Blog DVD Review: Peanuts 1960's Collection

Saturday, July 11, 2009

It is Saturday, so that must mean it is time for the weekly Blog DVD Reviews. Today week we take a look at Warner Home Video's Peanuts 1960's Collection. We get all six remastered TV specials on DVD including a few for the first time ever! See my Blog DVD Review of Peanuts 1960's Collection:

Peanuts - 1960's Collection (Warner, $29.98) brings us all six 1960's TV specials on DVD digitally remastered...and it is really worth it! These are the first six TV specials that have ever aired, too. We get A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie Brown's All-Stars, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, You're in Love Charlie Brown, He's Your Dog Charlie Brown, and It Was a Short Summer Charlie Brown. I believe the latter two have never been released on DVD, so we get those here for the first time. Charlie Brown All-Stars wasn't released digitally remastered previously, so it looks much better here.
Among the stories on these six specials are: Charlie Brown has the holiday blues; new baseball team uniforms and memberships; being invited to a Halloween party; being smitten with the little red-haired girl; mischief Snoopy tries everyone's patience; and summer camp rivalries between boys and girls.
Let's now move on to the packaging. Like all the previous sets, we have a thin outer box that holds a very thin case, that is movie style. I never understood the reason for the thin box that holds a thin case...again what's the point? It doesn't need protection really. Also, both the back and front of each are exactly the same, except the box is shinier. The cover art is white in color, and has a shot of Snoopy sleeping on top of his red dog house. The title of the special is on the roof of his dog house in yellow, with a mention that this is a remastered deluxe edition on the top with a Snoopy Peanuts logo! It also says we get all six remastered TV Specials. To the back we go, we get a nice shot of nearly the entire gang on top with the wording "It's a Cool Collection Charlie Brown." The back also has a disc-by-disc breakdown on what specials to expect. When we open the case, we get nice artwork and details on each special on each side. The first disc is in a plastic holder, that we can flip back and forth like a page on a book. Disc two is actually on the right panel. Disc art has a white background, with artwork of Charlie Brown and Snoopy on disc one and Linus and Sally on disc two.
The menu screen has options of Features, Trailers, Special Features, and Languages. We get that white background again, with the theme song playing in the background. We also have the same artwork as the cover art with Snoopy lying down on the roof of his dog house. Anyway back to the menu, Trailers is just on disc one and we get some for the Woodstock movie and The Jetsons DVD. We also get auto-trailers on each disc before the main menu for items like Scooby Doo Cartoon Network movie, Saturday Morning 60s/70s DVD, Tiny Toons/Freakazoid DVD, and Snoopy's Reunion DVD. For Languages, we can have either have English, Espanol, Portuguese or Japanese. For subtitles we have those four again and also French and Thai! The Features section has the specials listed, we can also select Play All to play them consecutively. Finally, Special Features is on disc two only and lists the featurette.
The video and audio is tremendous once again. These specials are all so good ever since they stated the Remastered Collection sets. They have never looked better or sounded better ever. I am very impressed yet again; what more can I continue to say about these digitally remastered sets?. Warner continues to do a great job on this remastering of all these classic specials. Each special has 5 chapter stops and runtimes are all between 25:05-25:25. So, yes of course it is unedited!
As for special features, we get a nice featurette! It is titled "Vince Guaraldi: The Maestro of Menlo Park" and runs 36:54. We find more about the composer behind the classic music on this show. We get insight from colleagues and more. Interviewed are Lee Mendelson (executive producer), Seward McCain (former bassist), David Guaraldi (son of Vince), David Benoit (composer/pianist), Vince Lateano (former drummer), George Winston (solo pianist), Dean Reilly (former bassist), Eddie Duran (former guitarist), Kitty Margolis (jazz-vocalist), Colin Bailey (former drummer), Jim Zimmerman (former drummer), Peter Woodform (Doc's Band on The Tonight Show), and Mark Rosengarden (former drummer).
I once again highly do recommend this set for any Charlie Brown-Peanuts fan and classic animation in general. Continue your collection, because we get two specials we never had on DVD before. This is worth it! It is now safe to say we have the first 6 specials all remastered! Warner continues to do a wonderful job with the remastering and the behind the scenes extras for each set. Let's hope they continue to release more Peanuts specials and eventually we get them all remastered in our personal libraries! So head back to the '60s and relive the first six classic specials all over again! Charlie Brown says "good grief" but there is no grief in watching these specials!
-- Reviewed by Pavan