5 WTF Facts About Mr. Rogers Hiding in Plain Sight on His Wikipedia Page
Mister Rogers’ Wikipedia page is a testament to his wholesomeness, thoughtfulness and the impact he’ll leave on the fields of public broadcasting and child psychology, for generations to come. But it’s not without its red flags. For starters, I bet you can’t guess how many times the word “cum” appears.
‘Rogers Spent Much of His Childhood Alone, Playing With Puppets’
If someone wrote that about me, I’d step in front of the trolley that runs through my living room.
But Fred was no puppet tourist; this guy really walked the walk. All the way up until high school, he didn’t have two friends to rub together to make a third. What he did have was asthma and a cruel nickname — all the other kids called him “Fat Freddy” — so he spent his entire childhood entertaining himself with his stuffed animals and a ventriloquist dummy.
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When he was 25, he got the opportunity to build an army of puppets for a Pittsburgh public TV station, including some familiar faces that he would take with him to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood 15 years later, like Tom Cruise stealing that goldfish in Jerry Maguire. Daniel the Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII, Queen Sara Saturday, X the Owl, Henrietta and Lady Elaine all started out on a show called The Children’s Corner. He designed, wrote and voiced almost all of his puppets for the next several decades.
Sure, he was no Jeff Dunham when it comes to voices, impressions and racism. But the characters he created remained consistent and vital for almost 900 episodes. His goofy little sock puppets have been described by a biographer as “complex, complicated and utterly honest beings.”
What Did Fred Rogers Know About the Assassination of RFK?!
South Park gets a lot of credit for its quick-turnaround, piping hot takes. But Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood broadcast a segment about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days after it happened.
Daniel Tiger grinds a perfectly innocent balloon tutorial to a halt when he asks Lady Aberlin, out of the blue, “What does assassination mean?” She looks appropriately disturbed. When the deep state is taking out U.S. senators, asking questions can be very dangerous business. Lady Aberlin explains: “It means somebody getting killed, in a sort of surprise way.” They discuss it a little further, and Daniel — wisely, in our opinion — opts to skip out on picnicking on a grassy knoll and lock himself indoors instead. Where Big Brother can’t get to him.
This is either an astounding feat of TV production and child psychology… or someone tipped off Fred Rogers.
‘I Went Into Television Because I Hated It’
I don’t think he’d mind us saying: Mr. Rogers was a bit of a dork. He didn’t watch TV until his parents got one in the middle of his senior year of college, and he immediately decided he hated the whole thing. Still, he recognized it as a way to spread his message to the masses: “I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen.”
He spent the first part of his career toiling as a producer and developer, which was perfectly fine with him. He got his big on-air break the same way Robin Williams did in Mrs. Doubtfire — the head of children’s programming at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation told him, “Fred, I’ve seen you talk with kids. Let’s put you yourself on the air.”
He was given a 15-minute show on the CBC, called MisteRogers. It went well enough, but he wanted to move back to Pittsburgh, so he bought the rights to his name and show, and just kind of hoped for the best. He showed up in Pittsburgh with no real connections, and pitched his show around until WQED Studios took the bait.
He Was a Mother Lovin’ Son of a So-and-So
Please excuse my language. You’ll see why I had to do it to ‘em in a second.
Fred Rogers was a virtue signaler, in all the best ways. He was a devoutly religious man, but his philosophy was: “You don’t need to speak overtly about religion in order to get a message across.” Instead, he modeled morality on his hit TV show by, say, washing the feet of his gay, Black mailman at the height of racial tensions in the late 1960s, and making sure to verbally declare when he was feeding his fish, after a deaf child wrote in saying they were worried about them.
Speaking of fish — he went pescatarian after his father died, and later went full Super Saiyan vegetarian. He became co-owner of The Vegetarian Times, and explained that his interest in sustainable consumption was both for his own personal health, and for moral and ethical reasons. He summed it up in his publication: “I couldn’t eat anything that had a mother.”
The Word ‘Cum’ Appears a ShockingOkay, the vast majority of these are because of twin 2018 doCUMentaries Mister Rogers: It’s You I Like and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
By the way — after he’d already been cast as Fred Rogers in the 2019 film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Tom Hanks found out that he and Fred are actually sixth cousins! There. Don’t say you didn’t learn anything in this entry.
Anyway, the last two “cum”s are his own fault — Fred graduated magna cum laude from both Rollins College in 1951 and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962. If he didn’t have to be such an overachiever, we wouldn’t have to cancel his ass.