IT WORKED! Now all the little smileys, arrows, etc. show up in my final HTML output. Much thanks for the tip. I just put my final html content file through your encode process before outputting to web:
$pagecontent = encode('ascii', $pagecontent, FB_HTMLCREF);

p.s. for anyone reading this later: If you store your JSON data in a file, then you need to access it explicitly as utf8:
open(my $fh, '<:utf8', $filename)
I had to do this and use Anonymous Monk's FB_HTMLCREF process to finally get the emoticons to show.