How Willie Mays inspired "A Charlie Brown Christmas"

PopMatters has a  terrific feature on the making of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which premiered in 1965. Considering Chuck's love of baseball, it's not surprising that there's a baseball connection. San Francisco filmmaker Lee Mendelson tells Brian Heater (perfect byline for the story, huh?) why he decided to work on the special:

“I had done a Willie Mays documentary in 1963, A Man Named Mays, which had done really well. Then I was reading a Charlie Brown baseball strip, and the idea came to me: I’ve just done the world’s greatest baseball player; now I’ll do the world’s worst.”

It took two years, but Coca Cola called Mendelson and asked him to produce the Christmas classic.

Mendelson went on to produce a couple of baseball-themed Charlie Brown specials: Lucy Must Be Traded, Charlie Brown (2003), and It's Spring Training, Charlie Brown! (1992), in which Linus gets a hit while cheering himself on from the bench. That kind of thing always happens in spring training.

Mendelson has written a more complete account about the connection between the Mays documentary and A Charlie Brown Christmas at the Charles M. Schultz Museum Web site.