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I grew up on the Peanuts creations of Charles M. Schulz. Most of us have, in some way or another. His newspaper comic strip is one of the longest running and most successful strips of all time. The work has been translated into every language currently spoken on the planet. The images of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have appeared on just about any kind of product imaginable. Our pop culture contains too many references to the strip to mention briefly. For me, it was the television specials starting in the mid 1960’s that brought the gang into my life. The classics are running annually, still after nearly 50 years. A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are the most mentioned and certainly beloved by generations of children and adults. I thought I never missed an airing.

Now Paramount has provided a 4-film collection that takes us back to those early films that were made at around the time the holiday specials were being enjoyed around the world. Two of the films have never been on Blu-ray before, and while there are no real extras they made the smart move of providing each film on its own disc so that the films have bandwidth in which to breathe. These are old films with plenty of flaws, but at least here we're given a real chance to get the best versions that are possible to get today. Here are the films you get:

"Space... the funniest frontier?"

Star Trek: The Animated Series first aired in September of 1973, four years after the three seasons of what is now referred to Star Trek: The Original Series. It was a straight sequel that continued the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise. All of the original cast lent their voices to the characters they played in the live-action series with the notable exception of Walter Koenig. Chekov was replaced with an alien that had three arms and legs named Arex, who was voiced by James Doohan, as were many of the other guest characters throughout the two years the series ran. There were episodes that served as direct sequels, and so we were treated to the likes of Harry Mudd, tribbles, and the Guardian of Forever once again.  Now Paramount and CBS have brought us a second animated series, and the first season of 10 episodes arrives on DVD straight from its running on the network's streaming service.

It's been a while since a CSI episode has crossed our paths. For nearly 20 years the franchise would be one of the top-rated dramas on television. It all started with the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. This Las Vegas show became an instant hit, and three years later we found ourselves in Miami for a spin-off. Two years after basking in the Florida sunshine, Jerry Bruckheimer caught lightning a third time; this time out New York would serve as the setting. While there are ties that bind the three shows to the CSI franchise, each show has a unique style. The cases also serve to distinguish the shows from one another. The leads for the three shows likely give the most character to the series. Gary Sinise as Detective Mac Taylor brings a strength that establishes this show’s credibility from episode one. Taylor is ex-military who lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks. He’s incredibly driven and passionate about bringing down the bad guys, but won’t allow his integrity or that of his lab to be compromised. Also the New York show differs from the original in that the CSI personnel are full-fledged cops and not just lab rats working for them. I find I like this version far better than the Miami setting, even though I can relate more to the Florida locations essentially in my own back yard.

The show does share some of the qualities that have become traditional essentials for the CSI franchise. Each opens with a song from The Who. I was bummed to hear that the original selection for New York was Behind Blue Eyes, one of my favorite Townsend compositions. It would have been a far better selection. New York has the same narrative style, which usually allows for an “A” crime and a “B” crime. The mandatory lab montages are intact, as are the CGI recreations of some of the internal body demonstrations. The show, like the others, focuses on the CSI team. Beyond Mac Taylor, the team includes Detective Stella Bonasara (Kanakaredes), who has a dynamic symbiotic relationship with Taylor. They are usually teamed together, and there is great chemistry there without it needing to involve romantic attraction. Detective Danny Messer (Giovinazzo) is all New York from the accent to his habits. He’s the kind of tough, no-nonsense New Yorker from an ethnic Italian hood who, you get a sense, could have just as easily gone the other way in the world of real-life cops and robbers. Dr. Hawkes (Harper) started the series as the medical examiner but now works as a CSI detective. Detective Monroe (Belknap), often called Montana, is a country girl adjusting to the big city. Messer often looks after her like a sister, and these two have developed another of the show’s good character chemistries together.

Ah, good old 1990's, such important years in our history. The Soviet Union was in a state of social and political upheaval, David Robinson had just taken the professional basketball world by storm, and I was hatching plans for my first double-digits birthday. Oh yeah, and Beverly Hills, 90210 hit the airwaves for its inaugural season. Obviously, at the time I was a bit young to have been interested in this teen soap opera, so watching the DVD set has not be full of reminiscence for me. Instead, it's been like discovering for the first time what 1990 could have been like, had I been a beautiful, spoiled-rich teen living in Beverly Hills. My three biggest regrets about missing out on 90210? I could have looked back now and laughed about the bad hair, bad clothes and bad music that I thought were so cool back in the day. Actually, I did laugh at that stuff, but surely not as heartily as I would have, had I been an old-school 90210 fan.

If I was old-school, I would know the story by heart. It's about a bunch of abnormally attractive teens living the high life in Beverly Hills, while dealing with the universal issues of high school existence. Fraternal twins Brandon (Jason Priestly) and Brenda (Shannon Doherty) are the central characters in this first season, supported by spoiled Kelly (Jennie Garth), macho Steve (Ian Ziering), brainy Andrea (Gabrielle Carteris), bad-boy Dylan (Luke Perry) and David (Brian Austin Green), the cheeky freshman. Also, the twins' parents (Carol Potter and James Eckhouse) play somewhat significant roles here, though as the show evolved, the parents were less and less involved.

"Well, you think about it, Ethan, it was inevitable. No more cold war. No more secrets you keep from yourself. Answer to no one but yourself. Then, you wake up one morning and find out the President is running the country without your permission. The son of a bitch, how dare he. Then you realize, it's over. You are an obsolete piece of hardware, not worth upgrading, you got a lousy marriage, and 62 grand a year."

The more things change, the more they tend to remain the same. In 1996 Paramount was nearing the end of a run of feature films that started with a 1960's Desilu Studios television series called Star Trek. That same year the studio was beginning a run of feature films based on a 1960's Desilu Studios television series that at one time shared an actor with Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy. That series was Mission Impossible. The show starred Peter Graves as the leader of a cold war covert government group called the IMF or Impossible Mission Force. Each week he would select from a group of series regulars after getting his mission, should he decide to accept it, from a tape recorder that always self-destructed in five seconds. The tape's dissolving vapor would lead to the fuse being lit that started the opening credits and an iconic theme written by Lalo Schifin. It ran for seven seasons between 1966 and 1973. The series returned for a short while as another television series in the 1980's before it vanished into post-cold-war oblivion, until Paramount and Tom Cruise decided to join forces and create a new film franchise that has lasted over 20 years and is about to release its 7th big-budget film.

"In the 19th century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be alienated from their own true natures. Experts who studied them were therefore known as alienists."

The Alienist was drama airing on TNT for two seasons and is the latest in the recent trend of period-piece dramas to populate the television series market. Like many of these kinds of shows, The Alienist relies as much on atmosphere as it does on the actual story being told. The series is intended to attack the senses and obviously elicit some kind of a reaction. Filmed in Budapest, the show takes us back to New York City in the 1890's and truly builds a rather deep and dark environment that you will likely remember far longer than any other element of the show. The series also utilizes a tremendous amount of computer-generated images for set extensions and sometimes complete environments. It's an ambitious undertaking and might well have been the crowning achievement of the series.