If you have ever listened to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and compared it to the actual television special you may have noticed "Christmastime is Here" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" abruptly cut short in the broadcast. That's because the special was directly sponsored by Coca-Cola and, like a lot of television in the 60s, included promotion inside of the program itself, as opposed to regular ad spots. These were removed in subsequent re airings and became lost, with the exception of a few blurry videos.
Today, somebody dropped on Archive a restored version of those scenes. There's a lot of minor little details that are different from the version that you are used to and this one (apparently the entire "Hark the Herald" scene was reshot for later broadcasts) but for the most part it's just fun to see the way that the sausage gets made with any of these commercial products. A Charlie Brown Christmas is and remains a classic in it's repudiation of the commercialization of the holidays, but of course it is also very much a part of that machine.
Peanuts in general has always been weird with this because, while the strips themselves are these beautiful pieces of American art at it's finest (imho), Schultz's happiness to sell out the characters to anyone and everyone who would like a shot at it always felt detrimental to that. Of course my newspaper comic of choice growing up was Calvin and Hobbes, whose creator had extremely strong feelings in the exact opposite direction, so perhaps it's just that rubbing off on me.
