Peanuts: Deluxe Holiday Collection [Ultimate Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) Image A Sound B+ Extras C
"It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown" (1992)
"It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (1966) Image A Sound A Extras C
"It's Magic, Charlie Brown" (1981)
"A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" (1973) Image A Sound B Extras C
"The Mayflower Voyagers" (1988)

by Jefferson Robbins I defy you to ingest the first minute of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (***½/****) and not yearn for the idealized childhood nobody ever had. It's not merely nostalgic, it's made of nostalgia. Traversing the quiet streets of your tiny snow-painted town, cracking the whip on a frozen pond, singing a Christmas carol that seems to have lived in your heart long before it was ever written--it's enough to turn a guy Republican. Then, the poison pill, in the very first line of dialogue: "I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus."

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS RUNNING TIME 25 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 (VC-1) LANGUAGES English DD 5.1 SUBTITLES Englis SDh REGION All DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Warner IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN RUNNING TIME 25 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 (VC-1) LANGUAGES English DD 5.1 Spanish DD 1.0 SUBTITLES Englis SDH REGION All DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Warner A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING RUNNING TIME 25 minutes MPAA Not Rated ASPECT RATIO(S) 1.33:1 (VC-1) LANGUAGES English 5.1 DTS-HD MA SUBTITLES Englih SDH French REGION All DISC TYPE BD-50 STUDIO Warner

Taking Charles Schulz's lead "Peanuts" character as a whole, it's impossible to tell whether Charlie Brown's misery is self-generated and self-perpetuated or whether it stems from his mistreatment by his peers. He's depressed, but also oppressed. On the comics page, Schulz used appealingly huge-headed children to dig at real adult concerns. (Remember Linus fleeing in panic from a dusting of snow he thought was nuclear fallout?) In "Peanuts'" first migration to narrative TV, Schulz stitched together jokes and punchlines extant from the strip, yes, but he also aimed very specific darts at the culture that values Christmas largely as a vehicle for commerce. The aluminum tree, the blowout light display--these are the unfortunate signposts of the season.

This is not a new message. The concept of Christmas as a commercial event, or of its nullification in favour of free enterprise, is a bogeyman at least as old as Dickens. But Schulz, an uncle to America's children who was nonetheless tormented by depression and self-doubt, knew that modern Christmas is really corrosive for our mental health. The communal embrace of the holiday implies that if we aren't enjoying ourselves, the fault is ours. (Five-cent psychiatry is no help, either.) You could read this message as brilliantly subversive or abhorrently cynical, coming as it does in a 1965 network special financed by Coca-Cola, from a creator who sold his characters to anybody with a fat checkbook.

The Annunciation reading that theologian/bedding fetishist Linus delivers from Second Luke reorients the show's theme towards the elevation of the humble, the promise explicit in the Christ story. Although the derided scapegoat Charlie Brown finds meaning in his stunted Christmas tree, it takes a village of his persecutors to strip Snoopy's doghouse of its holiday garlands and...dress up the tree until it looks exactly like the prefab monstrosities on the commercial lot. What is this gesture? If it's regret at having abused him earlier, it's oblique and backhanded. The dynamic between Charlie Brown and his little pals is so fraught, you don't even notice that they never get around to staging the Christmas play they've been rehearsing the whole time.

Thanks to the visionary triumvirate of animator Bill Melendez, producer Lee Mendelson, and composer Vince Guaraldi, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was a smash, opening the gates for more than fifty such specials. The third, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (***½/****), is about faith and imagination where its forerunner is about loathing and redemption. His role as the group's Bible-studies leader notwithstanding, Linus holds a neopagan view of Halloween, keeping vigil for the rise of his saviour in the gourd patch. While his confreres are mostly out for candy, here again Linus safeguards the holiday's spiritual aspect (as he understands it). The kids wear the costumes of fantastical characters, merely passing as fantasy figures to earn rewards--though Snoopy projects himself fully into history as a World War I Flying Ace. His inner life as a warrior of the skies is so brilliantly realized by Melendez and company that you sort of wish you didn't have to rejoin Linus's inevitable disappointment, now in progress. Give him credit that his disappointment never gives way to disillusionment.

"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" catches the Melendez "Peanuts" cycle at its zenith, with joyful character animation, luscious backgrounds, an augmented and more adventurous score by Guaraldi, and gentle hilarity. (The opening scene featuring Linus and Lucy selecting their jack-o'-lantern makes me giggle hard.) It defined these characters in animation for decades to come--imagine them in the hands of Disney or, worse, Hanna-Barbera, and shudder. It wasn't to last long, though. Schulz himself began to set his character design in concrete by the 1970s, and he introduced obnoxious foils like Peppermint Patty where previously Lucy Van Pelt and her ilk had served perfectly well. To watch "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" (**½/****) on the heels of the Halloween special is to wonder if these are even the same characters, and it's not simply because the child voice talent has grown up and been replaced. Ridden down by Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown caves to her self-invitation and serves up a whimsical Thanksgiving feast, only to feel her wrath. By now the shows' pattern of moralizing is clear: we suffer most at the holidays when we identify with their material aspects--the presents, the candy, the turkey--and Linus will always be there at the midpoint to sum up the true meaning of it all. Maybe it was that repetitiveness that I found wearying. Though lots of people love the Lucy-yanks-the-football gag and Snoopy's death match with the deckchair, I just wanted to fly in the Sopwith Camel again.

THE BLU-RAY DISC
The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack "Peanuts Deluxe Holiday Collection" offers up a welcome warts-and-all presentation. In fact, it may be the best showing of a classic cartoon I've yet seen in HiDef. The lines of the character's expressions are full and clean, the sound is remixed to DTS-HD 5.1--except in the case of "A Charlie Brown Christmas", which is presented in lossy DD 5.1--to put Guaraldi's piano just over your shoulder, and the colours are Sunday-funnies vibrant. (I admit I don't remember Charlie Brown's house looking so...mustard.) Smears and scratches in the animation elements remain present but far from overwhelming, implying a clean print transfer with minimal digital cleanup. If the defects add to the nostalgia, a jerkiness in the scrolling backgrounds when the characters walk can make your eye jitter. This was probably unavoidable--unlike in 1965, there are no intervening filters of film degradation, broadcast carrier wave, and lo-fi cathode display to disguise it. I found the audio on "A Charlie Brown Christmas" a little papery in comparison to the lossless tracks elsewhere, but chalked it up to quickie production values in the first show's creation.

Each Blu-ray in the pack largely duplicates the contents of its sister DVD, albeit with serious deficits: the BD language options suck. "A Charlie Brown Christmas", for instance, can be heard in English, Spanish, or Portuguese on the DVD version with a choice of Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai subtitles. On the Blu-ray, you'll get English and live with it. It's mystifying. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is backed with "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown" (*½/****, 23 mins.), the thirty-sixth "Peanuts" TV special and a weak echo of its progenitor. There's no plot to recap for this instalment because it's essentially a series of unrelated, strip-derived vignettes with Christmas as their shared pivot point. The Halloween episode shares a disc with "It's Magic, Charlie Brown" (**½/****, 25 mins.), a more cohesive story that sees Snoopy experimenting with stage magic and turning Charlie Brown into Claude Rains. It's a nice jab when he uses his newfound invisibility to accomplish a long-deferred dream, yet the show fatally oversteps by leaving Charlie Brown content while another character is humiliated. That's a terrible misunderstanding of the lead player's role in his own mythos. The Thanksgiving episode leads into "The Mayflower Voyagers" (**/****, 24 mins.), more "School House Rock" than "Peanuts" both in purpose and style, with the kids taking on the role of Pilgrims in the New World to tell the story of America's most revered cultural incursion. It may be educational, but it's so weirdly drawn that it's definitely fourth-tier Melendez. Despite being supplemental in nature, this sub-trilogy similarly boasts 1080p video and lossless DTS audio.

Three talking-head docs (12-16 mins., SD) explore their accompanying specials and feature a roster of authorities, including Mendelson, Schulz's widow Jeannie, "Peanuts" historian Scott McGuire, and the gleeful Melendez himself, apparently captured in footage shortly before his death in 2008. (The fact that he'd passed on before these sets were released goes unmentioned.) The behind-the-scenes dish on how the series got launched is well-presented, and its dominance as a cultural touchstone--acclaim, Emmys, Nielsen share near 50 percent--is adequately covered. Schulz's son Monte takes credit for the idea of Snoopy battling the Red Baron, although he says his father tried to claim it as wholly his own. Comics writer and scholar Mark Evanier provides a nice outside viewpoint, and it's good to hear, across the featurettes, from animator Phil Roman and voice artists like Hilary Momberger (Sally) and Chris DeFaria (Peppermint Patty...played by a male!). All three segments are in standard-def with DD 2.0 sound.

The single hour of entertainment content per disc plus a few minutes of extras seems a waste of the Blu-ray format's nine-hour capacity, and surely there is much more archival material that could be deployed here. On spinup, view previews for the "Peanuts" collection itself (which seems redundant) as well as "Charlie and Lola Vol. 6: How Many More Minutes Until Christmas". Through the menu, access previews for Warner's "Classic Christmas Favorites" collection, which bundles "Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas" with a grab-bag of Rankin-Bass holiday films. My copy of the "Peanuts" triple set came with three packages of press-on window decals featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy in both Christmas and Halloween regalia. Nothing for Thanksgiving? Good grief. Originally published: December 24, 2010.

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