Original Christmas Classics

The Original Christmas Classics on DVD brings back childhood memories. The DVD includes seven of my favorite animated Christmas cartoons. It also includes a terrific CD to listen to while you're decorating, driving around looking at lights or sipping eggnog with your honey. The Original Christmas Classics on DVD is a set you'll pull from the shelf every year.

The Original Christmas Classics DVD will take a generation or two back to childhood, when these holiday cartoons only came once a year and you had to position the antenna just so to watch them on only three networks. This DVD set includes several beloved Christmas cartoons to watch whenever you want.

First is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a stop-motion animated special. The mod design, varied voices and touching way the story is told makes this one of my favorite Christmas TV shows of all time. I still love listening to Burl Ives sing "Silver and Gold," and I still get scared of the Abominable Snowman.

The next cartoon is Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. This, too, is animated using stop-motion. The special tells how Christmas traditions came to be. This classic show includes classic actors, with Fred Astaire as the storytelling postman and Mickey Rooney as Kris Kringle.

Frosty the Snowman is a cartoon featuring characters with extraordinarily large teeth. Dental details aside, the TV show is based on the popular Christmas song and plays out pretty much how you think it would. Jimmy Durante's gruff voice somehow has the right warmth to narrate this tale. Frosty isn't as beloved to me as the first two I mentioned, but it's still a must-see during the holidays.

Other Christmas TV specials included on the DVD are Frosty Returns, The Little Drummer Boy, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol and Charles Dickens' Cricket on the Hearth, starring Roddy MacDowall and Marlo Thomas.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.