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! Burbank, as the rightful Hanna-Barbera successor to produce original programming for the network and future projects. Two "What a Cartoon!" shorts, "Wind-Up Wolf" and "Hard Luck Duck", were the last cartoon shorts directed and produced by co-founder and co-chairman William Hanna. In addition, "What a Cartoon!" and spin-offs were the final original productions released by Hanna-Barbera. Creator of "The What a Cartoon! Show", Fred Seibert, left Hanna-Barbera in late 1996 to open up his own studio, Frederator Studios, and has persistently continued in the tradition of surfacing new talent, characters, and series with similar shorts "incubators", including (as of 2015)