How a road trip with Mr. Rogers and Mr. Dressup changed children’s TV forever
How a pair of children entertainers driving from Pittsburgh to Toronto would go on to change television forever Don Gillmor
‘You take everything north of Windsor. The whole U.S. is mine. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“And remember, every child is special.” “Whatever.”
Full disclosure: this conversation never took place between Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers) and Ernie Coombs (Mr. Dressup).
However, in 1962, both men made the drive up Interstate 79, from Pittsburgh to Toronto, for a trip that would eventually change the face of children’s television. At the time, the pair had been been working on a show called The Children’s Corner at WQEDTV in Pittsburgh. Fred Rainsberry, head of children’s programming at the CBC, saw Rogers, and invited him to come to Toronto to do his own show. Rogers, in turn, invited Coombs to come along and work as a puppeteer on the new program, which was going to be called Misterogers.
The future of children’s television in one car. What did they talk about? Perhaps the two of them formulated a diabolical plan to dominate children’s programming in two countries for the next three decades, dividing up the continent like a game of highstakes Risk. More likely, they talked about how this new show would be different than anything on TV. And Canada was the perfect place to do it.
Watching the documentary about the late Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, he comes across as quintessentially Canadian, or at least the caricature we’re often saddled with: earnest, understated, well-meaning, a bit dull, a nagging sense that we all studied to be Presbyterian ministers, which in fact, Rogers did. Perhaps those were the qualities Rainsberry saw.
Misterogers ran for four seasons on CBC before Rogers returned to Pittsburgh, taking his sets with him. For the next 33 years he put on that cardigan and those sneakers, and talked about the joys of neighbourliness until finally retiring in 2001. Coombs stayed in Canada and, after working on the children’s series Butternut Square, created Mr. Dressup, which ran on CBC for 29 years (1967-1996).
Both Rogers and Coombs addressed the camera as if it were a single child rather than a collective. They were quiet and restrained, Rogers to the point of narcosis at times (he once silently watched an egg timer tick off a minute). Years ago, I interviewed Coombs, who said Rogers had told him that “if you’re restrained, the kids will come to you.” And come they did. Both created iconic shows (Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood was the longest running children’s show in U.S. history until Sesame Street eclipsed it), and both were successful live performers.
In the Rogers documentary, an interviewee points out, “If you take all of the elements that make good television and do the exact opposite, you have Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ Low production values, simple set, an unlikely star.” The pacing was slow, at times agonizingly so, the theme song sucked and Rogers didn’t have a singing voice (though he was a pretty good pianist).
For all of his earnestness, Rogers was also quietly adventurous: he did a whole week on death - pets, grandparents, etc. After Robert Kennedy’s murder he talked to pre-schoolers about assassination. He addressed racism, violence and divorce, all in his soothing ministerial way. There is a prescient clip from 1968 where a puppet, “benevolent monarch” King Friday XIII, decides to build a wall to keep “undesirables” out. He is subsequently talked out of it.
Watching the documentary, it’s hard to imagine a show like Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood being on the air now. You could say that it was a more innocent, peaceful time, though it wasn’t, what with Vietnam, student protests, racial strife, Kent State et al. While these are perilous times, the tribalism and trade chaos is largely taking place offstage. Back then, it was in the streets.
And it’s tempting to say that today’s frantic children’s programming (Phineas and Ferb) reflects our frantic times, though Rogers said that his show was a response to the slapstick violence of TV in the 1960s, and the clubby fascism of shows like The Mickey Mouse Club (though he would never have phrased it that way). It was an anomaly even for its time.
Mr. Dressup used the same formula as Rogers – essentially offering young viewers a version of himself on screen, full of gentle lessons and quirky puppets. Casey was an androgynous four-year-old with a mid-Atlantic accent who lived in a tree house and didn’t have any parents. His dog Finnegan never spoke aloud but whispered to Casey (both operated by Australian puppeteer Judith Lawrence, who retired after 23 seasons, her arms finally giving out).
The natural successor to both shows was “Sesame Street,” which debuted in 1969, only a year after Rogers’ show, and held to similar progressive ideals, but was fresher, more inventive and much hipper – though virtually everyone was hipper than Fred Rogers.
The recent release of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? has unleashed both a bout of nostalgia and the fear that some aspect of childhood has been lost. But every generation mourns the loss of innocence. Neil Postman argued in The Disappearance of Childhood that childhood was an invention, created by the printing press, or at least literacy. If you were the child of a peasant in the Middle Ages, you would have engaged in the adult world by the age of seven, perhaps even earlier. Your parents would be illiterate, and may never have travelled farther than the next village. At a very early age, you knew what your parents knew because there was so little access to new information. All information was oral, and usually practical – don’t go into the forest.
We are currently approaching the mirror image of that. With the internet, our children now have access to the same information we do, not always an uplifting thought. They spend an increasing amount of time in the forest.
In Won’t You Be My Neighbor? the innocence is seen in Rogers as much as in his audience. Each generation of children faces its own unique challenges, but both Mr. Rogers and Mr. Dressup remind us that there are several childhood qualities that are immutable.