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Scott McGuire reviews
and
It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown
Paramount
- Cert: Unrated, but suitable for all ages
- Cat.no:
Paramount 15614 (Holiday Classics box set of 3)
Paramount 15613 (A Charlie Brown Christmas)
Paramount 15611 (It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown)
Paramount 15612 (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving)
Paramount 83944 (It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown) - Running time: 50 minutes (each holiday DVD);
24 minutes (Pied Piper) - Year: 1965, 1966, 1972, 1973, 1988, 1992, 2000
- Pressing: 2000
- Region(s): 1, NTSC
- Chapters: 12-14 per disc
- Sound: Dolby Mono, Dolby Surround
- Languages: English
- Subtitles: English for the hearing impaired
- Fullscreen: 4:3
- 16:9-Enhanced: No
- Macrovision: Yes
- Disc Format: 4 * DVD 5
- Price: US $19.95 individually, US $57.95 box set
- Extras: Schulz interview (Pied Piper only)
Directors:
- Bill Melendez, Phil Roman
Cast:
- (for “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, differs for other shows)
Charlie Brown: Peter Robbins
Lucy Van Pelt: Tracy Stratford
Linus Van Pelt: Christopher Shea
Schroeder/Shermy: Chris Doran
Pig-pen: Geoffrey Ornstein
Patty: Karen Mendelson
Sally Brown: Cathy Steinberg
Freida: Ann Altieri
Violet: Sally Dryer
Snoopy: Bill Melendez
In the USA, Paramount have issued four DVDs of Peanuts shows, 3 “holidayclassics” titles with 2 shows each, and 1 with a new direct-to-video title. The DVDs are:
- A Charlie Brown Christmas & It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown
- It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown & You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown
- Charlie Brown Thanksgiving & This is America, Charlie Brown: The Mayflower Voyagers
- It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown
The three holiday DVDs are also available in a box set called the “Peanuts Classic Holiday Collection.” There’s nothing different between the box set and the three DVDs individually except a cardboard slip case.
The Peanuts DVDs look excellent! The picture on all of them is sharp, clean, and bright. They’re so good that you can sometimes see the slight shadows the cels cast on the background. I compared the DVDs with a my VHS tapes, and the videos looked washed out by comparison. The picture quality on a couple of the shows (“The Mayflower Voyagers”, “You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown”) is not quite as good as the best, but it’s still very good.
I didn’t see any compression artifacts in the pictures. While some have criticized Paramount for only putting 2 episodes per DVD, at least they took advantage of the extra space – the DVDs have the highest data transmission rate of any DVD I own.
Okay, the pictures aren’t perfectly pristine – there are a few scratches and dots here and there, but they’re uncommon and minor. Paramount used the same digitally cleaned masters for the DVDs as were used for the Paramount VHS releases. There are a few times, usually during rapid motion, where black outlines break up – this is probably a side effect of the digital cleaning (it happens on the VHS tapes as well), but it’s transitory. For video that’s over 30 years on in some cases, it looks quite good overall.
The menus on the DVDs are simple, but easy to use and pleasantly designed with bold graphics – there’s none of the animation overload and difficulty telling what options you’re selecting as there are on many DVD menus.
The DVDs, with the exception of “It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown” don’t include any extras beyond subtitles. “It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown” includes a short 12-minute “retrospective interview with Charles Schulz,” which features Schulz interview clips where he talks about the characters and the TV shows, clips from the animated TV shows, and photos. The material is all drawn from previous TV documentaries, but it’s a nice short selection.
If I had to find a quibble, it would be with the audio on the 3 “holiday classic” DVDs, which is quieter than on most DVDs, and yet I noticed a few hints of distortion, mostly when someone was speaking. But the soundtracks were after all not designed with modern home theater systems in mind. As such, they are only presented in monophonic sound.
The sound on “It’s the Pied Piper, Charlie Brown” is much louder, and it’s in Dolby 2.1 Stereo, nicely showing off David Benoit’s music. (Advance press for the PIED PIPER DVD said that it would have a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack and both English and Spanish subtitles, but it appears that the DVD only has the 2.1 stereo audio track and only English subtitles.)
Final analysis? The Peanuts shows have never looked better than they do on these DVD releases and I’m looking forward to more being released in the future.
PICTURE QUALITY
SOUND QUALITY
EXTRAS
OVERALLCheck out Scott’s Peanuts TV & Animation Page.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.