Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Good Grief—Boo!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 22, 2017

In a review several months ago, I questioned Warner Brothers' 4K strategy, particularly its decision to release animation UHDs where the source material didn't appear to allow for any meaningful upgrade. Having now viewed the three Peanuts specials that are being released both in single editions and collectively as the Peanuts: Holiday Collection (in fact, it's really nine specials, but we'll get to that in a moment), I can't say that my doubts have been assuaged. It's apparent, however, that Peanuts Worldwide LLC, which owns these independently produced TV presentations, has made a serious attempt to supply 4K fans with something not only improved but also new. Each of the three Holiday Collection UHDs contains content not found on the previous Blu-ray editions and, except in the case of A Charlie Brown Christmas, not available on Blu-ray. Whether that content is enough to spur fence-sitters to jump on the 4K bandwagon is a separate question. As for the quality of the 4K presentations, please read on.

Kenneth Brown's lively discussion of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown can be found in his review of the 2010 Blu-ray release, a copy of which is included with the 4K disc. Ken's review also covers an additional full-length TV special, It's Magic, Charlie Brown, first broadcast in 1981, which was included on the 2010 disc and has also received a 4K upgrade. The Peanuts producers have added something new for this UHD release: a special entitled Charlie Brown's All-Stars, which aired on CBS in 1966, the same year as the Great Pumpkin. As far as I have been able to determine, this is the first time that All-Stars has been released in high-definition on physical media.

All-Stars is a lesser entry in the canon of Peanuts specials, but it's filled with amusing moments, nearly all of them at the expense of hapless Charlie Brown, who repeatedly finds himself in his customary position of being "the goat" instead of the hero. With the arrival of summer, Charlie finds himself struggling to maintain team spirit as the manager of a baseball squad that has lost every game to date (and lost badly, as Linus confirms in tallying up the grim statistics). Threatened with a walkout, Charlie achieves a temporary truce with the promise of new uniforms supplied by a local store owner—but what he doesn't mention is that the team's new benefactor will insist on adherence to league rules, which means no girls and no frisky beagle playing the outfield and craftily stealing bases. Dangling this incentive works well enough to keep the team together for one game, and miraculously the gang appears to have a chance of winning. Charlie gets so confident that he even attempts to bring in the tying run by stealing home. Is there any doubt about whether he fails?

All three specials are offered in a choice of two formats: "widescreen"(at 1.78:1) or "classic", which reproduces the original broadcast format for the 1.33:1 TV screens of NTSC.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

(Note: Screenshots accompanying this review have been captured from the standard Blu-ray.)

All three of the Peanuts specials on the UHD of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are based on new 4K scans of the hand-drawn animation's original camera negative. The work was performed under the auspices of Peanuts Worldwide LLC, which controls all of the Peanuts animated properties and was the motivating force behind this release, with Warner serving as distributor. Evaluating the 2160p, HEVC/H.265-encoded UHD in this package presents a familiar challenge when the only source for comparison is a dated Blu-ray. Great Pumpkin's Blu-ray version is an older, inferior master encoded with VC-1; a newly remastered Blu-ray derived from the 4K scan would provide a better basis for comparing and contrasting. That being said, there's no question that the UHD offers superior clarity over the earlier Blu-ray. Lines are cleaner, densities are improved, and the film's grain pattern is more finely resolved. The colors aren't necessarily brighter or more intense, but they're more refined, and the improvements in black levels and highlights give the UHD a vibrancy that the Blu-ray lacks. Advances in cleanup software appear to have removed a thin layer of grime that was evident on the Blu-ray, but without compromising image detail, thus allowing the virtues of HDR to shine through. (The effect is more noticeable on the two specials from 1966 than on It's Magic, Charlie Brown.) Again, I can't be certain that a Blu-ray remastered from the same new scan wouldn't display some, or even all, of these same virtues.

The decision to offer widescreen versions of all three specials will no doubt alarm some fans, because it exemplifies an unfortunate trend in the creation of HD presentations of material originally framed for 1.33:1 broadcast. (See, e.g., HBO's reformatting of The Wire.) Although I haven't tried to compare every scene, the 1.78:1 presentation of Peanuts appears to be a simple matter of matting the 1.33:1 image at top and bottom, cutting off slightly more above than below. In some scenes (but not consistently), a sliver of additional picture information is visible at the left and right. While it's surprising how effectively these programs translate to widescreen, an occasional shot is obviously too tight, and some scenes lose entire elements from the composition. Regardless of one's attitude toward "modernizing" aspect ratios of television programs (or any other material), the producers of these discs should be commended for including the "classic" versions, which have obviously been prepared with equal care and attention. Traditionalists are free to ignore the widescreen option in favor of the "classic" versions. If you're going to translate NTSC TV into widescreen for home media, this is how it should be done.

(For comparative examples of the Peanuts specials' widescreen reformatting, please see A Charlie Brown Christmas 4K, which is the sole release in the 4K Peanuts: Holiday Collection to receive a Blu-ray remaster.)

[System calibrated using a Klein K10-A Colorimeter with a custom profile created with a Colorimetry Research CR250 Spectraradiometer, powered by SpectraCal CalMAN 2016 5.7, using the Samsung Reference 2016 UHD HDR Blu-ray test disc authored by Florian Friedrich from AV Top in Munich, Germany. Calibration performed by Kevin Miller of ISFTV.]

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Great Pumpkin and It's Magic arrive on UHD with the same lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 track previously reviewed. All- Stars has also received a lossless 5.1 upgrade, and its sonic character and quality are much the same as Great Pumpkin, which was released in the same year.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The UHD disc has no extras. The included Blu-ray contains the same 2008 retrospective featurette about Great Pumpkin previously reviewed here.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not sure who the audience will be for these 4K Peanuts releases. Early adopters of UHD generally look for discs with a sufficient "wow!" factor to showcase the format to best advantage, and while these discs are certainly well-made, I doubt anyone will be wowed by the image. Devoted Peanuts fans may be tempted by the dual aspect ratios and the availability of yet another special (All-Stars) in a new and improved version, but I doubt those elements alone will be the tipping point at which they are persuaded to upgrade their systems. (The temptation might be greater if the standard Blu-ray had been remastered, offering many of the UHD disc's advantages to those who haven't taken the 4K plunge.) At the moment, these discs strike me as little more than a novelty item. Perhaps their time lies in some future era in which the UHD format has been widely adopted. Until then, buyer's choice.