THE PLOT THUS FAR
The Peanuts gang goes to summer camp, and they participate in a river-raft race against some cheating bullies.
WHAT WE THOUGHT
“Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown” might be the first outlet where Charlie Brown takes charge from the start. The gang gets split into rafting teams to compete at Summer Camp. Unfortunately, a gang of bullies and their primitive communication cat is there to ruin everything. The kids don’t take the time to note how similar their scenarios are, but they decide to fight it out on the white water rapids. For a film that’s not quite 80 minutes long, that’s a lot of high stakes packed into one adventure.
I grew up watching the Peanuts feature films and it always blew me away that the later releases never got a proper DVD or Blu-Ray release. Hopefully, this means that “Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown” will be coming soon. That one is my personal favorite, as I felt it had a much better developed story than this film. That’s not to say that “Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown” is bad, but it’s 30 minutes of material padded out to barely feature length. I guess people would demand anything to ship their kids to watch during the year. For those readers that remember way back when, did this film lose any audience to “Star Wars”? I’m showing that the movie was a late August 1977 release, so I’m not sure if “Star Wars” was wide enough back then to poach potential viewers.
The DVD comes with no special features. The A/V Quality is on par for an animated feature from the 1970s that is making its DVD debut. The transfer is strong, but it spots the usual digital sour patches that comes with standard definition. The same goes for the mono audio track. In the end, I’d recommend a purchase to fans.
RELEASE DATE: 02/10/2015
