Forgot one yesterday

Residents of a Make Believe Neighborhood

You may remember that I loved the show, Mister Rogers Neighborhood growing up, in fact I love it still, though it's pretty much vanished from the airwaves. A few years ago I thought it would be fun to illustrate some of the puppet characters from the Neighborhood of Make Believe. I didn't think they had ever been captured very well in books or on merchandise, and thought I'd see if I could do better. I'm sad to say that I didn't pursue it further, but someday maybe I will. Below are the highlights of my efforts, really just quick pencil sketches with some digital color.

To the Neighborhood of Make Believe...

I decided some time ago that I'd love to do a series of illustrations depicting the puppet characters of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. As I've said before, this show had such a huge impact on me growing up, and yet unlike most kids shows, I didn't ever see any merchandise for it. I found out later in my adult life that there was quite a bit of merchandise- books, toys, and records- for some reason I just never saw them as a kid. I was fairly disappointed in the quality of the illustrations though. The flaws ranged from total inaccuracy of the characters and places depicted, to more nit picky stuff like making the puppet characters more human sized. In short, I definitely had opinions about how I thought this sort of thing should be done.

So, in my illustration I wanted to be sure that the puppets were depicted fairly accurately. I'm not opposed to showing them walking around as they have in other books, using legs that they obviously didn't have on the show, but this should be kept to a minimum. Also they should be kept puppet scale. Another thing I wanted to depict were the human cast members interacting with the puppets, something that was never done in the books. I thought a quiet moment between Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger would be a good recognizable moment to depict. This scene occurred countless times over the course of the programs run. Daniel's favorite way to show affection was to rub noses with someone and say "Ugga Mugga".

I'm not a caricaturist, so the one thing I really am not happy with is Lady Aberlin's face- I wanted a very stylized look for the humans, but someone more skilled at caricature probably could have gotten a better resemblance. But overall I'm quite pleased with it. It also confirms my theory that seemingly unimportant details like the colors of the wall, distant hill, and surrounding ground really do say "Neighborhood of Make Believe" just as much as Daniel's clock does. That's something that other books seem to have played a little more loose with. I guess those illustrators were trying to expand the Neighborhood beyond what the show could depict on it's limited budget, but to me it always reeked of disregard for the details of a beloved show.

Daniel Striped Tiger

After I posted my artwork of Corny, from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, I got a lot of requests to see the other characters I had done, with Daniel being by far the most requested.

Ironically, I didn't do any sketches of him in his standard wide eyed shy expression. My main question in tackling each of these characters was to see if you could get any facial expression into them while still keeping them recognizable. I will say he seems to be the easiest. I think his kitten-like appearance is a somewhat familiar cartoon form, and that made it a little easier. That's not true with some of the other characters.

Cornflake S. Pecially

I am a big fan of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, possibly more now as an adult than when I was a kid. Fred Rogers philosophy is something that continues to amaze me the more I learn about it, and requires much more delving beneath the surface than would ever have been possible for this mop-headed kid. Now as an adult who happens to go through obsessive spurts about things from his childhood, I discovered that the website for the Non Profit entity that Fred Rogers founded, sells merchandise based on the show, a really startling revelation because as a kid I didn't see a stick of merchandise- no Neighborhood of Make Believe playsets, no books, no Trolley's, no puppets- bupkiss. It was out there apparently but I certainly never saw any of it. Anyway.... I didn't particularly like the artwork for the merchandise on the site. A lot of it looked very generic, almost as if the artist had never even seen the show, perhaps working from a verbal description only. For a show with 40 years of iconic places and characters, and an audience that undoubtably is very detail oriented (who hasn't had a young kid blow you away with their attention to detail?), this seemed extremely unfortunate. Anyway it got me thinking about drawing the characters and places from the show. I wasn't sure how much time I'd have to devote to it, and as of this moment it's only resulted in one painting and a lot of sketches with some digital color. But below is one of my first and favorites.

For those who may not remember this fella, this is Cornflake S. Pecially. Corny to his friends. He works (and lives?) in a pink factory just to the right of King Friday's Castle. He touts himself as a man who manufactures, and his specialty is Rocking Chairs, which he calls Rockits, though he has been known to make just about anything that needs making: dolls, pretzels, trolley's, annoying talking horses. His museum caught fire once, and Lady Elaine once thought that they were engaged.

After drawing a couple of Mr. Rogers characters I think I'm realizing that Corny was always one of my favorites, though I couldn't really tell you why. His voice (as provided by Fred Rogers) was kinda funny, a sort of scratchy, high pitched "old man" voice, I always thought. He looked like some sort of chipmunk with his one tooth sticking out and his hair was always dissheveled. think he may have been one of the most capable of the puppet characters on the show. Besides Dr. Bill and Gran Pere', he was one of the few who didn't show too much dysfunction. He just went about his business and was friendly, unlike Lady Elaine or King Friday both who caused trouble in one way or another. Perhaps as a kid I liked his stability.

I did this drawing in under a minute (5 more for color), and I really like how effortless it looks. Many of the puppets on the show don't lend themselves to much expression (and my attempts at them weren't as successful), but Corny's grin and easygoing manner were easy to translate. Perhaps I'll post some of the other Mr. Rogers pieces in a future post.