- Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
7/29/18 (Sun)
I was never a big fan of Mr. Rogers, who seemed embarrassingly old-fashioned to me back in the day even before Sesame Street was blowing the neighborhood away. But I’m regretting all those years of neglect after seeing this superb documentary of his life – his view of the role of the emerging medium of television in communicating with children, the radical ideas cloaked in his retrograde and laid-back style, his ability to reach out to children (the most difficult audience in any medium). Rogers felt that the pie-throwing and banana-peel humor of the early children’s shows were downright destructive to little minds seeking simple truths, and sought to bring kids up to his level rather than the other way around by addressing them honestly and directly. It’s difficult to imagine today how strange that must have seemed at the time, especially in the show’s childlike setup: sock puppets, crude sets, basic storylines, unhurried style, simplistic themes. But what could be cloying comes out as oddly compelling in the face of Rogers’ earnestness.
sekenbanashi 