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42 of 42 found the following review helpful:
 Enjoyable collection of short tales Dec 27, 2009
By Banacek
I ran across this DVD at my local CVS Pharmacy for $13. The Christmas Tales are a selection of short scenes, similar in format to the special "It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown". If you liked that one, then you'll probably like this one as well. I found them both enjoyable. The Christmas Tales were originally released in 2002, but I missed them somehow. I'm glad I found them on this 2009 DVD, released for the 60th anniversary of Peanuts.
The second feature, "Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown?", is a story about Linus and Lucy moving away when their father takes a new job out of town. It's a little melancholy at times, with the Peanuts gang saying goodbye and adjusting the idea of friends moving away, but it's not an emotional roller coaster like the "Snoopy, Come Home" story. Of course, it has the usual satisfying ending when the move turns out to be temporary.
As far as I know, neither of these specials are available on any other current DVDs, so I'm glad that I picked this one up when I found it. If they keep releasing more "collection DVDs" (like the 60's collection and the 70's collection volume 1 that were released in 2009), then I suppose that these specials will eventually appear on an upcoming release. In the meantime, though, this is a good way to get them without duplicating something you already have.
11 of 11 found the following review helpful:
Christmas Tales and New to DVD -- Is This Good-bye, Charlie Brown? Oct 30, 2010
By M. Hill
Christmas Tales is a sweet group of five holiday shorts which in total are a brief eighteen minutes long. Note that these shorts are the same ones included as a bonus on the original version of the -- I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown DVD. They have been removed from the remastered edition of Dog for Christmas, I suppose in preparation for this release.
However, this is the first DVD release for the bonus feature -- Is This Good-Bye, Charlie Brown? -- which originally aired in 1983 and is twenty-eight minutes long. So, if attempting to compile a complete set of Peanuts features, this is an essential addition.
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Good enough collection, but... Feb 01, 2011
By The Phantom
...don't make the same mistake that I did. I bought this collection expecting to get something new, but this is the same show as is included with the release of I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Absolutely love it Dec 19, 2010
By ABC Snoopy
"Adam"
I love Charlie Brown Christmas Tales. I love that they put Lydia in, I love Sally's funny voice, and I love Snoopy. Also the bonus episode Is This Good Bye Charlie Brown is also good too. I got this at CVS and it was worth it. I hope everyone enjoys it. Happy holidays.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Brief but excellent program in "classic" style! Dec 14, 2011
By Andrew Furst
First off, the main feature here (Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales) is only 18 minutes long. But what this lacks in minutes, it makes up in quality, assuming you are a fan of "Peanuts", particularly of the early/mid 1960's. Although this was created in 2002, it's very true to the original Peanuts strips, as well as true to the original "A Charlie Brown Christmas" television special. Other than a brief appearance by "Woodstock", you might think this program was made in the mid 1960's (there's no internet or cell phones, no flat screen tvs, just the same things you'd have seen in the 1960's). Not only is this very true to that Peanuts era, it's very funny, in very much the Charles Schulz style of humor.
The program is presented as 5 separate parts, "Merry Christmas" from the 5 different main characters here: Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, Sally, and Charlie Brown. But the 5 parts also work together as a unified whole. While each "featured" character is a little more prominent in their own segment, nearly all the characters are in each segment. And the 5 "tales" progress through a Christmas season, with ice skating, writing to Santa Claus, trying to obtain a Christmas tree, and finally arriving at Christmas Day in the final segment. So the 5 "tales" could be viewed as a single story.
A great effort apparently went into making this very authentic, very true to the comic strip and the original tv special. The animation is so true to the comic strip, you might believe that Charles Schulz had drawn every panel himself. The humor is very Peanuts/Schulz too - many of the sequences/jokes are directly from the comic strip, and those which are original are completely in the truest style of 1960's era Schulz. The voices of the characters are also remarkably similar to the ones of the original 1965 Christmas special; although obviously they couldn't use the same voice actors that had been used nearly 40 years prior, they did an amazing job of finding new actors which sounded virtually identical to those used in the 1960's. Even the music is very much in the style of the original Charlie Brown Christmas, in fact at times they use some of the same music written by Vince Guaraldi, a new performance but very true to the original. I'll also point out that if you are familiar with the music from the original (1965) Charlie Brown Christmas, you'll find an additional reason to smile during this program.
This program was created in order to be shown after the original "Charlie Brown Christmas", as a one hour (total) segment on television. The original was shown with very brief commercial interruption, making the actual content longer than most "half hour" tv shows. When "A Charlie Brown Christmas" is padded with a normal amount of commercials, it runs to about 33-34 minutes or so. Thus this program was created to fill a 26 or so minute time slot, with commercials. Unfortunately A Charlie Brown Christmas is now being shown without this as the follow up, so if you want to see it (and you should, it's that enjoyable), you'll probably have to see it on DVD.
One more thing - as some here have noted, "Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales" was a bonus feature for the 2004 release of "I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown" (on the ABC Studios label). However, the 2009 re-release of "I Want a Dog For Christmas" (on the Warner label) does not include "Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales", which is the reason for this as a separate release. Also note that the bonus feature included here (about Linus and Lucy moving away) is quite good. Finally, I'll note that if you like the authentic 1950's/1960's feel of "Christmas Tales", you might also want to see "Happiness is a Warm Blanket" which is likewise very true to the original comic strip and original Peanuts animations (despite being made very recently).
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