It’s time to put on your coziest cardigan and head over to YouTube.
Starting Thursday, there is — for the first time — an official YouTube channel dedicated to the work of Fred Rogers, the beloved children’s television host.
Aside from clips and compilations from his show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the channel will make a selection of full-length episodes available globally for the first time as well as some that haven’t aired in several decades on PBS stations, the show’s original home. The final new episode of the show aired 25 years ago, and the program is approaching its 60th anniversary in 2028.
“Our goal is to help make Mr. Rogers more discoverable and shareable than ever,” Kristin DiQuollo, the creative director of the YouTube channel for Fred Rogers Productions, said in an interview.
Before the YouTube channel, episodes of the show were available on PBS and its PBS Kids app, along with free and subscription options on streaming services like Amazon prime and Pluto TV.
In part because of the success of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the show will re-emerge in the digital children’s programming space that is much more crowded, where kids binge on programs made by entertainers like Rachel Griffin Accurso, better known as Ms. Rachel, and animated shows like “Bluey.” (Accurso, who has often drawn comparisons to Rogers, has said she reveres him like “a saint.”)
Rogers hated the medium of television when he first came across it in 1951 as a senior at Rollins College in Florida. He had planned to become a Presbyterian minister, but soon found himself intrigued, and shifted his plans to chase a TV career.
“I saw people throwing pies in each other’s faces, and I thought, ‘This could be a wonderful tool for education!’ Why is it being used this way?” Rogers said in a 1999 interview with the Archive of American Television. “So I said to my parents: ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll go into seminary right away. I think I’ll go into television.’”
In 1954, Rogers developed “The Children’s Corner” for Pittsburgh’s public television station, WQED. “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” premiered in 1968. He hosted 895 episodes of the show over more than three decades, until to 2001.
The stewards of Rogers’s legacy have found ways to keep reintroducing him to new audiences over the decades since his death in 2003. For example, in 2009, a media firm named Fablevision partnered with Family Communications Inc. (which eventually became the Fred Rogers Company) to introduce a website dedicated to Rogers’s work. Three years later, the first episode of “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” the still-running animated series inspired by Rogers’s work, aired on PBS.
Tom Hanks played Rogers in “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a 2019 feature film that invited nostalgic tributes to the host. In 2021, Rollins College commemorated Rogers with a statue and “Donkey Hodie,” another animated spinoff of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” premiered on PBS. (DiQuollo is a co-executive producer of that show.)
More recently, Lady Gaga sang the theme song from the show — “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” — as part of a Super Bowl commercial this year. Last month, the men’s wear brand Todd Snyder released a limited-edition cardigan and sneakers inspired by Rogers. And also last month, the U.S. Postal Service reissued a stamp featuring Rogers.
“Fred’s lessons are timeless,” DiQuollo said. His messages on kindness and community endure, she added, because “they’re very simple and they’re relatable because they are human, whether you’re 3 years old or 30 years older.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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