Revisiting Mister Rogers at the Crayon Factory and What It Meant

Crayola If you were to rank the most blissed-out segment in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood , you would have a monumental task ahead of you. Each show is 28 minutes of zen. But easily making it into the top five recurring warm-bath segments are the factory tours. Watching red balls take shape, pretzel dough go into the oven, the Crayola factory come to life, and a cloud of cotton getting brushed into a towel with Fred Rogers’ calm , interested voiceover makes for good television, sure, but it does so much more. These segments show the magic of work — that an object is the sum of its parts plus labor, and this process is a sight to behold. Rogers wanted to show kids that our chaotic world is an orderly place with meaning, if we just take time to look below the surface. As an adult looking back at these segments, it’s clear to me the world just isn’t that simple anymore. Sure, the adult viewpoint complicates things (“Who’s their manager?”; “I wonder what overtime pay is like?”), But so does the world economy. Companies don’t just make a single thing anymore. For better and worse, the world just doesn’t work like that. There’s perhaps no better example of this than in Mister Rogers’ visit to the Crayola factory. The episode, which ran on June 1, 1981, sent the team packing to Easton, Pennsylvania, to explore one of the most familiar objects for kids: the crayon. The segment begins, as most factory segments do, with Mister Rogers approaching the picture frame and a slow zoom taking u…