Bill Melendez, head animator of the Peanuts animated TV specials and feature films, has passed away at the age of 91. When working with animated commercials for Ford Motor Co. in the late 1950s, as the car company were using Peanuts in a promotional campaign, Melendez came to create the first animated version of the Peanuts characters ever, in close co-operation with creator Charles M. Schulz.

Six years later, Melendez' and partner Lee Mendelson's animation company also was the studio behind the first animated Peanuts special: A Charlie Brown Christmas, first aired in the US in 1965 and a holiday tradition ever since. The production was pioneering for television animation at the time, using real children instead of adult impersonators as voice actors, rejecting the standard use of a "laugh track", introducing jazz music in children's television cartoons, and allowing the script and the pace to tell a story rather than just non-stop visual action and gags. The scripts by Schulz also helped ensuring that the animated version of Peanuts maintained the quality standards that made the daily comic strip such an immense success. Melendez also provided the voices for Snoopy (as he grunts, laughs or groans) and Woodstock in the cartoons.

Nearly 40 half-hour Peanuts specials followed, as well the eight-episode TV miniseries This is America, Charlie Brown (1988-89), the Saturday morning cartoon The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show (1983-86), four feature films (1969, 1972, 1977, 1980), and hundreds of animated commercials featuring the Peanuts characters. In the US, the series is the longest-running and highest-rated animated specials in the history of television. The Peanuts specials have also taken on more serious topics not usually tackled by cartoons, like historical events, religion and life-threatening illness, while maintaining the warm, sharp and sophisticated humor that has made the Peanuts strip a landmark in the history of comics.

Says Maria Ornryd, Plus Licens' Category Head for television sales and DVD rights: "Working with Peanuts animation from Bill Melendez and Lee Mendelson's studio has always been a pleasure for us, and we are proud of having helped distributing this evergreen material into new territories and to new generations of Peanuts fans".