Apple TV+ dropped a new Peanuts special titled Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin, focusing on the comic strip’s first Black character, Franklin Armstrong.
When the trailer was unveiled, one moment got social media buzzing as it referenced the 1973 special A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The controversial scene is where Franklin is seen sitting on one side of the dinner table while the rest sit on the opposite side.
The new special, which is already streaming on Apple TV+, fixes that scene showing all the Peanuts characters rallying around Franklin.
Craig Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, recently addressed the controversy in an interview, revealing that his son Bryan told him about the issue with the scene.
“It was very important to my son Bryan,” Schulz told The Daily Beast. “He said, ‘This is our chance to kind of rectify the whole thing.’”
Director Raymond S. Persi explained how they made the emotional scene happen, adding, “To make it have the most impact, [I suggested that we] match the shot exactly to what it was in the Thanksgiving special. 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.”
Franklin was introduced in 1968, and Schulz recalled that “newspapers refused to run those comics with Franklin in them” initially. In 2024, Schulz said, “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 hopes the special shows how “two people can come together if you just take it down to a basic level.”
