Product: A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)
Rating: 4.0
Improved picture & packaging - What about the sound?
A lifelong fan of this Christmas special, I give the content 5 stars, as usual. And this new issue is a delight to own. The package is gorgeous with its sparkly sleeve. The remastered picture is cleaner than the previous issue on DVD. The sound, however, has some trouble. For one, the synch is noticeably off. Watching, I thought something wasn't quite right. It wasn't until Schroeder and Lucy's Jingle Bells scene that I was sure there was a problem. I even dug up my old VHS copy to verify. When an annoyed Schroeder plays the toy-piano version of Jingle Bells, the old copies have a perfectly synched presentation, with each movement of his hand resulting in one note, dead on. The new version's synch is off to an alarming and annoying degree. Also, I was more impressed with the audio quality on the VHS copy. In short, the best part of this new issue is the packaging. If you want one copy for watching, go with the older issue. If you are a collector, get this one for the package and keep the older version for viewing.