Good Grief, It's Warner Home Video

This isn’t exactly new “news,” but it’s fairly close. A few weeks ago it was announced that Warner Home Video is now the official distributor of the Peanuts specials on home video. I am not a lawyer, or a corporation, or a fortune teller, but I feel good about this decision. The DVD releases so far have been nice, however they have released only the holiday specials, in addition to the usual one or two “extra” programs that are on most of the DVDs. (See previous post).

Okay, so I said I thought the change of hands was good, and I do. But, (and “that’s an awfully big but” as Pee-Wee Herman might put it), I am a little perplexed by the first scheduled releases under the new distributor. Coming in the winter of 2008- “Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown” and “It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown” are finally coming to DVD. Oh, wait. I mean finally coming to DVD again. You see I actually already have both of these at home. On DVD. I feel as though I need to call the people who decided to generously grace the world with these new versions. I would paraphrase a favorite exchange from “The Great Pumpkin.”

“There were two lists, Warner Executive. One list to release on DVD, and one list not to release on DVD. These shows were on the wrong list.”

Now, I will re-buy them if they have other specials as “bonuses.” Specials not already on DVD. As much as I love anything Peanuts , I doubt I will get them otherwise. The press release proclaims the shows will be “completely remastered, in all-new deluxe editions, with newly created bonus features.” That’s nice, but I don’t recall there being huge problems with the way they looked on the first issue. I just hope that these DVDs will not under-sell and cause Warner to lose interest in releasing more titles. That’s happened with other properties (don’t get me started on Twentieth Century Fox and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”).

But regardless, since no one asked for them, here are my ideas:

A) I would love to see the specials released all together in one or two volumes. Call it “The Peanuts Gold Collection” or “Peanuts Compendium” and just get them all out there. These could be marketed in the same manner as those Disney vault releases, or the way they are doing the Looney Tunes cartoons. These would be marketed more towards adults, and I’m sure would be bought by the mature fan looking for a dose of nostalgia.

B) You could also go another route: back in those wild carefree days of VHS releases my Mom used to buy every video of “The Andy Griffith Show” she could find. Most of these videos just took a handful of episodes that featured a particular character and went under titles like “The Best of Aunt Bee, Volume 4” or “The Best of Barney and Thelma Lou.” You could obviously have a Holiday collection (much like the one that exists now featuring the fall/winter holidays) but it could be complete with Easter, Valentines, New Year’s, and the little seen “It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown!” “The Best of Lucy,” “Best of Peppermint Patty,” aren’t hard to imagine either.

What I would not do, is try very hard to market these towards kids. It’s not that kids hate Peanuts. They don’t, on the whole, but in the same way I doubt there are hundreds of angry four year olds screaming to have the new “Complete Popeye” collection, there would be similarly few lining up for “Schroeder’s Greatest Hits.” These shows have a fan base and I would play to them. I imagine it’s the same group of people buying the continually released books that will eventually print the entire run of daily comic strips.

I also hope to one day see DVDs of the other two Peanuts feature films not currently available: “Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown” and “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (And Don’t Come Back),” but these were not mentioned in the press release. Come on, who doesn’t feel the need to see Charlie Brown try to get out the door with a four foot long baguette? And then feed it to the car? I want to stay at the Chateau of the Bad Neighbor again.