Revisiting Mister Rogers at the Crayon Factory and What It Meant

If you were to rank the most blissed-out segment in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, you would have a monumental task ahead of you. Each show is 28 minutes of zen. But easily making it into the top five recurring warm-bath segments are the factory tours. Watching red balls take shape, pretzel dough go into the oven, the Crayola factory come to life, and a cloud of cotton getting brushed into a towel with Fred Rogers’ calm, interested voiceover makes for good television, sure, but it does so much more. These segments show the magic of work — that an object is the sum of its parts plus labor, and this process is a sight to behold. Rogers wanted to show kids that our chaotic world is an orderly place with meaning, if we just take time to look below the surface.

As an adult looking back at these segments, it’s clear to me the world just isn’t that simple anymore. Sure, the adult viewpoint complicates things (“Who’s their manager?”; “I wonder what overtime pay is like?”), But so does the world economy. Companies don’t just make a single thing anymore. For better and worse, the world just doesn’t work like that.

There’s perhaps no better example of this than in Mister Rogers’ visit to the Crayola factory. The episode, which ran on June 1, 1981, sent the team packing to Easton, Pennsylvania, to explore one of the most familiar objects for kids: the crayon. The segment begins, as most factory segments do, with Mister Rogers approaching the picture frame and a slow zoom taking us into the scene, which happened to be of a great big tanker train. From there, colorful visual flow and fade in and out as in a fever dream. This vision is mostly beside the point. The heart of the experience comes through in Rogers’ methodical language, as if he is putting the crayons together with his words:

“The train is full of hot wax. And from the tank it’s poured into a kind of big kettle with a kind of powder that makes the wax hard. After that, they put in the pigment, which is like colored flour.

This pigment is yellow, so it’s used to make yellow crayons.

Now all of that hot wax and hardener and pigment is mixed together into a kind of pouring bucket… into a mold for lots of crayons. Each little hole will be filled with the colored wax.

See how they pour that in?

That colored wax is going into all those holes. And a little later, each one of those holes will show a crayon coming up. People wait for about five minutes for the yellow wax to get hard. Then they scrape of the top which they’ll melt and use again

Now watch the crayons come into the crayon collectors.

There they are.

Look at all those yellow crayons. Handfuls of yellow crayons. It’s like a ferris wheel, isn’t it? These crayons get lots of rides.

To make up big boxes of crayons, many little boxes are put together in one big box. Then they’re all put into a big shipping box. And then people take those boxes to the stores where other people come to buy them.”

The segment, to this kid at least, was mind-blowing. It initially complicated the relationship with a familiar object, dissecting it into its essential and unfamiliar parts, before slowly bringing it back in a solid, familiar form. Out of a steaming train and molten swirling yellow liquids and people moving boxes and cylinders of wax comes crayons. This is how crayons are made. This is what work looks like. The world makes sense.

On its surface, it seems like not much has changed. The crayon-making process at Crayola is, wonderfully and surprisingly, not all that different. There’s a bit more automation. There are fewer people. But the modern-day crayon-making process (as you can see here in a 2014 video from Wired) is pretty damn similar to the one Mister Rogers showed us. It’s still visual gold. It’s hard labor. It’s how things are made.

But of course, things have changed. Some 37 years later, the world is a lot more complicated and so is this crayon factory. Crayola is still be based in Easton, Pennsylvania, but its supply chain is international, its products more complex and wide-ranging than crayons, and its core value all the muddier. The quiet essence of the yellow crayon and the crayon factory producing crayons, and the factory worker making crayons is lost.

There’s this plot twist in The Good Place, an excellent show about how to live a moral life in modern times, where, spoiler alert, the main character realizes that everyone goes to the bad place because the world is too complicated for good to exist. A good act, like ordering flowers for grandma, they propose, is complicated by the fact that those flowers have high CO2 emissions, the phone used to order them was built in a sweatshop, and the shipping company used to keep costs down is hellbent on union-busting.

Likewise, the making of yellows crayons — handfuls of yellow crayons — is complicated by modern economic forces. You can look deep into the supply chain that churns out familiar objects, but unlike in Rogers’ time, there’s no coming back to the Platonic ideal. What does Crayola manufacture? Crayons. Also, crafts, this weird springy clay stuff, animals that ooze, pricey museum-like experiences, cheap screen-based experience, slightly horrifying 5-foot-tall talking crayons, and some very colorful marketing. In other words, it’s complicated.

Read Original