One topic that has come up a few times on the Neighborhood Archive message board over the past few weeks has been the content of Episode 37 from 1968. For those who have not been a part of this message board conversation, you might be surprised to learn that the question at hand is this: On the Neighborhood program, was Mr. McFeely a smoker?
Let's start with what led to this question in the first place. According to the summary of Episode 37 found on the University of Pittsburgh Library's online catalog, Mister Rogers "talks about how he is sometimes angered by Mr. McFeely's smoking."
There it is in black and white. I had never seen this myself until it was pointed out to me by readers of the Archive site. Included in the most recent batch of episodes provided to me for the site, I was able to check Episode 37 first hand.
And guess what.
No smoking.
Mr. McFeely does indeed appear in this episode and the rest of the description from the Pitt library is accurate; however, there is nothing in the episode that suggests that Mr. McFeely is a smoker.
So then the question became -- was this episode edited at a later time to remove this content once smoking became less "socially acceptable?" While this is a possibility, I just couldn't believe that this was ever included in a Neighborhood visit to begin with. So I sought out the help of a reliable source from the Fred Rogers Company and here is what I learned.
1. Mr. McFeely never smoked and no mention was ever made of him smoking.
2. This was clearly something added (for whatever reason) by the person documenting this episode at Pitt.
3. According to Pitt, this information is part of a permanent database and cannot be edited.So there it is. The story behind the story.
Mr. McFeely. Non-smoker.
6 comments:
Thanks for posting this. I heard this rumor for a while, and I often wondered about it. I didn't think Mr. McFeely was a smoker, but I did wonder about that.
Couldn't you tell from the running time of the episode whether something had been edited out?
Galen -- Not necessarily. A few times in later episodes content was slightly edited but then reshot. The end result was an episode the same length as the original. So I assumed the possibility of some content being reshot in 1968 would have been there too.
Wow, great research. This is totally the reason I come to this blog.
A database that cannot be edited is, by definition, a bad database. I really don't think that situation just just be accepted idly.
Hmm what an odd little thing, just one line in an obscure database, and look how far it spread. I hadn't heard the rumor myself but it reminds me of an episode (probably an older one as I never saw it again) where, if memory serves, Mr. McFeely says that he's a bit upset, that his grandchildren have said they don't like playing with him because his hands are too fast. I was probably around 13 or 14 when I saw this, the age where you very easily hear veiled innuendo everywhere, even when you know it's unintentional, and I laughed with a friend at how inappropriately phrased I thought that was. Does anyone remember that episode? I think the gist of what Mr. McFeely was saying was that he was going to make a concerted effort to slow down.
Back to the topic at hand, I don't think I would find it that strange if Fred were to have made a comment about a character smoking. Children of smokers undoubtably do have feelings about the subject, and probably did even before it was talked about as much as it is today. Mr. McFeely being of an older generation would be an obvious character to have this habit bestowed on, perhaps being less enlightened than younger people (was anyone very enlightened about smoking in the 60's?). I doubt anyone would have batted an eye if this had actually aired the way it was described- smoking was so incredibly commonplace. Perhaps the only unusual thing would be Fred's bringing it up at all and perhaps suggesting that what Mr. McFeely was doing was somehow wrong, if in fact that's the tactic he took.
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