It’s A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood: A Look Back At Mr. Rogers

Challenging Sight

If you watch a Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood episode now, you’ll notice that he is constantly explaining everything he is doing, which even applied to feeding his fish. He began doing this after getting a letter from a young blind girl who would listen to his show. She said that she wanted to know what was happening, so he began to describe what he was doing so he could “show” her and other children like her.

Mr. Rogers actually had his own vision problems; he had red-green color blindness. The condition causes people to have difficulty distinguishing between red, green, orange, and brown. Some people with this condition also have issues telling purple and blue apart. Red-green color blindness or “deuteranopia” is actually the most common type of color blindness.

Mr. Roger’s Learning Props and Daniel Tiger

An interesting fact about the famous little red trolley that comes around the tracks every episode is that it would travel about 5,000 miles in only one year of filming. Wow! Another interesting prop tidbit is that there were not any hands on Daniel Striped Tiger’s clock in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Mr. Rogers purposely did this because the goal of his show was for kids to use their imagination. He touted that if there were no hands on the clock, they could imagine it was any time they wanted it to be.

Daniel Striped Tiger was actually one of the first characters Rogers created. His first appearance was on the show The Children’s Corner, one of Mr. Rogers first shows, in 1955. Currently, a new generation of kids can still experience the magic of Mr. Rogers through the spin-off cartoon Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. The animated show started on PBS in 2012, and Daniel Tiger teaches kids about issues like dealing with feelings. The new show has already won many awards and was nominated for the Television Critics’ Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming.