Peanuts cartoon studio that had Ford as a client. Schulz and Meléndez became friends, and when producer Lee Mendelson decided to make a two-minute animated sequence for a TV documentary called "A Boy Named Charlie Brown" in 1963, he brought on Meléndez for the project. Before the documentary was completed, the three of them (with help from their sponsor, the Coca-Cola Company) produced their first half-hour animated special, the Emmy- and Peabody Award-winning "A Charlie Brown Christmas", which was first aired on the CBS network on December 9, 1965. This episode is undoubtedly the most widely recognized of all "Peanuts" TV
What a Cartoon! company to pay for the whole program. In addition to the eventual spin-offs, the "What a Cartoon!" short "Larry and Steve" by Seth MacFarlane featured prototypes of characters that would later go on to become MacFarlane's massively successful "Family Guy". The "What a Cartoon!" project and its assorted spin-offs brought Cartoon Network more commercial and critical success, and the network became an animation industry leader as the 1990s drew to a close. In 2001, coinciding with the death of William Hanna, Hanna-Barbera Productions merged with Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network opened its own production arm, Cartoon Network Studios, in