‘Our Friend Martin’ Brings King’s Legacy to Children

“I had envisioned something like this for many years,” said Coretta Scott King. King, the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. and the primary torchbearer of his legacy, was speaking of “Our Friend Martin,” a star-studded, animated home video release that she hopes will help children see her husband as more than just a history lesson.

“I have always felt that it was important for young people to understand the philosophy and the methods for change my husband used and became an example of in his life,” she said in a recent phone interview. “And to have something that really turns young people on, that entertains them and educates them the way this film does, is very exciting.”

The video, released this week, is a fast-moving hour of time-traveling adventure about present-day buddies--one black, one white--who get to know the great civil rights leader, first as a friendly baseball-playing teenager and later as a deeply committed, warm and accessible adult. When they try to prevent his assassination by bringing the teenage Martin to the present, the well-meaning kids see what their world might have been like without King’s efforts.

Conceived and produced by Phillip Jones and DIC Entertainment’s Andy Heyward, Mike Maliani and Robby London, the film features a Motown Records soundtrack and such all-star vocal talent as Danny Glover, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, John Travolta, Samuel Jackson, Susan Sarandon and Oprah Winfrey.

King’s daughter Yolanda and son Dexter also play roles; Dexter King is the voice of his father from the ages of 30 to 40.

The King family’s unusual endorsement of the project includes the use of exclusive archival film footage and photos from the King Center for Non-Violent Change in Atlanta. Images of King and his family, of the Montgomery bus boycott and the local government’s violent response to civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham are woven into the animated action, as are newspaper and television reports of the time, pictures of “whites only” public signs, and the landmark “I have a dream” speech in Washington.

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The real-life material becomes part of the animated landscape as projections on windows, on buildings, in picture frames--even in cartoon characters’ eyeglasses.

“When I saw the finished product, I was extremely pleased that it had been done,” said Coretta Scott King. “We have teaching guides, we have curriculum that we infuse in the school system, but this is something different. The way they did it was so important because you have the animation and the magical things, but then you come back to the reality. And I think kids have to face the reality.”

The film footage is meaningful, too, she added, “because people have either forgotten, or never knew [what happened], and it brings back memories, but it reinspires you in many ways.”

“On some levels, it’s so delicate,” Heyward said of the use of the archival material and the way King’s history is told. “It can be harsh, it can be painful. We tried to walk a fine line to introduce kids to the legacy of Dr. King and what went on, [yet] not leave them with something that would be a bit too heavy for them.

“We felt it was important,” he added, “that we had an African American director [Vincenzo Trippetti] and African American writers,” headed by Dawn Comer, Chris Simmons, Sib Ventress and Deborah Pratt.

Heyward, who approached the King family about doing the film, said he had thought about it when his young children were studying about Martin Luther King Jr. in school and he wondered “why there’d never been a holiday special celebrating his life and achievements. Our hope is that this will be a piece that will run every year.” Future TV broadcasts are being planned, he said.

“I hope that [viewers] will get from it the message that one person can make a difference,” said Dexter King, who is president of the King Center. “I think most people saw my father, and still do, from a historical perspective--the superficial part of his legacy, versus the [way] that any kid can say, ‘I can be like him, I can do that.’ ”

While the film alludes to the existence of racism today, it paints a positive, colorblind picture of the cartoon kids’ present-day world.

Coretta Scott King is “hopeful,” she said, that such harmony will become a reality. “I think we’re always in the process of becoming. I’m a person who has always believed that the larger plan for humankind is to move toward a state of perfection. . . . I think we become more and more so as we continue striving. And we need things like this to help us and to remind us to continue to move in that direction.”

Dexter King agrees with his mother that “Our Friend Martin” is “very timely, because there’s so much negativism, that anything positive that drives the message home is so important.”

But this youngest son of Martin Luther King Jr. seems sad when asked if he thinks the nation will reach true racial harmony soon.

“I believe that we will, ultimately,” he said. “But at this current time, and I don’t mean just in terms of civil rights or race relations, we’re living in a very polarized time, where there’s so much negativism, so much isolationism, and all these ‘isms’ that exist to keep people apart rather than together. Somehow we’ve got to get back to basics and realize that we’re all a human family.”

* “Our Friend Martin,” Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, $15.