The executive producer of Welcome Home, Franklin, and overseer of all Peanuts media, Craig Schultz, was interviewed by Daily Beast’s Obsessed over Zoom alongside director Raymond S. Persi in regards to Franklin’s introduction and initial backlash, following the legacy of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, and seizing the opportunity to respond to a controversial shot from the 1973 Thanksgiving special.
According to the Daily Beast, 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.
It is worth mentioning that the decision to incorporate Franklin into the comic strip came with an alarming, albeit unsurprising, amount of controversy. His father took him to his bedroom and showed him
“this letter that’s two pages long of this rant of somebody who just blasted him for putting a Black character in the comic strip,”
Schulz recalled. It was a shocking moment for the young Schulz, who explained that anonymous civilians weren’t the only people upset with Franklin’s introduction.
“Newspapers refused to run those comics with Franklin in them in those days. And my dad said, ‘If you’re not going to run it, that’s fine with me. I’m just not going to write it,’”
said Schulz.
By smartly wielding his power and the popularity of the comics, Franklin remained a key part of the Peanuts crew. Nonetheless, it was an eye-opening moment for the cartoonist:
“I think the whole thing enlightened him on the anger that was in the world,”
Schulz says.
Schulz says, adding,
“We use the comic strip as our Bible and we build upon that. This story was one that we all wanted to tell. Everybody loves Franklin. We just felt he deserved a lot of respect.”
#Clique, what are your thoughts on this Interaction?
