Charles Schulz’s landmark comic strip Peanuts has occupied a unique niche in American pop culture. It’s part of a medium often aimed at children, and its cast is a group of kids under the age of 10, doing normal child-like activities like playing baseball, going to school, and ice skating. But these kids also talk about Beethoven, theology, and The Brothers Karamazov . They throw around words like “depressed” and “neurotic,” and one of them puts up a “Psychiatric Help” stand instead of selling lemonade. The strip balances hilarity with the fragility of life and the pain of existence, and that balance surfaces in Peanuts’ first two big-screen adventures, A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home (both available this week as a two-disc DVD from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment).
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DVD: The Humor (and Angst) of Peanuts Lives On in Its First Two Films