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The Peanuts specials are some of the most beloved, well-known, culturally significant and commercially available TV specials of all time. Paramount, the former licensor of the Peanuts library, put out about a dozen DVD's of the Charlie Brown specials, primarily the holiday ones, from 2000 to 2004 before bringing the releases to a complete halt, to the dismay of Peanuts fans everywhere. However, last year Warner Bros. announced that it had obtained the DVD license to the Peanuts specials, and announced ambitious home video plans for the animated specials. So far, Warner has been content to release the same specials Paramount had put out earlier in the decade, but with noticeably fresher transfers and new featurettes. This brings me to this new DVD release of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

The main program, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, is still the same special that gets rerun nearly every October. Linus (You know, the kid with the wild haircut and blanket) believes in the mythical even by holiday standards Great Pumpkin, who every Halloween night rises out of the pumpkin patch and acts like a round orange Santa Claus. Naturally and understandably, all the other kids don't buy into Linus' Great Pumpkin, except for Charlie Brown's sister Sally, and even she is mostly driven by her love of Linus than any real belief in the Great Pumpkin. The end result is that Linus and Sally end up missing trick-or-treating and a Halloween party, while The Great Pumpkin predictably fails to make an appearance in the special. What makes this, and indeed all the other Peanuts specials, work is a certain combination of the bittersweet and the surreal. For an example of the bittersweet, Charlie Brown dons a ghost costume with more holes cut into it than needed and gets nothing but rocks while trick-or-treating, very much in keeping with Charlie Brown's unending string of losses and failures. For some surrealism, Snoopy becomes the World War I Flying Ace and sits on top of his doghouse, "flying" it and "fighting" the Red Baron. This really has nothing to do with anything, but it's sort of funny and random. The ending, with Sally chewing Linus out over the Great Pumpkin's absence, and Lucy retrieving Linus out of the pumpkin patch at four in the morning, is as perfect as Peanuts can get.

Warner is apparently starting to mix up the contents of these DVD's to incorporate some specials that have never been released to DVD before. The bonus special of the original Paramount Great Pumpkin release (1972's You're NOT Elected, Charlie Brown) has been given its own separated DVD release and It's Magic, Charlie Brown, a New-to-DVD 1981 Special, has taken its place. In It's Magic, Snoopy goes to the library at Charlie Brown's insisting and checks out a book on how to perform magic. This leads to Snoopy hosting his own magic show (under the stage named "The Great Houndini." Get it?) featuring some of the most incompetently executed magic tricks ever performed. This culminates in Snoopy performing a disappearing trick with Charlie Brown which actually works all too well. Charlie becomes permanently invisible, no one can see him, and Snoopy's attempts at making him visible again are sadly not much more competent than his magic tricks. But that's okay, because Charlie Brown uses his lack of opacity to exact revenge on Lucy by kicking her football. Snoopy, using alchemy, manages to make Charlie Brown visible again. Its Magic feels sort of juvenile, and fails to reach the heights of Great Pumpkin, but I actually think I enjoyed it more. Snoopy's various terrible magic tricks are funny by any standard, Charlie Brown's revenge is sweet, and the ending with Snoopy leaving Lucy hanging in the air is priceless.

Since I never owned the original Paramount Great Pumpkin release, I can't tell you how much Warner's new release improves upon it in terms of picture quality, but the special does look gorgeous. Colors are vibrant and saturated without looking garish or inauthentic, and details are crisp and sharp. The audio is nothing really to write home about, but its audible, and I guess that's all I can ask for. It's Magic is newer than Great Pumpkin, and looks roughly about the same if not even better, and the audio track is also clear if not especially loud or flashy.

There's only one Bonus Feature on the disc, not including trailers, and yet it's very much substantial. We Need a Blockbuster, Charlie Brown is a new 15-minute documentary discussing the background of its The Great Pumpkin and how the future of the Peanuts Specials depended on its success. Just about every aspect that can be covered about Great Pumpkin is covered here, from the animation itself to the voices to Vince Guaraldi's music. Lee Mendelson, Fred Silverman, Jeannie Schulz, Mark Evanier, and the late Bill Melendez make appearances to talk about Great Pumpkin and give their takes on its successes and importance. In addition, there are trailers for the Thanksgiving and Christmas Peanuts special DVDs, one for a new Wiggles DVD and one more for a new Scooby Doo movie. Overall, if you are a fan of the Peanuts animated canon, I'd recommend this set. However, I think paying 15 to 20 dollars for not even an hour of content is not all that great a deal. I'd instead recommend getting the inevitable and obligatory Christmas/Thanksgiving/Halloween Peanuts DVD 3-pack to get a little more bang for your buck.

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