when I had to change my planned person because Carrie Fisher died.) This morning, my calendar told me that I was supposed to write about Lee Mendelson. This, obviously, is wrong, as Lee Mendelson died last year. At this time of year, which I’m suspecting is when I added Bill Melendez to the schedule. How better to celebrate Boxing Day than with one of the architects of The Charlie Brown Christmas Special? And he turns out to be one of those people who’s so much more fascinating than I ever knew.

For starters, José Cuauhtémoc Meléndez was born in Sonora, Mexico. His family moved to Arizona when he was twelve. Like vast numbers of the people we’ve covered, he graduated from what was at the time Chouinard Art Institute. (Now California Institute of the Arts, with its own impressive alumni list.) From there, he went to work for Disney. He worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. And then there was the strike, and he didn’t work for Disney anymore. He went to work for Warners, spending several years there before being fired by Eddie Selzer.

After Warners was United Productions of America, where among other things—vast numbers of commercials, for one—he worked on the Oscar-winning “Gerald McBoingBoing.” Finally, in 1963, he founded his own animation production studio. In his basement. Two years later, he became the person to whom the Peanuts gang were entrusted, and that’s the place where he enters the awareness of, let’s be real, most people who know his name at all.

My reference sites make very clear that Charles Schulz “trusted” Melendez. Certainly his studios handled every single TV special and direct-to-video cartoon, and Melendez personally directed most of them. What’s more, the great debate of translating Snoopy to the screen was how to deal with his talking; Snoopy, in the comics, talks in thought bubbles. That didn’t translate, even though he directly responded to the others. So Snoopy’s voice—to this day, in archival audio—is Bill Melendez making gibberish into a tape recorder and being sped up. And I mean to this day; his voice is used in the most recent movie.

It seems strange to say that a man who’d been working in the industry for nearly thirty years at that point had his career made by a single half-hour of television, but it’s also kind of true. Without Charlie Brown, Bill Melendez would’ve remained in the ranks of hundreds of others over the decades—someone who did good, solid work shaping the pop culture landscape in a way that didn’t stand out from anyone else and indeed wasn’t supposed to. You aren’t supposed to see his style on “A Fractured Leghorn,” and his work animating the titles of Escape to Witch Mountain wasn’t even credited. But without him, what even is animated Snoopy?

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