Welcome Home Franklin: Franklin Armstrong blog and gallery exhibit

“The origin story for one of Peanuts’ most beloved characters, Franklin, follows how he approaches making new friends. Franklin’s family is always on the move with his dad’s military job, and everywhere he goes Franklin finds support in a notebook filled with his grandfather’s advice on friendship. But when Franklin tries his usual strategies with the Peanuts gang, he has trouble fitting in. That’s until he learns about the neighborhood Soap Box Derby race. According to his grandfather, everyone loves a winner! He’s sure that winning the race will also mean winning over some new friends. All he needs is a partner, which he finds in Charlie Brown. Franklin and Charlie Brown work together to build a car and in the process become good buddies. But as the race nears, the pressure mounts — can their car and their newfound friendship make it to the finish line?”

What makes this special particularly exciting and, well, special, is that Robb Armstrong, whose last name Charles Schulz (Sparky to his family and friends) used for Franklin after asking permission from his longtime friend, is a co-writer on the project.

I had the pleasure to interview Robb for the MPA’s The Credits, and he talked a lot about how the kerfuffle around the Thanksgiving special (where Franklin is alone on one side of the Thanksgiving table, leading folks on the internet to call the entire special, and, indeed, Peanuts in general, racist) lit a fire in him to tell Franklin’s story and address the issue from the 1973 special, as well as how his own life is reflected in the animated character named after him. You can read it HERE (once it gets posted to the site, which was supposed to be today, but maybe won’t be!)

Here he is talking about his own experience and his involvement with the Armstrong Project, which offers scholarships to art students of color interested in pursuing a career in animation and art:

 

In our recent interview, Robb also talked with me about the origin of his love for Peanuts, and how it inspired what has become an incredibly successful career as the creator of JumpStart. I asked him which particular Peanuts comic strips stand out in his mind:

“There are many great ones, but I love Snoopy. He’s a figment of his own imagination, but also he’s a real dog. He lives in his own world, and doesn’t have the same rules that confine the rest of the cast. Schulz did a strip once with Snoopy on top of his dog house as the World War 1 flying ace, and he’s about to go off to fight the Red Baron. He’s determined this is going to be it, the final confrontation, and prepared to die. All this is very unlike other comic strips. He’s talking about war and fighting and someone’s not going to live. So Snoopy is on top of the house, leaning and bent forward, and really intense, paws clenched, then Charlie Brown rings a dinner bell and the entire orientation of the comic strip flips, so he can go back home to eat. It is the funniest visual comic strip I’ve ever seen. It just shows you what can be done using this tiny piece of real estate that were given as cartoonists, and it’s one of the things that attracted me to it and that still attracts me to it. What also amazes me is words can always be understood by a child. The thoughts, the sentiment, the emotional content isn’t complex. A little kid can understand it. I just love that.”

Robb co-wrote the special with Sparky’s son and grandson Craig and Bryan, and writer/director/producer Cornelius Uliano. Craig, Bryan, and Cornelius also executive produced the special, much as they did the award-winning feature The Peanuts Movie, which the three also co-wrote. Of course those who watch the special will see how much influence the original comic strip has in the story and spirit of Welcome Home, Franklin. Here’s what Robb had to say about that:

“Everything goes back to the comic strip. Craig Schulz is great about redirecting, almost like a traffic cop, always saying, “Go that way, guys.” We would always go back to the canon and history of the strip. That’s where we pulled out the scene about The Great Pumpkin and all that, but rather than dwell on any one thing, it was fast. Franklin just quickly entered the pumpkin patch, and ruins it. Right away, he just walks into the patch and snaps the life out of a pumpkin. We’d seen Linus in that environment with the pumpkins, and his obsession with The Great Pumpkin, but we’d never seen Linus lose his temper. He’s always a very spiritual, even-tempered guy, and then Franklin stumbles in and clumsily does that. Linus is like, “What have you done?” It’s like the end of his world. We always grab things from the canon of Peanuts. That’s the best place to go to move things forward. Go back, then go forward, go back, then go forward. There were lots of things, like Franklin meeting Charlie Brown on the beach back in 1968, that are so important that you don’t have to think about it much. If we meet on a beach, though, this whole thing has to take place during beach-y, friendly weather. You can’t do anything that’s too cold-weather related, no sledding, no ice skating. It’s a given that they have to meet on the beach, because Sparky introduced Franklin there, when he meets Charlie Brown. So you start with concrete moments, and we have to deal with the table, but it doesn’t have to be Thanksgiving, they just have to be at a table. So that’s cool, we can do that anywhere, anytime, but we’ve got to land on that at the end. We started with all the things that were engraved in stone, and build the rest of the story around them. The key was always going to the comic strip itself as our North Star.”

Here are Robb, Welcome Home, Franklin director Raymond Persi and Craig Schulz talking about the special:

Throughout the history of the animated specials, that has been the case. Bill Melendez, the animation director who was entrusted by Sparky to bring the Peanuts story to the screen starting all the way back in 1965, always referred to the original strips as the basis for the animated shows.

Here’s Bill talking about A Charlie Brown Christmas, and animating Sparky’s great characters and bringing them to life onscreen:

As an animation art dealer and expert, finding Franklin images has always been a challenge. The thing about Franklin Armstrong is he isn’t in that many scenes in the early specials. That being said, here’s a cool story about how this new exhibit came to be:

I knew that Robb had co-written Welcome Home, Franklin, and was very interested in talking to him about his role. I contacted my editor at the MPA, who didn’t know the story about Robb and the fact that Franklin was, in part, named after him, and of course he LOVED that, so he accepted my pitch to interview him. Then I contacted the folks at Apple TV+ about it, and they too gave me the thumbs up. They sent along a screening link and I got to see the show in prep for my interview. Having seen many of Robb’s strips, and knowing that he has lately been working on the live action version of JumpStart, starring Terry Crews, I knew he would do right by the character, but it was even more charming than I expected.

Knowing that I was going to talk to Robb, I thought I’d give my friends at Peanuts a call and ask if there was any art from the older specials (because Welcome Home, Franklin is computer animated, so there is no “art” as such). I knew from the last exhibit I had that images of Franklin are very hard to come by, so I didn’t have much hope. BUT, WAIT! It turns out that the Schulz Museum had contacted them to pull the best art they could find in preparation for a travelling exhibit about Franklin, so they worked their animation-loving fingers to the bone searching for great art, only to discover the Schulz Museum decided they didn’t need them after all, so there was all this art, just waiting for me! What a joyful moment that was!

So, today is the first day of my Welcome Home, Franklin Armstrong exhibit. I have several gorgeous key setups, meaning original cels and matching backgrounds, from the history of Peanuts animation specials, as well as a production cels from various productions. Again, the Peanuts folks went above and beyond by sending along exclusive images of the storyboards from these specials.  They tell the story behind some of the images in this Franklin Armstrong collection.

First, let’s talk about 1975’s You’re A Good Sport, Charlie Brown.

 

This special was the 14th prime-time special, and in it Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown take part in a motocross race. (*side note: I always thought it was motoRcross..) It was the last Peanuts special to air during Vince Guaraldi’s lifetime. It was a departure for the composer, because it blended his signature jazz with fund, disco and pop music. The score was quite popular at the time! You’re A Good Sport won Schulz his third Emmy, with the first two being A Charlie Brown Christmas and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

The film was directed by award-winning animator Phil Roman, who had worked on Peanuts specials as far back as 1968. He went on to win a number of Primetime Emmys, for The Simpsons in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999, and for King of the Hill in 1997 and 1998. He is also the recipient of the InkPot Award at SDCC, and the prestigious Winsor McCay Award at the Annie Awards in 1996. Here are some original storyboards used in the making of that special that the above original reflects:

The second is This is America: The Music and Heroes of America. It’s a pretty powerful special, actually. In it, Franklin talks (briefly) about the history of slavery, and several of the most inspiring Black American heroes are featured. You can see the entire special HERE.  At the end of the show, you can see the storyboards come to life. It’s fascinating!

You can see the production cel of Franklin playing drums in the opening sequence of the special:

The below storyboard shows the scene in which Franklin plays a character in historic New Orleans, from which many important blues and jazz musicians hail.

Check out this great cel from the above sequence, available as part of the Franklin Armstrong show at ArtInsights:

Franklin does much of the narration in this Peanuts release. He is also seen variously playing banjo, drums, and piano, and as a character inside the stories from history he tells. The Music and Heroes of America is one of 8 episode mini-series that aired in 1988 and 1989. The other episodes cover The Mayflower voyagers, the birth of the constitution, the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, The NASA space station, the building of the trans-continental railroad, the great inventors, the Smithsonian and the presidency. This Is America features compositions by Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, George Winston, Dave Grusin, and Desirée Goyette.

Here is a fun image of Franklin, Charlie Brown, Linus and Schroeder playing together from the show:

The end of This Is America: The Music and Heroes of America has a poignant collection of images from the civil rights movement, as seen in the storyboard below:

Lastly, we have It’s Spring Training, Charlie Brown, from 1992. It is one of several specials that heavily feature baseball in the storyline, along with 1966’s Charlie Brown’s All-Stars.

You can’t ask for a better image bringing together baseball and the Peanuts gang than this key setup, which has a Dean Spille original background. These backgrounds and cels that belong together from the specials are very hard to find, because there are hundreds of cels for every one background. Spille was featured in a former blog on the site in 2018, HERE.

Here’s a great storyboard that shows the gang on the ball field.

 

This was when breakdancing and rapping was at the center of the pop scene, and this 35th Peanuts special featured Franklin showing those dance moves to the very square Peanuts gang. You can see the whole special HERE. 

Snoopy gets into the spirit of the dance in this storyboard from the special:

Here’s a great cel setup with many characters in the Peanuts gang, working to get inspired for their game:

The below storyboard captures some of the vibe happening in the cel above:

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We have other great images in our Welcome Home, Franklin Armstrong exhibit and art sale. You can see them all by going HERE.

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Here are a few more of them below, for your enjoyment, including one key setup from the Valentine’s Special, in which Franklin, Charlie Brown, and Schroeder are all looking very happy. What a great image!

You can enjoy my interview with Robb Armstrong, once it gets posted, by going to my interview with him on the Motion Picture Association’s site, The Credits. It’s always a delight when my two loves, the art of animation and film journalism come together!