Today marks the final airing of Mr. Dressup on CBC TV. Ernie Coombs, the man behind the moniker, retired in 1996 but CBC continued airing re-runs. It had been on the air for nearly 30 years. According to CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay: “The thinking is that 11 years of reruns is enough. We have to think about other things to do with our children’s programming.”
     And, says this blogger, “There’s little doubt that ‘other programming’ will be more frenetic, less gentle, and completely lacking a Tickle Trunk.” The blogger writes:

When I heard that Ernie Coombs had died, a part of me was happy. He died in the early days of September of 2001, news of his death obscured by the bigger things that happened that autumn. When I heard the news, a few days after he had died, after “everything changed,” I remember thinking that I was glad that Mr. Dressup hadn’t lived to see that. Ernie Coombs died on September 18, 2001, after a stoke on September 10. Amid my grief, that distant and acute grief of losing an icon of childhood, I felt relief that a man most often described as gentle hadn’t had to see what the rest of us had.

The Calgary Sun is reporting that after 11 years of daily reruns, Mr. Dressup will disappear forever from the CBC lineup in September. According to the Sun:

The network’s management has been reworking its children’s lineup over the past several years and decided it was time for the friendly, bespectacled Mr. Dressup and his “Tickle Trunk” to go.
     In his prime, Mr.Dressup would draw 500,000 preschoolers every day, but ratings have been in steady decline.
     Ernie Coombs, the man who was Mr. Dressup, died of a stroke at 73 in 2001.

I hope the CBC will offer a discounted (DID YOU HEAR ME — DISCOUNTED!!!) DVD so that I can raise my kids with Mr. Dressup and not the bullshit on television these days.
     Ernie Coombs came to Canada in 1963 with Fred Rogers to launch the original Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Rogers took his show to U.S. public television a year later, leaving Coombs to create Mr. Dressup on Butternut Square in 1964. The series became Mr. Dressup in 1967 and remained in production until Valentine’s Day, 1996. In all, Coombs logged 32 years and 4,000 shows as the the fun-loving character with his puppet friends Casey and Finnegan.