A new "Peanuts" special focusing on the comic strip’s first Black character, Franklin Armstrong, addresses a controversial scene from the 1973 special "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving."
The new special, titled "Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin," was just dropped on Apple TV+ over the weekend, addressing the controversial scene where Franklin is shown sitting on one side of the dinner table while the rest of the guests sit on the opposite side. In the new special, all the Peanuts characters are shown rallying around Franklin at the same dinner table.
"Hey Franklin, we saved you a seat over here!" Charlie Brown says in the clip, as Franklin walks around the table.
"You know you've found your home when you're surrounded by good friends," Charlie later says.
"To make it have the most impact, [I suggested that we] match the shot exactly to what it was in the Thanksgiving special," Director Raymond S. Persi explained in an interview with The Daily Beast how they recreated the scene. "So, we looked at the original frame. You’ll see [in the special] it’s even that same weird, wonky perspective of the table. We put it in there just so that it would immediately get people to connect to that moment."
Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, creator of the "Peanuts" comic strip, draws in his studio near a stuffed Snoopy toy. (Getty Images)
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Craig Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and executive producer of the special, explained it was his son Bryan that told him about the issue with the scene, he told the Daily Beast.
"It was very important to my son Bryan," Schulz said. "He said, ‘This is our chance to kind of rectify the whole thing.’"
Franklin's character was first introduced in 1968 and some newspapers at the time "refused to run those comics with Franklin in them," Schulz said.
Charles M. Schulz. (CBS via Getty Images)
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"Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated," Schulz said. "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."
"The time in 1968 is similar to the time we have right now," as "there’s a lot of divisiveness and a lot of anger in the world," Schulz added. But, he said he hopes the special shows how "two people can come together if you just take it down to a basic level."
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