Mister Rogers puppets revived

A new PBS kids show is bringing back characters from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Donkey Hodie, a collaboration between Fred Rogers Productions and Spiffy Pictures, follows the original puppet's namesake granddaughter in the land of Someplace Else. Each half-hour episode features two 11-minute stories. “We started to discover these really obscure characters that not a lot of people knew about: Purple Panda, Bob Dog and Harriet Elizabeth Cow, and a lot of other characters that weren't in the main tier of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,” Spiffy Pictures head David Rudman told Variety. “They weren't King Friday or Daniel Tiger. They were ones that appeared every once in a while. And something about these characters spoke to us.”