Won't You Be My Neighbor? 2018
I was two years old when Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood debuted nationally on PBS. So I was probably a fairly early adopter and remember watching the show a lot as a little kid, but had to have outgrown it fairly quickly. This documentary was released in theaters for some reason, though there is a television network that does a lot of documentaries . . . I am not sure why this was made for theaters, but it is woth seeing (I caught it on PBS in early 2019). It is mostly about Fred Rogers himself, but a lot of focus is on the first year of the show and then scattered highlights and interviews with his family and people who worked with him. What is interesting about him is that he was not just some guy they put in front of a camera to do a kid show. He had very definite ideas about what he wanted to do and why, and it was always about the children and giving them reassuring messages of love and respect. What you saw on TV was the real Fred Rogers doing a job he believed in. At 93 minutes, this documentary can’t go into great detail, but you do get a good understanding of his philosophy and how he put that into effect. At a time when some people were upset that swimming pools were desegregated, he invited one of his black guest stars to sit down and soak his feet with him in a kiddie pool. They didn’t talk about race, just about how nice and cool the water was on a hot day. What an important thing for kids to see. And just as important as what the show was doing, was what it was not doing. It wasn’t violent, noisy, disrespectful. Everyone was given respect and everyone had dignity. Honestly it seems like an amazingly boring and sappy show with a guy who just couldn’t be that nice in real life, but it worked for me when I was a kid. Other shows maybe did similar things. I remember liking Captain Kangaroo too. This documentary is a great tribute to Fred Rogers, both the person and his work. There is a lot of nostalgia, but also a story of a guy who saw a need for something and saw a way to fill that need through the budding public television system. It seems odd to grade this as a movie, but it is a very nice story and it couldn’t have been easy to try to distill a very full lifetime and 30 years of television shows down to 93 minutes, but they picked great pieces to show and got a very good result.
Written: 14 Feb 2019