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…

Hi. There are some Mister Rogers related events that I thought I’d take a sec to bring to everyone’s attention. If these are in your neighborhood you might want to check them out…

On Friday, October 24, Family Communications will conduct a workshop at University of Wisconsin-Stout. Hedda Sharapan, FCI’s Director of Early Childhood Initiatives will be presenting the “What do you Do with the Mad That you Feel?” and Challenging Behvaiors: Where Do We Begin?” seminars. Both of these are part of FCI’s Mister Rogers Professional Development series. Children and the people who care for them are welcome to attend. You can get the specifics here.

Sorry, this next one is invite-only! A special award will be posthumously presented to Fred Rogers at the 41st Annual ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music. The award will be presented during a ceremony and reception on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at The Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Allen Room, Broadway at 60th Street, New York City.

And here’s a lovely event that you may want to check out if you find yourself in the Pittsburgh area around the holidays. Mister Rogers’ musical neighbor, Joe Negri, whom many of you may know is a quite accomplished jazz musician outside of the Neighborhood, will be performing his innovative Mass of Hope at The Carneigie on Saturday, December 20.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has an update on the Tribute to Children memorial that’s being created near Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.  For those not in the know, it’s essentially going to be a small park on the North Shore that will include a stylized 10-foot-tall statue of Fred Rogers by renown sculptor Robert Berks — Rogers was a fan of his work.

The statue itself has been completed for some time, but progress on the site construction has been slow. Our takeaway from the article is that beaucracy has had more than a little to do with it.

Sources close to the project tell Save MRN that it might be ready for March 20, 2009, what would have been Fred Rogers’ 81st birthday. We’ll keep you posted.

Credit: Astorino/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Here’s a glimpse at the sculture and the park courtesy of the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette.

The opening of the Fred Rogers Center at St. Vincent College continues to get play in the press. Here’s an excerpt from a nice piece in Allentown PA’s The Morning Call:

“Fred Rogers, during his lifetime, was not only the most powerful producer of children’s media, but he was the standard setter,” Maxwell King, executive director of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, said at its dedication Thursday at St. Vincent College.

The heart of the center, King said, will be to create national programs to help parents and children deal with media and help media producers create better media for children.

His widow, Joanne, said the center ”keeps Fred alive and he’s been alive for me all along, mostly because of this. Right away, we got busy with this,” she said, adding her husband would have been humbled and fascinated.

Archabott Douglas Nowicki said Rogers made it clear that ”he did not want a museum to himself.”

Still, a modest interactive exhibit focuses on ”Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and includes artifacts such as several of Rogers’ trademark hand-knit cardigan sweaters and a pair of his worn blue canvas sneakers.

Puppets from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, including King Friday, Queen Sara and Daniel Striped Tiger are also on hand. So is the black Royal typewriter and paper on which he taught himself to type in 1943. The original manuscript for ”Won’t You Be My Neighbor” is also on display.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice piece as well, which features a look at part of the exhibit area. Meanwhile, The Pittsburgh Tribute-Review has an article that also includes an image.

We hope to pay a visit to the Center soon to check it out for ourselves. If any of you happen to beat us to it, please let us hear from you. Watch for more stories related to the center popping up online here.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the scoop on the grand opening of the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College.

From the paper:

This $14 million facility is being billed as “green” and is a testament to the red-sweatered man above — a Latrobe native and longtime host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on PBS.

Two stories tall with 36,500 square feet, the center will include the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media; the Fred Rogers Archive; and an interactive exhibit about his life and work.

Also there is his Steinway D Grand piano, on which he composed many of his songs for the show. It was donated by his wife, Joanne.

A group of experts have gathered today for a briefing on Youth-Created Media that’s being streamed live on the Rogers Center website.

The center, which should be a valuable resource for those studying the fields of early learning and children’s media, will have an open-to-the-public space with a self-guided multimedia exhibit. That will be open Monday, October 6th and normal hours will be M-F 8:30AM-4:30PM.

Hi everyone. We have some great news from Brew City! Milwaukee, Wisconsin PBS affiliate MPTV had initially planned to suspend weekday airings of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood starting September 1, but they have reconsidered. We’ve learned that the Neighborhood program will be broadcast Monday-Friday at Noon beginning September 1st on MPTV channels 10 and digital 10.1. And I’m guessing that viewer involvement in our campaign had a little something to do with it. (Special thanks to Milwaukee resident Leah Kim and her family for their active participation!)

We hope that those of you in the MPTV viewing area will join us in expressing our appreciation and, if you’re not already, become a member today!

- Brian

Hi,

Thanks to all of you for continuing to support our cause and for standing up for this timeless children’s program. Sorry for the lack of updates over the past week. Our campaign is still very much alive, but I’ve been unable to post due to a personal matter.

My mother, who introduced me to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood at a young age and reinforced the show’s life-shaping messages in so many ways, passed away. I want to thank those of you who heard about her passing and sent your condolences. She was a very kind, special person.

As the new PBS season begins, and the Neighborhood program is bumped to one airing per week in many areas, we’ll be retooling the website to reflect that. I want to assure all of you, however, that we aren’t going anywhere. We will keep talking about the things that make Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood unique, and our campaign will continue to call for the Monday through Friday airing of the program on all PBS stations. There have been some encouraging developments lately — more on that in an upcoming post — and we care too much about this cause to stop now.

Thank you again for your continued support.

- Brian

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood will remain a part of the weekday schedule on Idaho Public Television. However, as you’ll see in this message, the future of the program is not entirely on solid ground there.

For the fall, Mister Rogers Neighborhood will continue to be a part of our weekday lineup. With the addition of new series each year, however, I cannot guarantee that the series will continue in that slot indefinitely. Each season, we evaluate every children’s series to see if it is still meeting the needs of viewers.

If you’re a concerned viewer in the IPT viewing area, make some noise and let them you want the program to remain on the air five days a week for the foreseeable future.

- Brian

Hi all,

“JJ” writes in with an important point that I felt was important to pass along to you all. I’d sort of assumed this went without saying, but when you’re dealing with a far-reaching internet campaign, I suppose it’s important to ask everyone to pause for a second and think before they take action. Here’s JJ’s note:

Our local PBS station is getting hit with a bunch of emails regarding “saving Mr. Rogers” and keeping the program on the air. Only thing is, it hasn’t been on the station for over two years, since January 2006! The people who are emailing obviously aren’t watching so what kind of message does that send to the station?

If you want to make an impact, don’t ask everyone in your contacts list to forward the email to their PBS station. Ask them to investigate and make an informed decision.

What she says is true: It’s important for you to take a second to educate yourself before contacting your local PBS station. Most member station websites have searchable program schedules, so you can look there to see if Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is still on the air — it is currently on 63% of PBS stations.

If you happen to live in an area where the Neighborhood was removed from the PBS schedule in the past, it’s still important for you to voice your opinion. Let them know you want the show back on the air five days a week! We’d simply ask that you craft the wording of your message to reflect the specific situation with your PBS station.

Thanks, everyone, for your continued support!

- Brian

In 1999, Fred Rogers gave an incredibly in-depth, 4+ hour interview with the Archive of American Television — you can watch the whole thing on Youtube.

In the final segment, the interviewer asks Fred what he hopes will happen to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood after he’s gone.

“I’d like to think that it could continue in being re-shown,” Fred says. “These programs are timeless — they’re sort of like The Wizard of Oz in that they can be read in any epoch.”

Indeed.

Another relevant bit comes up in part 8. Fred is discussing the early struggle to keep the Neighborhood going:

“There was a group mothers in Boston who heard that we might be going off the air. They marched door to door to get people to make contributions to the Children’s Programming Fund. They said that it was essential to keep these programs on the air.

“Clear over in Chicago, people got word of what was happening in Boston — this mothers’ march for the Neighborhood. It came to the attention of Bill McCurdy, who was President of the Sears Foundation at that time. He had been talking with NET about sponsoring something… and he said, ‘Why don’t we try that one?’ … You see, it’s always thanks to people. If it hadn’t been for those mothers… And if it hadn’t been for the good graces of the newspapers that wrote about those mothers… people in Chicago never would have heard about it.”

It’s this same kind of grassroots action that we must take today if the Neighborhood is going to remain on the air. Please call your PBS member station today and tell them you want Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood five days a week.

- Brian