If you could rate the happiest part of it Mr Rogers placeyou would have a great task ahead of you. Each show is 28 minutes of zen. But simply making it into the top five repetitive parts of a warm bath is a factory trip. Watching red balls grow, pretzel dough go into the oven, the Crayola factory come to life, and a cloud of cotton be brushed by a towel with Fred Rogers’ soothing voice makes for good television, sure, but it does so much more. These parts show the magic of work – that something is the sum of its parts and work, and this process is a sight to behold. Rogers wanted to show children that our chaotic world is an orderly place with meaning, if only we take the time to look below.
As an adult looking back at these stages, it is clear to me that the world is not that simple. Sure, the perspective of adults makes things difficult (“Who’s their boss?”; “I wonder how the overtime pay is?”), but so does the global economy. Companies no longer just do one thing. For better or for worse, the world doesn’t work like that.
Perhaps there is no better example of this than Mr. Rogers’ visit to the Crayola factory. The episode, which aired on June 1, 1981, sent a team packed into Easton, Pennsylvania, to test one of the most familiar objects to children: the crayon. The segment begins, as many factory segments do, with Mister Rogers approaching a picture frame and a slow zoom takes us to the scene, which turns out to be a large tank train. From there, a colorful flow that appears and fades in and out like in a fever dream. This idea is mostly beside the point. The heart of the experience comes through Rogers’ methodical language, as if mixing crayons with his words:
“The train is full of hot glue, and from the tank it is poured into a kind of big kettle with a kind of powder that hardens the glue, and then they add color like colored flour.
This pigment is yellow, so it is used to make yellow crayons.
Now all that hot wax and hardener and pigment is mixed together in a kind of pouring bucket… into a mold for more crayons. Each small hole will be filled with colored wax.
Do you see how that works?
That colored wax gets into all those holes. Later, each of those holes will show a crayon coming out. People wait about five minutes for the yellow glue to harden. Then they scrape the surface to be melted and used again
Now look at the crayons coming to crayon collectors.
Here they are.
Look at all those yellow crayons. Hands of yellow crayons. It’s like a ferris wheel, right? These crayons get a lot of rides.
To make large boxes of crayons, many small boxes are combined into one large box. Then they are all put into a big shipping box. Then people take those boxes to the shops where other people will buy them.”
The part, for this kid at least, was impressive. At first the relationship with the ordinary was strange, splitting it into its essential and idiosyncratic parts, before gradually restoring it to a solid, ordinary form. Out of the hot train and the yellow liquid that melts and the people moving the boxes and cylinders of wax come out of the crayons. This is how crayons are made. This is what the job looks like. The world makes sense.
On the face of it, it seems that not much has changed. The process of making Crayola crayons is, surprisingly and surprisingly, not that different. There are more defaults. There are a few people. But the modern process of making crayons (as you can see here in the 2014 video from It has strings) is very similar to the one Mister Rogers showed us. It is still visible gold. It’s hard work. It’s the way things are done.
However, things have changed. Some 37 years later, the world is more complicated and so is the crayon industry. Crayola still operates in Easton, Pennsylvania, but its supply chain is international, its products more complex and broader than crayons, and its core value all muddier. The silent essence of the yellow crayon and the crayon factory that produces the crayons, and the factory worker that makes the crayons is lost.
There is this application Nice placean excellent show about how to live a moral life in modern times, where, spoiler alertthe main character realizes that everyone is going to a bad place because the world is too complicated for good to exist. A noble deed, like ordering flowers for grandma, they suggest, is complicated by the fact that those flowers have high CO2 emissions, the phone used to order them was made in a sweatshop, and the shipping company used to keep costs down is hellbent on union-busting.
Similarly, the making of yellow crayons – yellow crayons – complicated by modern economic forces. You can look deep into the supply chain that brings out the usual stuff, but unlike Rogers’ time, there is no return to Plato’s good. What does Crayola produce? Crayons. Also, crafts, this weird clay thing, wiggly animals, expensive museum-like experiences, cheap screen-based information, scary 5-foot-tall talking crayons, and other colorful marketing. In other words, it’s complicated.
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Since the days of Mr. Rogers, American goods have increasingly come from distant countries and the way they are made in those places is not visible. When you see a video from, say, FoxCon, a major electronics manufacturer in China, it usually highlights human rights violations, not shows the work being done. The crayons, too, were not without stain. While Pennsylvania continues to be the center of US crayon production – with 13.5 million crayons made there per day – there have been competitors from factories whose standards are not as high. A major scandal 25 years ago, leading to the recall of Chinese crayons that were found to contain lead. This scandal alone reduced the quality of crayons in the American market, they did not send imported crayons past the three to five percent mark in America.
Crayola is the best at making crayons, but they don’t rest on their laurels. Like many modern companies, it has extensive intellectual property. This, logically both helps the bottom line and helps the company reach more people. In the case of Crayola, the do-it-yourself ethos shines through in many of its products (we’ll offer intermediate applications) and the toys and crayons provide great entertainment for children. But the variety of offerings also makes companies more difficult to understand.
If you look at the latest products from Crayola this year, you’ll find a lot of things that aren’t even remotely similar to crayons. New products include: Build a Beast Dragonfly Craft Kit by Model Magic (made in China), Spray Creatures Activity Kit, and a 2-in-1 Color Chemistry gift set. These are not bad toys. In fact, the Build-a-Beast line is full big toys require creativity, imagination, and manual skills. The latest from that line has even been done It’s my father’s a hand-picked list of the 50 best toys of 2019.
The point is, Mr. Rogers’ factory tour would look very different today. Crayola is no longer a single, well-understood single product manufacturer that can be divided into wax, dye, and packaging. Mr. Rogers will need to get on board, talk to product designers, marketers, and audience analysts to get the full picture. He will have to talk to her why a company makes a product rather than just the parts that go into the thing.
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Perhaps most confusing to children and far from Mister Rogers’ belief, Crayola has invested heavily in marketing its factory as a destination. experience. The Crayola Experience, a one-of-a-kind DIY museum that launched 23 years ago in Easton and has expanded to Arizona, Minnesota, Florida, and Texas, is filled with smiling crayon characters on interactive screens and posters lining every wall. There are rooms with screen-based games, “silly selfies,” melted crayon art, DIY crayon making (both admittedly very cool and productive), and the obligatory pizza and soda and junk food you find in a children’s museum cafeteria.
It’s a fun place and, by all accounts, it’s fun for families. But it also complicates the company. This is no longer the place where the crayons are made – the point being made is that the factory tour is not only part of the Crayola Experience, it’s not available to the public. From a child’s perspective, Crayola is the place to be magic happensa place where 100-pound orange crayons fall from the sky on New Year’s Eve and melted wax turns into art. In this case, “magic” is ephemeral. As you get older, it goes away. The magic of the Crayola Experience, unlike the magic of drawing with crayons, is lost on adults.
The truth of the matter is that the Crayola Experience is an immersion. 5-foot smiley talking crayons replace the smell of wax (it’s beef fat that makes it smell like that). Interactive displays and flowing clay replace sitting down to draw. Crayola replaces crayons. Yes, Crayola puts its name on its most iconic product. After all, there are already crayons in every restaurant and home in the country – what else is there that can be sold there?
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I recently showed my kids (two and eight) Mister Rogers’ crayon adventure, playing the part from my phone. I preceded more than this how crayons are made. They were attentive and quiet, looking, I thought, at the calm repose of Rogers’ voice. I hung up the phone and told my oldest child that she had been there (we were once members of the Crayola Experience). A blank stare. Then I asked if they wanted to draw. My 8-year-old refused, no doubt feeling too old to color. A 2-year-old child, who had been a fan, also refused. Then he asked for “more TV!” But babyI thought, Mr. Rogers is absent jus TV. This is a man who shows us how the world works. As it turns out, everything is more complicated than that.
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