Do you love the late Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts?
Do you also have a hankering for American history, or the desire to
teach your kids about the full breadth of the same? Then the two-disc This is America, Charlie Brown
is for you — a robust and entertaining filing from the
spoonful-of-sugar-to-make-the-medicine-go-down line of reasoning that
plays equally well to kids and nostalgic young adults entering
first-time parent terrain.

Elementary instruction through colorful animation is nothing new, but the whole Peanuts
gang pops up here as guides through various important events in the
history of our country. Consisting of eight 24-minute episodes, This is America, Charlie Brown
looks all the way back to the Mayflower voyage and the birth of the
constitution, but also hearteningly enters more generalized territory
in offering forth a lively look back at American music throughout the
years. From composers John Philip Sousa and Stephen Foster to the rise
of ragtime and jazz, and the inimitable explosion of blues, a wide
variety of musical genres are touched upon, and it’s nice to see Pig
Pen rock out on bass guitar.

The groundwork of America’s industrial explosion is laid in “The
Building of the Transcontinental Railroad,” while “The Smithsonian and
the Presidency” finds Charlie Brown and company visiting the titular
Washington D.C. museum and learning about Abraham Lincoln and Theodore
and Franklin Roosevelt, taking make-believe journeys that whisk them
back to crucial events from the various eras under discussion. Among
the other episodes are one examining outer space and the NASA Space
Station, as well as the launch of the Wright brothers’ first primitive
airplane in 1903 in Kitty Hawk, N.C. Probably best, though, is “The
Great Inventors,” which results when Sally gives a school report (a
frequently used leaping-off point for the series) that touches upon
Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. It’s great for
kids to learn, in such a short, compacted sitting, about a wide-ranging
buffet of information that practically affects their everyday lives.

A cardboard slipcase stores the two slimline snapcases that house This is America, Charlie Brown’s
two discs. Each episode is presented in 1.33:1 full screen with a Dolby
digital English stereo track. While no supplemental extras grace the
release, in a weird way I was almost appreciative of that, as part of
the appeal of the Peanuts has, to me, always seemed to lie in
its comparative restraint — the fact that there wasn’t an all-out
commercial blitz attached to the series, even as those little Snoopy dolls and
lunchboxes became ubiquitous in bedrooms and classrooms across the country. B (Show) C+ (Disc)