Save Mister Rogers Neighborhood
I don't see many posts about Mister Rogers on Muppet Central, but I fondly watched both Mister Rogers Neighborhood and Sesame Street every day growing up (I even watched in the morning, and then the two same episodes in the evening!)
PBS has decided to no longer transmit the show Monday through Friday starting in September. They will only transmit the show on the weekend. The local PBS affiliates can still choose to air Mister Rogers during the week, but they have to record a stream over the summer and edit the shows, and many local affiliates are choosing to just show Mister Rogers on the weekend when it's streamed from PBS - during the same 8 - 9 am time slot as the popular Saturday morning cartoons we would never want to miss as kids.
My local PBS affiliate WFYI in Indianapolis is no longer going to air Mister Rogers daily, and if I were a betting man I would guess your local station is probably cutting the show as well.
I would encourage you to contact both PBS, and your local PBS affiliate, and ask them to continue to air Mister Rogers Neighborhood Monday through Friday. You can find out more at
www.savemisterrogers.com, find your local affiliate at the
PBS staion finder and contact PBS org
here. I even contacted my congressmen as PBS is tax dollar funded, and
he spoke to congress in the 60's and singlehandedly saved PBS.
I think Mister Rogers helped to make me who I am today, and maybe some of you Muppet fans feel the same way. Besides Mister Rogers Neighborhood, I can't think of another show on television that is still real.
“We were saying when we started that we were interested in the cognitive development of children, primarily. Letters, numbers, preparing them for school. I think Fred would have said is that he is interested in the affective development of children. The psychological and emotional development of children. So we saw us as operating in more in two different spheres. So I think the two shows in some ways are closer, but still extremely complimentary. And children deserve those two shows.”
Joan Ganz Cooney - Founder of Children’s Television Workshop