Availability: Widely available online and off
Average Price: $14.95-20
Product Link: It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown
Rating:

When I saw this on a list of upcoming releases I nearly jumped for joy. My 14 month old son is obsessed with the television (unfortunately) and we let him watch it in moderation, mostly when I get to sleep late and his daddy needs something to help keep him from destroying the apartment. It is increasingly difficult to find cartoons that are actually appropriate for viewing by children, particularly younger children. Charlie Brown offers just that sort of wonderful simplicity of story and illustration. And yet holds its own for the parents on a different plane.

CONTENT

This DVD contains the title story, “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown”. It also contains another animated Peanuts classic “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown”, and an all new featurette documentary called “In Full Bloom: Peanuts at Easter”.

In “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown“, the Peanuts gang each go about celebrating Easter in their own unique way. Peppermint Patty focuses on making Easter Eggs, Lucy dyes eggs and hides them with grand plans on finding them all on Easter, since she hid them in the first place and will know just where they are, and Sally is looking for the perfect Easter shoes. The story gets more than a little disjointed at times with strange sequences involving Snoopy, one of which is more than a bit psychadelic… But the story is held together with the repeated insistence of Linus telling his friends that the “Easter Beagle” will save the day. And each time his efforts are received with groans and reminders of the “The Great Pumpkin” which never panned out.

The funniest part of “Easter Beagle” is where Peppermint Patty is trying to teach Marcie how to make Easter eggs, and suffers one setback after another as Marcie fries the eggs, puts them in the waffle maker, toaster, oven, and finally makes egg soup. After each failure Linus is there to tell them not to fear, “The Easter Beagle will bring the eggs”.

In the end, the Easter beagle does bring the eggs… Just with a surprising twist.

In “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown” Sally gaffs by guessing that Arbor day is the day when ships come sailing into the ‘arbor, to which everyone laughs their heads off. This funny mistake earns Sally the project of writing a report on Arbor Day. The gang learns about Arbor day through Sally’s newfound enthusiasm and teams together on a project to plant trees and other plants. There’s just one problem, they decide that all of this should be done on Charlie Brown’s baseball field. Charlie Brown is kept clueless through Lucy’s insistence despite repeated attempts  by Linus to tell him what is going on. Game-day comes and Charlie Brown is shocked by what has been done to his field but has to play anyway or risk humiliation in front of Peppermint Patty. The amusing twist is that the odd baseball field has his team almost winning when it starts to rain and the game is called. Poor Charlie Brown never can win. Throughout, Snoopy does un-doglike things such as reading obedience training books in the library (and getting kicked out for laughing), and goes to bat for Charlie Brown’s team only to be foiled by a creeping vine that’s out to get him. Snoopy always has an odd role to play!

The extra “In Full Bloom: Peanuts at Easter” includes interviews with Charles “Sparky” Schulz’ widow and son, his animated specials producer and a variety of contemporary strip authors whom he influenced. In addition to the expected accolades, the piece touched on how “Sparky” was himself a religious man having read the Bible through at least three times in his life and ran Bible reading classes. It highlights how much of the Peanuts comics touched on religious subjects, theological, and moral topics. And while many readers would interpret certain meanings to his strips, Charles Schultz stood firm that he was not preaching, only doing a comic strip.

LANGUAGES

Those who speak other languages (and thus may not be reading this) will be pleased to know that the whole disc from features to featurette are fully subtitled in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai and that alternate language tracks are available for Spanish and Portuguese. It’s nice to see that Warner Brothers is starting to ensure that the whole disc is subtitled (with one notable exception) and not just the feature presentations.

This DVD has decided to use “English for the hearing impaired” subtitles rather than closed captioning. I prefer this option as it’s more widely supported in DVD playing software on computers, and you don’t have to worry about whether your TV has a closed caption decoder, or how to set it up. “It’s the Easter Beagle” and “It’s Arbor Day” provide English subtitles for the Deaf. Unfortunately the documentary featurette is not subtitled in English. I wish that WB would take the time to subtitle the extra features for the hard of hearing as well, seeing as 10% of adults and 8% of children have a hearing loss.

I can’t really complain too much since it seems to be standard industry practice to leave off the subtitles/captions for extra features, and I only mention it because the extra featurette has subtitles  for every other language included on the disc and only English for the hearing impaired has been left off.

NAVIGATION

Unlike some DVDs available today, “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown” does not make you sit through a half hour of trailers just to get to the menu system. It opens up right to the menu and you can start watching right away with a simple tap of the “play” button, or you can use the menus to make more detailed selections and set up language preferences.

The menu system has three main items: Features, Special Features, and Languages- each of which have their own set of selections to make. It’s very well organized. The menus are all well done and easy to navigate. WB hasn’t made it difficult to tell which option is selected- just look for the egg icon and you’ll immediately know which option is highlighted. The menu system isn’t anything flashy, there are no animations just cartoons of the Peanuts characters. No complaints here. It’s easy to use and gets the job done.

ENTERTAINMENT/EDUCATIONAL VALUE

What can you say, it’s Peanuts! There is nothing else quite like it. Its dry, often sardonic, wit and outlook to life work on one level for the kiddies, and another level for the adults. Not many shows that can pull that off.

Despite Charles Schultz’ claim to just be a cartoonist without a particular message, it is hard to deny that Peanuts has taught more morality to more generations than most other works, great or small. It also offered something that many do not, an opportunity to think, ponder and expand on ideas presented. In our book that is great educational value.

PACKAGING

This DVD is packaged in a standard black DVD case with a fully illustrated wrap. Great for ease of storage. It also has a colorful embossed cardboard over-wrap which shows the same artwork and information and just makes it appealing on the shelf. You’ll probably want to lose it once you have it home and in your DVD storage tower.

BOTTOM LINE

The main feature “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown” is a charming addition to the Peanuts line but is by no means the best introduction to the series. I’d recommend picking up the Christmas and Halloween episodes first to get your kids up and running with Peanuts so that they can enjoy this episode more fully. “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown”, on the other hand, is one of the most wonderful Peanuts episodes that I have seen. I can’t figure out why I never saw it when I was growing up, but I was thrilled to discover that I hadn’t seen all that there is to Peanuts and I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the new material.