<
https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/welcome-home-franklin-special-fixes-50-years-of-peanuts-controversy>
"Everybody’s favorite
Peanuts are back! The latest
Snoopy Presents special
on Apple TV+, premiered over the weekend. The focus of the special has garnered
a lot of excitement: After being introduced in the late 1960s, Franklin,
Peanuts’ first Black character, is finally getting the spotlight in
Welcome
Home, Franklin.
The
Daily Beast’s
Obsessed spoke to Craig Schulz, executive producer of
Welcome Home, Franklin and overseer of all
Peanuts media, and director
Raymond S. Persi over Zoom, about Franklin’s introduction and initial backlash,
following the legacy of
Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz (who is Craig’s
father), and seizing the opportunity to respond to a controversial shot from
the 1973 Thanksgiving special.
The creation of Franklin has a remarkable origin. “The year was 1968,” Schulz
says. “Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. A young school teacher
named Harriet Glickman had seen this, and it profoundly affected her. She
thought that one way to get a better message out to the community was to reach
out to some cartoonists and see if we could get a Black character in the
cartoon world—which there hadn’t been up until then.”
One of the cartoonists Glickman reached out to was Charles Schulz, the creator
of the
Peanuts universe. That same year, on July 31, Franklin joined the
Peanuts, first introduced in a comic strip meeting Charlie Brown on the
beach. That very sequence was recreated in
Welcome Home, Franklin to honor
the character’s legacy."
Via Frederick Wilson II.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
