Oh, and about red and blue...

I was at a magic show once in college where the magician was more or less giving a lecture on not being fooled by things that seemed "magical." (I went to a Christian college.) The magician wrote something on a piece of cardboard, then had a random male student stand up. He asked the student to tell him what his favorite color was, and the student said blue. The magician turned his card around and written on it was the word, "blue."

He then went on to explain that if you ask men what their favorite color is, something like 80% or more will say that it is blue. So, writing blue was simply playing the odds. Someone asked him what he would do if a man chose another color, and he said he had a funny joke ready to tell in order to make it seem like his mistake was intentional.

Something that may play into this male color choice is the fact that the majority of people who are color blind are men. The most common color blindness is red-green. So, if you can't see a color properly and struggle with its identification, you're not likely to choose it as your favorite.

I knew a guy who was red-green color blind and I asked him what it was like. He told me that in bright light he could tell the difference, but if it was dim or shadowy, both colors looked the same to him, just perhaps shaded a bit darker or lighter than the other. I then asked him about red and green traffic lights. He said he went by which light was on or off, rather than by the color.

Mr. Rogers red sweater is in the Smithsonian:

https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_680637

To be fair, when Mr. Rogers first came out, most people still had black and white tvs. I can remember when a neighbor was the first person I knew to own a color tv. The neighbors all went over to marvel at it. Even when it was available, few people owned one because they were expensive. If memory serves, the neighbor paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 for it, which was quite a lot of money in those days.

There were no computer chips in tvs in those days, just vacuum tubes. If a tv broke, most people called the tv repairman to come out and fix it. The local drug store used to have a display where you could bring your burnt-out tv tubes to the store to figure out what type they were, then you bought the corresponding tube to replace it. My father often went down to the store to get a replacement to fix our old tv. We had the same tv set the entire time I lived at home and even through college. I was the one that finally bought them a color tv.

The fact that tvs were black and white back then may explain why it took so long to establish today's "red for Republicans and blue for Dems" color scheme. Before color tv, it didn't really matter.

I'm also wondering whether all the different color schemes for the two parties over the years might not be comms in and of themselves. If they were cheating back then -- and they undoubtedly were -- the colors could indicate which candidate needed a "boost" at the voting booth. Just a thought, but they could have used the colors on election night to say, "we think Joe X is lagging a bit, so get ready to add a few extra votes for him to push him over the top."

I was just rereading your post on Mr. Rogers and something occurred to me. Mr. Rogers had other interesting puppets on his show: Lady Elaine Fairchilde and King Friday the 13th.

Fairchilde = Rothschild??

"Her Museum-Go-Round, is a Merry-Go-Round kind of place where she is the curator of all kinds of things, real and magical – “from dinosaurs and bones to antique telephones.” Lady Elaine can also perform magic of her own – after all, this is the Neighborhood of Make-Believe! She waves her magic boomerang, calling out “Boomerang-Toomerang-Soomerang,” and creates havoc by literally turning things upside-down. Her neighbors help her turn things right-side-up again by letting her know she is important to the Neighborhood, lovable in her own way, and that there are other ways to handle conflicts."

None of this sounds very Christian, especially given that Fred Rogers was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers