Friday, September 21, 2018

A Tribute to Mr. Rogers

I grew up watching Mr. Rogers every day. He was kind, patient, always 
explained things so that children understood what he was talking about. Topics were always discussed in non threatening ways so that kiddos would not be fearful. He was always reassuring children. He took us along as he visited places in his neighborhood such as the eye doctor, music store, and even how different things were made. I remember that at the end of some episodes he would take about "feelings" and there was a song called "It's Such a Good Feeling". And who could forget his red sweater and red tennis shoes. 


"On this date, September 21, 1967, 51 years ago, Fred Rogers walked 
into the television studio at WQED in Pittsburgh to tape the very first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which would premiere nationally on PBS in February 1968. He became known as Mister Rogers, nationally beloved, sweater wearing, “television neighbor,” whose groundbreaking children’s series inspired and educated generations of young viewers with warmth, sensitivity, and honesty."



WOW!!
I just found this amazing review on Amazon for the movie
"Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and wanted to share it with you all.

"The parallels and similarities are right there, inescapable and plain, on display for everybody to see:

In Chapter Ten of the Bible’s Book for Luke, a lawyer seeking to test Jesus asks him what he needs to do in order to inherit eternal life.  Jesus answers the man by saying that he needs to love God with all his heart, his soul, and his mind.  And to love his neighbor as he loves himself.

The lawyer persists.  He asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”  And Jesus replies by telling the man the parable of the Good Samaritan.

An ordained Presbyterian minister, it is impossible that Fred Rogers did not know the story documented by Luke in his Gospel…or that he didn’t have Jesus’ parable very much in mind when he composed the song which opened not only every single episode of his seminal children’s television show, but also is used as the title to the superb new documentary released on June 8 by Focus Features, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”

Fred Rogers, of course, was the creator and star of WQED’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the PBS children’s show which over the course of 912 episodes and 31 years helped entire generations of young people through some of the most traumatic times they experienced between infancy and adolescence.  Over the course of those years, Mister Rogers changed not only the face of PBS and children’s television—he changed the world.

Directed by Morgan Neville, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker behind “Twenty Feet From Stardom” in 2014 and 2015’s “Best of Enemies,” the new documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” with the full cooperation of Rogers’ family and unlimited access to rare and obscure archival footage, paints the gentle and soft-spoken Rogers as an enormously unlikely but fearless and persistent revolutionary:  The word “radical,” in all its tenses and forms, is used several times over the course of the film’s 93-minute running time.

A 1946 graduate of Latrobe High School, Fred Rogers was educated at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where in 1951 he earned a BA in music.  Intending to pursue a career as a minister in the Presbyterian Church, Rogers experienced a life-changing epiphany when he first viewed the new medium of television.

Specifically, Rogers was appalled by what passed in those days as children’s television programming—pies in the face, violence, and often-inappropriate cartoons.  The young Rogers decided to put on hold his ambitions of a career in faith and religion, and instead set about changing the face and image of children’s television.  “I’ve always felt that I didn’t need to put on a funny hat or jump through a hoop to have a relationship with a child,” Rogers says in archival footage used by Neville in the film.

Employing a fairly straightforward documentary style, director Neville makes brilliant use of new interviews with Rogers’ associates, colleagues, friends and family members, as well as writers, critics, and historians, to relate observations, insights, and always more stories and anecdotes about the gentle and unassuming man who sought to make television his personal ministry.

But the real heart and soul of Neville’s documentary is the footage of Rogers himself, blazing trails, opening doors, and resisting intolerance, often in ways which when viewed with the clarity of hindsight appear audacious, sometimes heroic, and at least once even prescient:  In February of 1968, during the very first nationally-televised week of “Mister Rogers,” the Neighborhood of Make Believe’s ruler King Friday the Thirteenth commanded the construction of a wall topped with barbed wire to isolate his kingdom from outsiders.  Sound familiar?

During the course of Neville’s documentary, we see Rogers sometimes braving almost overwhelming opposition to reinforce his vision, his medium, and his message.  While public television was originally endorsed and subsidized by the presidential administration of Lyndon Johnson, President Nixon in 1969 needed more funding to channel to the Vietnam War.  He sought to find some of that money by deducting $20 million from government subsidies to the fledgling PBS.

To resist cuts which might’ve ended public television while still in its infancy, Mister Rogers went to Washington to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee, headed by the cynical, caustic, and outrageously sarcastic Rhode Island Senator John O. Pastore. 

In new interview footage, Rogers’ widow Joanne reveals the nervousness and fear felt by her husband that day, but Neville’s archival footage betrays no such tension.  Instead, with a firm but carefully deferential demeanor and a quietly modulated voice little different from the tones and cadences he used to communicate with the nation’s preschoolers, Rogers faces down Pastore’s belligerence.  He recites to the Senate committee the lyrics to a song he composed for an episode of his show, highlighting the importance of people helping others. 

In six minutes of testimony, Rogers accomplishes much the same result the US Army’s chief counsel Joseph Walsh did some fifteen years earlier while facing down the despotic Senator Joe McCarthy:  After Rogers completes his brief presentation, a chastened and defeated Senator Pastore looks down at his hands and resignedly acknowledges, “Well, it looks like you’ve just earned $20 million.”  It’s a powerful moment.

There are many such quietly courageous instances included in this wonderful film.  In response to news footage of the owners of segregated hotels dumping cleaning compounds into pools as a means of evicting black swimmers, Rogers appears in an episode of his show soaking his feet in a small pool of cool water, an antidote to the day’s oppressive heat.  And when the Neighborhood’s Officer Clemons happens by, Rogers insists that the African American policeman join him.

The message of the scene is unmistakable, but one wonders today how many of the nation’s segregationists understood the relevance of the moment which followed, as Mister Rogers helped his black friend towel off his feet…or that the simple gesture’s roots were in the Bible’s Book of John.  In new interview footage shot by director Neville, actor and singer Francois Clemons, who played the Neighborhood’s police officer, still grows misty while cherishing his memory of the scene, and the man.

We see moments from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” shows on assassination, on death, and divorce—“Love is the root of all relationships,” says Rogers, “Love…or the lack of it.”  We see black and white news footage of hundreds of children and their families in a line stretching along entire city blocks for a 1969 guest appearance by Mister Rogers on a PBS show in Boston.  And it’s difficult to not feel a sense of electricity and inspiration while viewing the images of Rogers and Clemons emerging side-by-side from a tenement during times of civil turbulence, engaging inner-city youngsters playing in the mean streets of New York.

Still, Neville never renders Fred Rogers in strokes larger than the man himself.  Mister Rogers was not a saint, nor by any means perfect.  We see his eyes flash with anger and his words grow harsh at the thought of a proliferation of violence and suggestiveness in children’s television programming.  A staff member recalls Rogers admonishing him for frequenting a venue for gays, and forbidding return visits.  And we see Rogers’ son John ruefully acknowledging the childhood difficulties of being “the son of the second coming of Christ.”

But the overwhelming impression of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is one of a quiet, gentle, unassuming man, not much different than the one entire generations grew to know, love, and trust—the man who regarded the space between the television and the child “holy ground indeed,” and who sought to “make goodness attractive.”

Is there room in the world today for such a message?  The tearful smiles of viewers exiting screenings of “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” emphatically suggest that there is."

Written by Carl Schultz

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