As a caring man attuned to the needs of children, he challenges prevalent gender stereotypes while celebrating the body in the best Whitmanesque manner, “a strain of ecstatic naturalism” in which the body is seen “as part of a real person” (Guy 104). The program demonstrates an almost Brechtian focus on process as opposed to theatrical realism, and in postmodern parlance, erases the distinction between character and actor: Mister Rogers always and only plays himself. As one critic notes, Fred Rogers combines the early television wizardry of Ernie Kovacs with a profound anticommercial sensibility (Bianculli 40). After reading this book of essays in tribute to his years of work in children’s programming, I can argue that Rogers’s TV aesthetic provides an antidote to those slicker television productions intent on the manufacture of kid-size consumers with adult appetites for commodified pleasures of all sorts. With his trademark cardigan and old-timey sneakers, Fred Rogers hardly seems an exemplar of the subversive, antiestablishment media artist.
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