Average User Rating: 1 Vote(s)
 
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
Average User Rating
There is no coverscan for Snoopy, Come Home!
Video Cover Thumbnail(s)

Distributor CBS/FOX
Catalogue Number 7126-70
Release Series
Release Date 1985
Duration:
Printed Classification
Notes Mono, CLV. Manufactured by Philips DuPont, England
User Reviews:
by Lee James Turnock
One of the first films I ever watched on video, so it'll always have a little nostalgic niche as far as I'm concerned, Snoopy, Come Home! was the second big-screen outing for Charles M.Schulz's Peanuts gang, following on from the success of 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, and quite a few people were surprised when it turned out to be a significant box office failure - in fact, it failed even to recoup its $1 million budget. It's easy to be clever in retrospect, but I can't help thinking that one of the reasons for its failure is the fact that the whole thing is just too downbeat. Melancholia was always a large part of the Peanuts universe, but here it's married to a strangely creepy, botched, cut-adrift tone, as if the makers were trying to make the film all things to all people. Snoopy and Linus indulging in a Laurel and Hardy-style escalating tit-for-tat fight doesn't feel right, and neither does the inclusion of that hoary old cartoon cliche, the chase around a corridor with multiple doors on either side. For much of the film, the characters are either moping, complaining or hurting each other, which doesn't exactly make for fun viewing - though the Monopoly game, the visit to the carnival and some of Snoopy and Woodstock's scenes together are perfect Peanuts moments. The much-admired kiddie jazz of Vince Guaraldi has been replaced by some forgettable Sherman Brothers songs and a brash, peppy Don Ralke score, equal parts MacArthur Park and the Fifth Dimension, and the palette of gaudy primary colours traps the whole thing permanently in the early seventies like a fly in amber. All in all, it's better for older children or adults on a nostalgia trip than something for youngsters, and it remains the weakest of the four Peanuts films - I'd still rather see Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown again.