It was a year ago on this day, more or less, that my wife and I went to see A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood, a wonderful story centered around Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
My wife Andrea was a big fan of Mr. Rogers when she was a child and her respect and admiration for the man continues into her adult years.
As I noted in my post about that movie, A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood is not a bio pic about Fred Rogers. It is a story about how and why Mr. Rogers was so beloved and influential. a story told through Lloyd Vogel, a hard nose magazine writer with a whole lot of trouble weighing on his mind and his heart.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? tracks Fred Rogers' life and career from a would be seminary student to his early work in the nascent TV industry of the 1950s.
Rogers wanted to work in television because he hated it and thought that something better could be done with the medium.
After working as a floor director for NBC programs in New York City, Rogers became a program developer at public television station WQED where he helped create The Children's Corner,. Rogers worked off-camera to create puppets, characters, and music for the show. Many of the puppets and characters Rogers created here will follow him to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
From there, Rogers goes to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) where he creates a children's program called Misterogers. Fred hosts the show where he develops the rhythms and cadences that will inform how Fred talks to kids on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
From the CBC, it's back to Pittsburgh for Fred Rogers where he creates Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood which is sent out nationwide on what would ultimately become PBS.
The documentary includes footage of Fred Roger's appearance before Congress where he appeals for full funding of PBS in the face of budget cuts. Rogers' testimony has been described as "one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress". Funding for PBS was increased from $9 million to $22 million.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? provides a lot of archival footage from Fred Rogers' earliest TV work to his appearances on talk shows with hosts like Arsenio Hall and David Letterman. And of course lots of clips from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood as well as behind the scenes footage.
The narrative of Won't You Be My Neighbor? is rather straightforward: it's the story of a man who became interested in television, developed plan to use the medium to make the lives of children better and created a show called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood designed to do just that.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? tells a story that is at once wholly unremarkable but completely amazing, the story that Fred Rogers was in fact the good and kind man that he appeared to be.
The closest thing to controversy that the documentary touches on is the animosity directed towards Fred Rogers by Fox News. It seems some pundits thought that Mr. Rogers' message of "you are special just by being you" created a generation of entitled spoiled brats or something.
Like a lot of things on Fox News, the pundits there missed the point of what Mr. Rogers was trying to do.
Won't You Be My Neighbor? is a well made archive of the history of Fred Rogers and his signature program. Andrea who remains a devoted fan of Mr. Rogers' work found the documentary very enjoyable and insightful.
That is that for this week's Cinema Sunday. Next week, I will be writing about a recent discovery, a comic crime caper movie from 1966.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another.
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