When the first trailer for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood dropped this week, America collectively cried. Tom Hanks plays Mr. Rogers in the biopic, and the gratifying union of Forrest Gump, Sheriff Woody, and Fred Rogers is everything our child selves could have dreamed.
In the trailer, a journalist is tasked with profiling Mr. Rogers, and his partner tells him, “Please don’t ruin my childhood.” It’s what we’re all thinking at the start of the trailer: If we find out that Mr. Rogers had some shady past, then we certainly don’t need to see a whole film about it.
But the movie promises not to uncover any dubious history, and if you watched the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, you know there aren’t many legitimate complaints you can lodge against Fred Rogers.
The news about Bill Cosby’s sex crime made a lot of people rethink the heroes of their childhoods, but Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood isn’t The Cosby Show. As a television presence, Rogers was peaceful but fierce, committed to providing comfort to children and defending his method of doing it.
“We deal with such things as the inner drama of childhood,” Rogers said in his testimony before a Senate subcommittee in 1969. “We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations, and we speak to it constructively.”
Rogers’ congressional testimony guaranteed more than $20 million in funding for PBS, a big win from such a soft-spoken personality. As his show ran on the network for more than 30 years, he helped countless children cope with personal trauma from bullying to divorce to national tragedies, such as the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
“I don’t think anyone can grow unless he’s loved exactly as he is now, appreciated for what he is rather than what he will be,” Rogers once said. Despite national fame, Rogers was a rare humble presence, more concerned with kindness than anything else.
When public figures too often make the news for showing themselves not to be the people we’d hoped, Mr. Roger’s legacy is both refreshing and inspiring. Let’s hope this new film gets a little more Oscar love than the documentary. We need some figures left to root for.
Mr. Rogers became a hero to many kids. In A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he gets to remain one.
