DVD Peanuts Holiday Collection (It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown / A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving / A Charlie Brown Christmas)

This wonderful half hour show, originally shown on CBS in 1966, is the pinnacle of Peanuts specials, an exercise in gentle humor and subtle satire depicting one boy's quixotic crusade and a dizzying trek across no-man's land by a beagle. It's Halloween, and everyone dresses up in costumes to go trick-or-treating. Charlie Brown, in a sheet with holes cut for his eyes, declares himself a ghost, but looks more like a potato and winds up collecting a bag full of rocks. The only person who doesn't go trick-or-treating is Linus, who, hoping to prove that the Great Pumpkin really does exist, sits alone in a pumpkin patch all night awaiting the mythical mega-gourd's arrival. Snoopy, meanwhile, boards his trademark Sopwith Camel to fight the nefarious Red Baron, only to be shot down. Lost in an imaginary war-strewn countryside, the intrepid dog must wander his way back home. (Snoopy's odyssey seems so monumental that it wouldn't be surprising if one of its effects on impressionable young viewers is sowing seeds of later wanderlust.) For the first time, Charlie Brown isn't the focus of the special, although his trick-or-treating failure provides some memorable laughs.