Autotuned Mr Rogers tribute

Robbo sez, "John Boswell is well know for making cool musical concoctions with auto-tuned scientists explaining the glory and wonder of the natural universe - the Symphony of Science. Now he's teamed up with PBS to craft this tribute to Mister Rogers and apparently this is just the first of a series they plan on making."

This is a wonderful piece, and very true to Mr Rogers' sincere and gentle affect.

Mister Rogers Remixed | Garden of Your Mind | PBS Digital Studios (Thanks, Robbo!)

• [Dave X]

  Misters Yummy and Whippy need a dose of this guy, for real. BTW, I declared 6/10 to be Mr. Rogers day. Just because I’m not famous doesn’t mean it’s not so. Have fun with it!

• [Boundegar]

  How wonderful.  I want to be him when I grow up.

• [Michael Leddy]

  In 2o08 PBS stopped offering Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to stations on a daily basis. Some stations still show one episode a week. PBS might offer a more fitting tribute by bringing the Neighborhood back to television. 

• [Smoobly Renfrew]

  That was really nice. I miss Fred Rogers.

  Thanks.

• [beaker]

  It’s a rare thing when BoingBoing is late to the party.  This masterpiece went viral already yesterday. May its multi-level awesomeness disseminate far and wide!

  • [mykie242]

    Yet, if BoingBoing wouldn’t have posted it, myself and many others wouldn’t have seen it.

    So I’m thankful they did.

    Just because a site doesn’t get the scoop first doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be posted.

    • [millie fink]

      Exactly, me 2.

      There’s more to BB than being first with everything.

  • [dasanjos]

    Welcome to life on the 21st century: one day old news is too old news? :-)

• [skyhawk1]

  Total WIN!

• [mtdna]

  Mr. Rogers would have loved – loved – loved to hear that.

• [Flagrant_Foul]

  Fantastic

• [CaptainPedge]

  What a lovely piece of music and a lovely sentiment. If his show is/was anything like the way it is represented here, I would pay good money to be able to show it to my future children.

  • [Ryan_T_H]

    His shows wasn’t simply ‘like the way it was represented here’, it was one of the most humble and genuine pieces of media ever produced. It is snark proof. There is no way to watch it ironically. And it is made so by the complete honest commitment of Fred Rogers to making the lives of every other person in the world better and leading by example.

    Two links to watch. The first is Rogers shaming twenty million out of the US Senate for public broadcasting in six minutes by appealing to their better nature. And having them discover that, to their surprise as much as anyone else, finding out they have one.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXEuEUQIP3Q

    The second is Mr. Rogers accepting an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement. And using his speech time to take ten seconds out for everyone to think about people they love. And bringing a room full of cynical industry types to tears by being so earnest about it.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upm9LnuCBUM

    His car was once stolen. When the thieves found out whose car it was they returned it with an apology note. Mr. Rogers was the Chuck Norris of making the world a better place.

    • [Andrew Singleton]

      Many men look up to Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris looks up to Fred Rodgers.

      Also his middle name is McFeely. He is literally the only person who could get away with that as a name and be on a kid’s show with no word or hint of any sort of untoward behavior.

      He was once asked to come down against homosexuality and the like by fundamentalists. His response God loves everyone just the way they are.Burger King once did a parody that had a strong likeness to him: He told them to stop. They did, and apologized (this unlike the SNL parody because Eddy Murphy’s was obviously different and was on after his target audience was in bed.)

      There is no evidence Fred Rodgers had tatoos or was a sniper.

    • [CaptainPedge]

       *snrk* There’s something in my eye…

• [Matthew Miller]

  That’s beautiful. It could have been a joke — like the Carl Sagan autotuned video really is — but somehow the power of the source material transcends that and transforms it.

  • [penguinchris]

    In which galaxy is the Carl Sagan autotune video a joke (there is now a series of them done by the same guy but most people are just familiar with the first one)? 

    This Mr. Rogers video was absolutely wonderful, and more easily tugs at the heartstrings, perhaps. Rogers transcends sincerity and honesty and as others have commented, you really can’t make a joke out of him.

    But watch “A Glorious Dawn” again if you haven’t. It’s equally as aspirational and sincere, and very much inspirational (and while I am a trained scientist surely it doesn’t take that to appreciate Sagan or the autotune). It’s a Wonderful Thing, as is this one, and speaks to an optimism and sincerity that’s severely lacking in today’s culture.

• [Mark Phipps]

  The nearest I can think of an equivalent UK presenter that I warmed to was Johnny Ball. He was everything you could want in an uncle. Feel like I missed out as he appears so genuine. He must of been very popular. 

  • [Jardine]

    The Canadian equivalent is Mr. Dressup (Ernie Coombs). Strangely enough, Ernie Coombs was brought to Canada from the US by Fred Rogers to work on an early version of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for the CBC. Mr. Rogers returned to the US but Ernie stayed in Canada and eventually created Mr. Dressup.

    • [jellyfishattack]

       I loved Mr. Dressup and Mr. Rogers!!

    • [Ryan_T_H]

      When I have kids I am going to put together a big media collection of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Mr. Dressup, The Friendly Giant and classic Sesame Street. Maybe the Elephant Show too.

      This will be all my kids can watch until they are about 4 years old, and they are free to watch as much as they like. I don’t care if I have to personally break into the CBC archives to get the original Betacam tapes and transcode it myself.

      • [Andrew Singleton]

        Want help? PBS should have torrents avalible of all their archived material. I mean it’s public television right? Then again they make money to run the network off of merch sales….

        Moral Quandry there.

        • [Donald Petersen]

          If you happen to have Amazon Prime, you can stream a whole bunch of old Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood episodes whenever you like for free, through Amazon Instant Video.

          Totally worth it.  Even with its rather slow pacing (glacial by the standards of today’s children’s programming), my 2-year-old is fully engaged in it.

• [Christopher Wells]

  Fred Rogers took a lot of flak over the years, and the thing is he took it with dignity and even laughed at some of the jokes about him, himself. I think the world and it’s children still need a Mr. Rogers and his wonderful neighborhood.

• [voiceinthedistance]

  Fred approves of this video!  Very well executed.

• [jerwin]

  Fred Rogers doesn’t need to be autotuned

  • [headcode]

    Whenever I’m listening to the radio (I know, who does that any more?) and I hear an autotuned vocal I cannot change the station fast enough.  However, I am still quite charmed by the Mr. Rogers tribute.  Perhaps it’s just a testament to how great he is, that I’ll put aside autotune disgust for Mr. Rogers delight.

    • [benher]

      Maybe it’s also because (thanks to so much top-40 garbage) “autotuning” is now synonymous with “turning the autotune setting way up until it makes a throat ripping warble of brain explodery.” 

      Nowadays, all music is autotuned at some point during production. If you really had to change the station if an autotuned song came on, there would be no station left for you to listen to.

• [benher]

  John Boswell is really going in a good direction with this stuff. Watching this I felt the same heart string pangs as when I first watched his initial “Symphony of Science” debut (Glorious Dawn) If anyone is experiencing his work for the first time here, I highly highly suggest you check out his other videos.
  Worth noting, he also makes a large portion of his work available for DRM free listening on his HP (plus lyrics, links, extra goodness)

• [noah django]

  We miss you, Mr. Rogers.
  http://reflectionsfromaredhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/peace-sign-coloring-pages-2.jpg

• [euansmith]

  I’ve never seen Mr Rogers before; but that was lovely. Thank you for sharing it.

  Hopefully UK’s Johnny Ball will be a similar tribute when he finally thinks of his last number… I hope his son in law (Norman Cook) gets on the 1s and 2s for that.

• [T]

  I’m way too old to have grown up with Mr. Rogers but discovered him as a stay-at-home dad rearing my infant and toddler daughter in the early 2000′s.
  I found the grace and beauty he embodied to be exactly the role model bearing the exact message I wanted my daughter to exposed to. The fact that this minister considered this to be his vocation and the TV to be his pulpit wasn’t lost on me. Finally I decided I had to share this admiration I was feeling for his work and mailed him a fairly involved letter. Some time later out of the blue I got a fairly thick envelope back with several autographed photos and a personal letter to my daughter as well as a hand typed two page personal letter to me. Less than three months later he was dead.
  Even in his illness he chose to reach out and share.
  Mr. Rogers was the real deal. We’re lucky he was here.
  Thanks Mr. Rogers! I like you just the way that you are.

• [Mark Freid]

  I’m surprised at the amount of people approving of Mr. Rogers being autotuned. I was under the impression (and opinion) that autotune is always an abomination, no matter who it is done to.

  • [voiceinthedistance]

    I believe it is the setting on the knobs, not the knobs themselves that are the problem.  Execution makes all the difference.

• [miasm]

  I have no connection to this man, never saw video of him before today that I remember and I still got emotions dancing behind my eyes.

• [hanoverfiste]

  I saw this on the top of YouTube the other day, and it made me cry.  My 6 year old was at the computer with me and he had never seen Mr Rogers before (forgot to show him that one, was to busy showing him Classic Doctor Who, my older son had been exposed to Fred Rogers.). Anyway, afterwords we clicked a related video that was a full episode of the show, and I got to enjoy watching him watch Mr. Rogers.  My son fully enjoyed the show.

  My sorta  Mr. Roger anecdote:  When I was about 3, Mr. Rogers made an appearance at a nearby Toys-R-Us.  I knew from TV promos he was coming. That Saturday my dad had to pick up new glasses from a store very nearby.  We drove past Toys-R-Us and my folks saw a line out to the parking lot and kept going.

  From time to time when I was older I thought about writing Mr. Rogers for his autograph, even up to the point that he retired, including a letter with that story but I never did.