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! became the first spin-off of "What a Cartoon!" in 1996. Two more series based on shorts, "Johnny Bravo" and "Cow and Chicken", premiered in 1997, and "The Powerpuff Girls" became a weekly half-hour show in 1998. "Courage the Cowardly Dog" (spun off from the Oscar-nominated short "The Chicken from Outer Space") followed as the final spin-off in 1999. In addition, the "Cow and Chicken" short "I Am Weasel" eventually was also spun off into a separate series: in all, six cartoon series were ultimately launched by the "What a Cartoon!" project, any one of which earned enough money for the