Welcome Home, Franklin Interview With Craig Schulz, Robb Armstrong & Raymond S. Persi

Last week, I attended the virtual Welcome Home, Franklin press junket and had the pleasure of interviewing three incredibly talented individuals: Craig Schulz, the son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and the Executive Producer & Co-Writer of Welcome Home, Franklin; Robb Armstrong, Co-Writer and the creator of Jump Start; and Raymond S. Persi, who directed this project as well as The Simpsons. Watch our interview below:

Craig Schulz is a pilot and motocross racer who has picked up the baton from his father and is now carrying on the Peanuts legacy. Since 2008, he has been producing and writing a variety of Peanuts specials. Schulz talked about growing up with Peanuts, whose characters were based on real-life friends of the family. Although he enjoys being the one who now gets to play with these characters, we chatted about how important it is to him to stay faithful to his father’s vision. “We stick with what he created, we stick within those boundaries, and yet we go right to the edges and try to add a little more emotion into those stories,” Schulz said.

The power of Charles M. Schulz’s influence was evident throughout the interview. For his part, Raymond S. Persi grew up reading Peanuts as a child; his love of cartoons later led him into a career in animation, where he won an Emmy for his work directing The Simpsons in addition to voice acting in a number of Disney classics such as Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen and Zootopia. With his latest project as the director for the last three Snoopy Presents specials, his childhood love of Peanuts came in handy. “Being able to connect with those characters at a young age really helped me as I came to direct these specials”, Persi explained.

Robb Armstrong was also heavily influenced by Peanuts as a child and described to me how Snoopy inspired him to learn how to read at an early age; he later grew up to create Jump Start, a cartoon that has been a staple in the funny pages since 1989 and is syndicated in over 300 newspapers. When Jump Start became distributed through the same syndicate as Peanuts, he went on to meet Charles M. Schulz, and five years later Schulz had a request for him: He needed a surname for his character Franklin, and he wanted to call him Armstrong. It’s been a surreal full-circle experience for Armstrong to now be so involved in the very cartoon that inspired him as a boy. He wants to do the same for today’s youth, so we also discussed Peanuts Worldwide’s The Armstrong Project, which provides endowments and mentorship at two HBCUs, Howard University & Hampton University. Through his work with The Armstrong Project, he hopes to help remove some of the barriers to entering the animation field, which he describes as very exciting but also very exclusive. “There’s a giant, ivory tower around all this. It’s not a gate – there’s a tower. This is not accessible. We want to make it accessible,” Armstrong concluded. “I share that commitment with Peanuts Worldwide and I’m very grateful, because they’re making it happen.”

Welcome Home Franklin comes to Apple TV+ on February 16th. For more on the special, click here to read my review of Welcome Home Franklin & learn more about the history behind the character of Franklin Armstrong.