How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (TV special) animation divisions of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, where Jones was under contract at the time. CBS, coming off the surprise success of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" a year before, allotted Jones and MGM a $315,000 budget, more than four times what Bill Melendez was offered to produce "A Charlie Brown Christmas". The original broadcast was sponsored by the Foundation for Full Service Banks whose sponsor plugs within the original airing were later edited out for subsequent broadcasts. The entirety of the book's text, with some slight embellishment, was adapted into the special; to pad the special to a full 30-minute time slot,
Peanuts "Peanuts" television specials the fourth Greatest TV Cartoon of All Time. A computer-animated feature film based on the strip, "The Peanuts Movie", was released in 2015. "Peanuts" had its origin in "Li'l Folks", a weekly panel comic that appeared in Schulz's hometown paper, the "St. Paul Pioneer Press", from 1947 to 1950. He first used the name "Charlie Brown" for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like the early 1950s version of Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold