Seeing strange characters on the page after migration to new environment

I have a DataAssist site that shows funny characters in the db, but displays the correct bullets, curly quotes, etc in the browser. I recently tried migrating the code and an export of the db to a new dev environment and I'm still seeing those funny characters in the db, but they're also displaying in the browser, like so:

"...highlighting “not just for Christmas” ..."

Nothing has changed in the code between the two environments except for the credentials in the db connection file.

The live db server's charset is cp1252 West European (latin1)
The dev db server's charset is UTF-8 Unicode (utf8mb4)

I can't change target db server's charset.

I recently migrated a different DataAssist site that had the same funny characters in the db and that also displayed correctly in the browser to the same environment and it's displaying correctly in the browser.

Just unsure where the issue is since it's working on the one site and not the other. I can't for the life of me figure out what I did differently between the two.