The company that promotes the legacy of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" has a reminder: Fred Rogers still wants to be your neighbor.
Starting this week, Fred Rogers Productions is situating the iconic show as nearby as YouTube, where it's getting its own channel.
The channel will debut Thursday, June 4, with five episodes including the very first one, which was shot at Pittsburgh's own WQED TV studios on Sept. 21, 1967, and aired the following February.
Episodes of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" are already available online and via paid streaming services. But folks at Fred Rogers Productions, which continues to produce spin-off programs like the animated "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," said the flagship series, with its messages of kindness, acceptance and understanding, deserves to be even more widely accessible.
"We wanted to find a way to bring the series to young kids now and some young parents, in addition to longtime fans in a way that makes it more accessible, in a way that makes it more discoverable than it has been," said Kristin DiQuollo, creative director of the new YouTube channel.
Content new and old
New episodes of the show — there are nearly 900 in all — aired through 2001. DiQuollo said the channel will post a rotating roster of 10 episodes at a time, including rarely seen shows, along with streaming episodes.
She said the channel will select them thoughtfully. For example, for stretches of its existence, the show did five weekly shows on a given theme, like love or superheroes, and these will be grouped together on YouTube.
"We can also curate the content in a way that makes it helpful and relevant for families," she said. That could include "playlists, for instance, on managing big feelings, or delightful things like playlists and compilations with the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segments," as well as Rogers' dozens of popular "how people make things" visits, including his famous one to a crayon factory.
Eventually, she added, new content is planned, including behind-the-scenes footage from the show and other material from the Fred Rogers Archive, housed at St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Rogers' hometown.
Fred Rogers Productions, which is based in Pittsburgh, created the channel with help from the social media agency and digital production company Little Dot Studios. The channel was funded in part with grants from the Heinz Endowments and Templeton Foundation.
'How do you feel about new things?'
With a statue on the North Side riverfront, and a permanent exhibit at the Heinz History Center, not to mention a Tom Hanks film celebrating him that was partly shot here, Fred Rogers is pretty well-remembered in Pittsburgh.
But in 1967, when that first episode was filmed, Rogers was a 39-year-old ordained Presbyterian minister and little-known TV host. His TV career actually predated both his years at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and his studies at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development.
He had helped developed "The Children's Corner" for WQED in the 1950s, and in the '60s hosted "Misterogers," a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series that served as the basis for its more famous successor. (Though it was videotaped at WQED, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" was first broadcast by National Educational Television, which shortly merged with the then-new Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS.)
Rogers saw much children's programming at the time as frenetically paced, rooted in cruel slapstick comedy, and generally not conducive to healthy child development. From the first, his show stood out as a calm, quiet space on the airwaves.
And indeed, other than the fact that the earliest 30-minute episodes were black-and-white, its look and format changed very little over the decades. Episode one begins with Rogers speaking directly to visitors in TV land to welcome them into what appears to be his home (though he refers to it at one point as a "studio").
He asks us, "How do you feel about new things?" — a theme that recurs when he visits the Neighborhood of Make Believe, where Henrietta Pussycat is wary of change but X the Owl is ready for what's next. Other characters, both puppet and human, will recur countless times during the life of the show, from King Friday to deliveryman Mr. McFeely and even the late Joe Negri.
And of course there are the songs, from the iconic theme "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" to "I Like You As You Are."
'Children still need the same things'
Hedda Sharapan worked on the series from the first to the last, starting as an assistant director and moving up to associate producer and assistant producer. She says it was Rogers who encouraged her to go back to Pitt for her master's degree in child development.
Sharapan, a consultant on the new YouTube channel, said the show's consistency over the years was intentional.
"Fred used to say that the outsides of children may have changed, but not their insides," she said. "They still need the same things. They need trust, they need help dealing with feelings, they need help with curiosity, and creativity, and problem-solving."
Since 1968, of course, children's on-screen culture has gotten only faster, wilder and more ubiquitous.
"I think there are two things that are coming to Fred Rogers' legacy that people are feeling today. One is respect and the other is affection," Sharapan said. "And those two things, they are so much a part of 'Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood,' and so much a part of what we all need in our lives."
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