BEFORE: So it turns out that once you make it through the four-hour documentary about Michael Jackson being a pedophile, the rest of the documentary chain seems like a breeze by comparison - it's all downhill from there. But still, it's been a very taxing eight days so far, what with a school shooting, political scandals, racism, race riots, financial scandals, bank bail-outs, etc. I deserve a break - wouldn't it be nice if I could return, just for a short while, to a time where I didn't have to worry about the stresses of modern life and being an adult, and all I had to do was to make it through the school day so I could come home and turn on the TV and be greeted and comforted by a nice man who would put on a puppet show for me and maybe sing a song or two? Here's hoping...
Bill Clinton carries over from "Capitalism: A Love Story".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story" (Movie #3,231), "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey" (Movie #3,232)
THE PLOT: An exploration of the life, lessons and legacy of iconic children's television host Fred Rogers.
AFTER: Jesus, I can't even catch a break with a documentary about Mr. Rogers, because it turns out that he was trying to educate me the whole time. Never mind that, he was PREACHING to me with his show - it turns out Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and he saw a special need to get on TV and impart little life lessons that were Christian-oriented. Next you'll probably tell me that "Davey and Goliath" wasn't just a show about an animated boy and his claymation dog. I KNEW this guy was up to all good, I just knew it. But it turns out he wasn't your average preacher, not like that dirty snake Joel Osteen or some POS like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, all of whom wanted to get on TV for the sole purpose of soliciting donations, because of COURSE Jesus wants him to have a private jet so he can travel around the U.S. collecting more donations more efficiently.
But jeez, if that's the worst thing that I can say about Fred Rogers, then the guy was probably on the up and up, and that's what nearly everybody has to say about him, that what you saw on the TV was the way he was in real life, he wasn't putting on an act or hiding anything, he just had a unique ability to talk to children and make them feel special (only not in a Michael Jackson sort of way) and loved (again, not like that) by taking them each day to the Land of Make-Believe (which was not the name of a secret closet in his bedroom, like with Jacko). And he didn't really sugar-coat too much, he was there for kids during the tough times - after the assassination of RFK, after the Challenger disaster, and after 9/11 - because learning to read and write is great, but the mental health of kids is important, too, and he GOT that.
There's been a lot of testifying in this space recently - Enron executives testifying before Congress, bank CEO's testifying about subprime mortgages and young kids testifying about their time spent at Neverland. Well, that continues tonight as this doc features footage of Fred Rogers testifying before Congress (at least twice) about the absolute need for public television, which was first funded by President Johnson, and then Nixon of course tried to take the funding away, because the war in Vietnam needed money. Mr. Rogers to the rescue, instead of just reading from the paperwork he brought with him, he made an emotional appeal to one of those hard-as-nails senators about a song he wrote for his TV show, about how when you feel like what you're doing is wrong, then you have the ability and the will to just stop. Well, you can visibly see that Senator's resistance just melt away, and therefore PBS got additional funding to continue, and the psyches of a generation of kids got spared from a lifetime of watching hosts talking down to kids and showing them insipid cartoons. Best moment of the week.
Perhaps that song was really a metaphor for Vietnam - it's like when Mr. Rogers saw that there was still segregation in the South, and black people weren't allowed to use the same swimming pools as whites, he did a bit on his show where it was a hot day, and he was cooling his feet in a kiddie pool with a garden hose, and then he invited the police officer character on his show to share the pool with him. Simple, brilliant, and effective - and kids then see a black man's feet and a white man's feet in the same pool, and they learn that it's no big deal. That doesn't exactly fix racism, but it's a step in the right direction.
Later, when it was revealed that the actor who played that black police officer was gay, Fred tried at first to help conceal this fact, but eventually he came to accept him as such, as we all should. And then there were protests over Mr. Rogers being tolerant of the gay lifestyle. Are you kidding me? Do you know how people sound when they're against tolerant people? By doing so, they only highlight their own intolerance, by a factor of ten. (Unfortunately, I don't think the gay community has learned this, they're still quite intolerant toward intolerant people, and you have to break the cycle somewhere - just as minority groups tend to act intolerantly toward racists, perhaps understandably, but it just doesn't help).
In the first WEEK of his second show, he had his puppets doing a thinly-veiled take on Vietnam. Yep, this is a guy who looked around the TV landscape at the time and said, "Wow, I could do SO much better than these clowns." (Literally, there were clowns on TV back then, as if that wouldn't scare the crap out of reasonable kids...) Then try to measure the positive effect this guy had on a generation, while producing 895 episodes of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" (and another 337 episodes of an earlier kids show, from 1961-1967). Who the heck DOES that, that's a ton of positive affirmations, and by all accounts, he believed every word that he said.
Now, I know the criticism, and that's the mistaken belief that by making every kid feel special, he diluted the very concept of special-ness. Because if everyone is special, then no one is really special, and then before long we're giving out trophies for participation and you've got an entire generation of vapidly entitled millennials - which we do have, but I believe it's a coincidence. Under other circumstances I'd be inclined to agree with that, but later in his life, during commencement speeches, Mr. Rogers would explain what he meant by "special", in that he believed each person is unique, there's only one of you, and every person deserves to love and be loved. And if you find fault with that, while defending your "hero" Michael Jackson, then your head's just not screwed on right.
He also kept the format of his show amazingly consistent - why change it, after all, if kids are going to always be aging out of the program, and the format will work just as well on the next batch of kids that's just discovering him on PBS? This also prepared kids for the real adult world, because they're all going to grow up and get jobs (OK, most of them), and then every day of their lives is going to be (pretty much) the same - come home, take off your jacket, take off your shoes, feed the fish (or the cat, dog, whatever) and then spend some time in the land of make-believe (however you define that) before you have to get up the next day and do it all over again.
When I look at the Land of Make-Believe as an adult, it's amazing how much I didn't notice when I was a kid. I have false memories, it seems, of Mr. Rogers talking to his puppets, but that's impossible, because he provided the voice of every puppet on the show. Now, of course, every puppet voice sounds very similar, they all just sound like Fred Rogers doing a bit - but in the context of the show, he himself never went to the Land of Make-Believe (he was always there, but behind the scenes) and each puppet represents a different aspect of his personality. Daniel Tiger is the nervous, insecure part, riddled with anxiety - Rogers himself was bullied as a child, so he knew the value of getting out the message to children that somewhere there was someone who liked them, just the way they were, and there was no need to compromise themselves to fit in. King Friday XIII is the bossy but benevolent despot (the kind of person needed to be the producer of a show, the top banana who still cared about all of his cast and crew) and Lady Elaine represented his older sister, or so the theory goes, and so on. I'm still working out X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat, but something tells me I don't even want to go there. Seems like kind of a "we're all masculine, we're all feminine" thing.
Did you know that VCRs are legal, partially because of Fred Rogers? The big broadcasters didn't approve of people taping TV shows at first, because it constituted copyright infringement or messed with their ad rates or something - then Fred Rogers testified in court that he didn't mind people taping his show, especially if the family was busy when his show aired, and they wanted to watch it together at a more convenient time. We now call this "time-shifting", but it was a radical concept back in the day. Before that, if a show aired at 8 pm, you HAD to be there at 8 pm to watch it, there was no way to get it on Demand or on Netflix or Hulu or Slingbox or BlabBlab or Zinger or NubNub or on your phone or during one of the other 100 times that channel would air the show over the next week.
It turns out that Mr. Rogers never killed people in combat (urban legend), wasn't hiding tattoos under his cardigan sleeves (another urban legend) and the name "McFeely" isn't salacious at all, it's his mother's maiden name, and his father was president of the McFeely Brick Company. He's the second best thing to come from Latrobe, PA (after Rolling Rock beer, of course). He played piano well and composed most of the songs on his show (not the opening theme, though...). Once he overcame his shyness in high school, he was president of the student council, editor of the yearbook and a member of the National Honor Society. You look up "straight arrow" in the dictionary and you'll see his picture. Then he spent a lifetime in public television and talking to children - except for a few years after 1975, when PBS ran reruns, as he had set his sights on making television for adults. But this sounds a lot like when the rock group KISS finally took off their make-up, and two years later people were begging for them to put it back on - five years later he was back on PBS, making new issue-oriented TV for kids, because that's where he was needed the most.
There's supposed to be a biopic about Mr. Rogers coming out later this year, with Tom Hanks in it - oddly, in the early footage of Fred Rogers I noticed a resemblance to Colin Hanks, and at other times, Jim Parsons. Michael Keaton is supposedly in this film somewhere, because he worked as a stagehand on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood early in his career, but I couldn't spot him. What else can I say about a man who weighed a consistent 143 pounds, and took special delight in that, because numerically 143 represents "I love you" if you count the letters? Yeah, I'm a large 50-year old man, and I'll admit I was tearing up near the end of this film...
Also starring Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, John Rogers, Jim Rogers, Bill Isler, Hedda Sharapan, Junlei Li, Max King, Margaret Whitmer, Tom Junod, Elizabeth Seamans, Joe Negri, David Newell, Elaine Crozier, George Wirth, David Bianculli, Francois Scarborough Clemmons, Susan Stamberg, Nick Tallo, Yo-Yo Ma
with archive footage of Betty Aberlin, John Candy (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Jim Carrey (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Apollo 11"), Hillary Clinton (last seen in "13th"), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Ralph Ellison, Jamie Foxx (last seen in "I'm Still Here"), Al Gore, Robert Kennedy (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Brian Kilmeade, David Letterman (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story), Christa McAuliffe, Margaret McFarland, Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Koch"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Sen. John Pastore, Paul Reubens (last seen in "Matilda"), Martin Short (last heard in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper").
RATING: 7 out of 10 long-haired hippie stagehands (Mr. Rogers didn't partake, but I'll bet he often had a contact high...)
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