As many of you who’ve been following this campaign for a while will know, PBS has said that their plans include bringing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood episodes online — it was a key point in their press release announcing the show’s weekday demise. So, not surprisingly, a question we’ve been getting a lot is… “Well, where are they!?”

Unfortunately, it would seem that there are no plans for the immediate future. It’s a real shame, especially for children in the areas where the Neighborhood program is no longer being aired each weekday. We hope you’ll continue to contact PBS and let them know how important it is to keep the Neighborhood available to today’s children and the people who care for them.

One point of concession, there are 12 episodes that can be streamed from PBSKidsPlay.org, PBS’ subscription online service. Not exactly the entire library, but it’s worth checking out using the available free trial.

One special thing to note… The site features an animated Neighborhood of Make-Believe environment that would be A LOT better if they had bothered to try to get the character voices even remotely close to the way they originally sounded. (C’mon! I can do a better X the Owl than the person they’re using.)

While navigating around the site, I began to wonder… Would the Neighborhood of Make-Believe work as an animated program? It would be tricky to create an animated program that was true to the nurturing spirit of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but if it were done with the excellence and care that Fred Rogers employed on his show, I think it could be a special, unique thing.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments…