By the time I was watching Mister Roger’s Neighborhood had been going on for over ten years. And I was one of the thousands of kids in America who grew up with the kindly neighbor and his land of imagination…Daniel the Tiger, King Friday the 13th (I totally did not catch that as a kid) and Lady Elaine Fairchild…but I confess, as I aged, I moved out of the neighborhood for Star Wars and Doctor Who and Transformers and G.I. Joe…
He seemed a quaint memory of a simpler time. And so it fell onto Morgan Neville to remind us of the dangerous rebellion at the heart of Mister Rogers.
A soft spoken minister, Fred Rogers looked at the images coming into the homes of families across America…and he thought…maybe you could do more than slap people in the faces with pies.
The documentary looks at his career, the successes and the failures. It explores his relationships…and one of the things that stands out? Fred wanted people to know they were loved and valuable. This is most heartfelt in the stories from François Clemmons. Their’s was a close friendship. You can tell when he speaks, there is a mix of joy and sadness.
What these types of documentaries always to get at eventually is the “seedier” side of the subject.
“You thought he was nice, but he was a tyrant!”
“You thought he loved kids, but he was a pedophile!!!”
But while viewers might brace themselves for the inevitable truth…the real truth is…Fred Rogers was just that decent and kind. Sure, he was not perfect. And he seemed plagued with doubts that he was doing any good.
Now, I talked earlier about the dangerous rebellion of Mister Rogers…and I stand by this. Fred Rogers fought for kids to be treated as more than just…”kids”. He did not believe in talking down to them…and so he focused on the events that the nation was facing and not pretending the best thing is for us to coddle children and hide the ugliness of the world.
Mister Rogers talked about the assassination of a President. He talked about the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. He saw these terrible things that kids were not being equipped for because we coddled them.
And yet, Fox News had the audacity to lay problems with modern society at his feet. That his message that you are special as you are was the real problem.
As I watched Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I was filled with joy and sadness. The cold hard truth is that the problem is too much Mister Rogers. Our culture faces the problem of not nearly enough Mister Rogerses(??).
I miss you Mister Rogers…and it makes me a bit sad that my nephews have grown up without you.