Latest Purchases #68

Apologies for the horrible picture quality this time.

As you can see, I'm on a major Peanuts kick. Peanuts was a huge part of my life growing up, in particular, the TV Specials. A lot of the TV Specials I hadn't seen in years, save for the usual ones shown around the holidays like A Charlie Brown Christmas, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and A Charlie Brown Thanks Giving. Now I can pull out these DVD sets and watch the aforementioned Specials along with Charlie Brown's All-Stars, You're in Love, Charlie Brown, He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown, and It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown. There were only six TV Specials for the 1960s, so there's only one DVD set for that collection. There's a Vol. 2 for the 1970s collection, which I'll need to pick up to complete that set. Since there have been a copious amount of Peanuts TV Specials and Warner Video hasn't released any sets for the 1980s or 1990s, who knows when or if I'll be able to have a whole set. But since Tails Spin has the honor of being the first Disney Afternoon cartoon to be completed on DVD after years of Disney dragging their feet on that, I wanna remain hopeful.

Everyone and their mother remembers the theme Linus and Lucy. Watching the TV Specials now that I'm older, I've come to appreciate the jazz music that plays in the background so much more. I knew I had to own some of the music so I hoped on Amazon. Sure enough, they had a nice selection of Vince Guraldi and the Vince Guraldi Trio CDs at reasonable prices. Oh, Good Grief!, in addition to having Snoopy dressed like Vince on the CD cover has my favorite rendition of Linus and Lucy. It's played by a synthesizer and not a piano, like the original, but I love the additions made to this version. The nice thing about getting these CDs off Amazon is that I could get free MP3 versions of these albums. All except A Boy Named Charlie Brown. For some reason, I didn't get any MP3s with that one after my purchase, despite being told that I would. I've heard some people complaining about the remastering done on the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. I'm not an audio whore so I couldn't tell you the differences between this and a version that was released back in the late 1980s that is probably much harder to track down. Besides, for $7, why would I complain?

I didn't stop with just music and TV Specials. I grabbed some of the original Peanuts source material. The books are the first in a long line of Peanuts comic strips, The Complete Peanuts. This two book set collects the years 1950-9054. These books are a real eye opener. Not only is the art style different from what the Peanuts crew looks like today, but Linus, Lucy and Schroeder were even babies during the early years. You can buy these books individually or together, but they actually cost less when you buy them in sets. This first set only cost me less than $35 after shipping.