Franklin gets starring role in new ‘Peanuts’ special during Black History Month

“Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz’s groundbreaking Black character, Franklin Armstrong, introduced in 1968, will get a starring role in the latest animated special inspired by the strip.

The all-new “Peanuts” special, “Snoopy Presents: Welcome Home, Franklin,” premieres globally Feb. 16 on Apple TV+.

“We’re really excited about the Franklin special,” said Schulz’s son Craig Schulz, who lives in Santa Rosa. With his own son, Bryan Schulz, and co-writer Cornelius Uliano, he forms the core writing team of the Apple TV+ “Snoopy Presents” series of animated specials.

The character Franklin got his last name from African American cartoonist Robb Armstrong, best known for creating the comic strip “Jump Start,” who is also one of the writers of the special.

“We knew this was going to be tricky,” Craig Schulz said Tuesday from the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa. “We couldn’t just have three white guys writing this.”

This is the seventh special in the “Snoopy Presents” series, which have focused on various characters from the strip.

In 1968, a Los Angeles schoolteacher named Harriet Glickman wrote to Charles Schulz asking him to introduce a Black character, which led to the creation of Franklin.

“Martin Luther King had been killed,” Craig Schulz said. A Baptist minister and nonviolent activist, King was assassinated April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Franklin character was introduced in the “Peanuts” comic strip July 31, 1968.

“Black people found themselves represented,” Craig Schulz said.

In the strip, Franklin and Charlie Brown met on the beach. The special also finds them participating as partners in a soap box derby.

The new special elaborates on the adventures of Franklin, who belongs to a military family, as a new kid in town.

“We tracked his journey,” said Craig Schulz, who also produced and co-wrote “The Peanuts Movie,” released to theaters in 2015.

Produced for Apple TV+ by Peanuts and WildBrain, the special is directed by Emmy Award-winner Raymond S. Persi of “The Simpsons” and “Wreck-It-Ralph.”

For more information, visit apple.com/tvpr and see the full list of supported devices.

Charles Schulz, who moved to Sonoma County in 1958, died in 2000 in Santa Rosa, after writing and drawing the “Peanuts” comic strip for nearly 50 years.

At its height, the “Peanuts” strip ran in as many as 2,800 newspapers, and reprints still run in about 2,000 papers, including The Press Democrat.

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On X @danarts.