Peter Robbins

It’s been something like 50 years since Peter Robbins faced a TV camera for purposes of regular employment. After that, he hosted a radio talk show in Palm Springs, pitched Peanuts merchandise at a shopping centre kiosk, managed an apartment building, sold real estate, dealt with addiction and mental health difficulties, and spent time in jail.

Now, the original voice of Charlie Brown has taken his own life.

Amateur psychologists and internet-made experts may be tempted to equate Robbins’ life with that of his most famous role. Instead, I choose to look back on happier times.

An unbylined promotional story appeared in newspapers at the end of 1978. By then, Robbins was out of show business but came back for a TV special. The following story isn’t quite accurate as far as I know, because Peanuts characters appeared on TV spots for Ford several years before the Christmas special.

Peanuts Celebrates Birthday
Charlie Brown was speechless when he met Peter Robbins.
The beloved little “Peanut” had spoken only through the inspired pen of his creator, Charles M. Schulz, his thoughts encased in comic-strip balloons for all the world to see—but not to hear—until Charlie and his pals took the giant step into network television with their first animated special on CBS in 1965.
Peter Robbins was the youngster selected, after exhaustive auditions, to be the voice of Charlie Brown in that historic debut.
Robbins, now a 23-year-old graduate student, is reunited briefly with Schulz and the “Peanuts” when he appears in “Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown,” a one-hour special that will celebrate the beginning of the 30th year of the popular comic strip, Friday, Jan. 5 from 8 to 9 p.m. on CBS.
Robbins remembers the first audition when he competed with some 50 other children in an intensive search for just the right voices to interpret the unique characteristics of each “Peanut” personality and bring them to life on the screen for the first time. He was nine years old and a young veteran of several motion pictures and television appearances—the only “professional” in the crowd of young aspirants.
“I was a ‘Peanuts’ fan even then,” Peter recalls, “and I felt I knew all the characters In the cartoon strip personally. I remember an enormous sense of responsibility when it was pointed out to me that the world would hear Charlie Brown for the first time through my voice. It was pretty heavy for a nine-year old kid.”
Producer Lee Mendelson remembers, too. “We listened to kids’ voices for days and days. I heard them in my sleep—if I got to sleep. We knew that everyone of Schulz’s millions of readers had his own idea of how each character should sound-especially Charlie Brown.”
The production team, Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez, selected Peter Robbins for the role because they felt he had “the Charlie Brown sound.” “It’s a wistful quality,” Mendelson explains, “an elusive something one feels rather than hears.”
Robbins voiced a half-dozen Charlie Brown specials and then “retired” from acting to concentrate on school and other activities. He is interested in film production and is a student in communications and psychology at UC San Diego.
“I haven’t acted in 12 years,” he said. Then looking around at the new troop of young voices, the cameras, the lights, the hurly-burly of the set, he said in a Charlie Brown-ish accent “Good grief! Maybe I’ll get back into acting after all.”

Let’s jump ahead to 1995. Dave Walker of the Arizona Republic had a chance to chat with him and the story was sent out to various papers. This was published December 10.

Peter Robbins is the Voice Behind the Peanuts Legend
Peter Robbins at the ripe old age of 9 years gave his dusky, down-and-out voice to Charlie Brown.
Robbins, now 39 and works as an account executive for a Palm Desert, Calif., advertising agency, said he got the lead role in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at a standard Hollywood casting call. “They liked my voice, I guess,” he said. “I was very, very depressing. ‘This kid needs a break. Let’s give him a job.’”
After winning the role, Robbins and the rest of the cast worked out their parts individually with animator Bill Melendez, whose vocal inflections, he joked, gave Charlie Brown “a little Latin accent.”

“We each (recorded) our own little segment separately because having 7-, 8- and 9-year-ods in one room together was too chaotic,” Robbins said. “I would mimic Bill, who would basically break up the dialogue into little segments.”
Although “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz has said he didn’t like Robbins’ voice, it set the standard for Charlie Browns for years to come. Robbins provided Charlie Brown’s voice for four subsequent TV specials (including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”) and the first Peanuts movie, “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.”
Easier than being on TV: “It was a relief to do a voice thing like this,” Robbins said. “On other shows, you’d have to get up early and wear makeup, look nice, have your hair combed. For this, I could just come in after school and play around in a recording studio and say ‘Rats’ and ‘Good grief.’ Then I went home.
“It was a lot easier than doing some of the other stuff.”
Some of that other stuff included TV commercials, feature-film parts and guest roles in such classic TV series as “Dragnet,” “Gunsmoke” and “F Troop.” But Robbins’ acting assignments began to dry up about the time he reached high school.
These days, there’s no way a new acquaintance could guess that Robbins once spoke for Charlie Brown. His voice sounds nothing like the perpetually discouraged cartoon character. But folks never fail to be impressed when they learn.
“They usually find out through friends, ‘Robbins said.” ‘Hey, you were the original Charlie Brown?’ Then they say, ‘Say something.’”
On a resume that includes appearances on such TV series as “Get Smart,” “The Munsters” and “My Three Sons,” as well as several motion pictures, including Sonny and Cher’s camp classic, “Good Times,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas” remains Robbins’ favorite credit.
“I’m quite proud of it,” he said. “If you can be the voice of any cartoon character, I’d pick Charlie Brown.
“As I get older, I appreciate it more. It really has turned out to be a classic.”

It was inevitable the Charlie Brown role would have to be re-cast if Peanuts TV specials were to carry on into the future indefinitely. Robbins’ mother didn’t want the money train to stop. Robbins told the Santa Fe New Mexican in 2005 his mother fed him female hormones to try to keep his voice from maturing.

All kinds of glib, Peanuts tie-in endings for the post are coming to my mind, but they just don’t feel right. I was pulling for Robbins and hoping life would be good for him again. I’m sad that it didn’t turn out that way.