‘Mr. Dressup is a language, it’s not just a show’ — how Canada fell in love with Ernie Coombs

What with the excitement of the premiere and the post-screening cocktail party, Chris and his wife and daughters hadn’t tumbled into bed at their hotel until about 3 a.m., but Chris woke again at 6:30 a.m.

“I was just lying there in bed, just going ‘Oh my God,’” said Coombs, his voice breaking, speaking by video call about a week and a half after the event.

“The reaction of the people (at the screening) and their love for Dad, culturally and personally, just floored me, my wife, Natalie, and my kids … And I’m still coming down to earth.”

Even for those of us not related to Ernie Coombs — the American-born performer who was a staple of Canadian children’s TV for almost four decades if you count reruns — the premiere of “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe” was a very moving event.

The TIFF Bell Lightbox audience — packed with people who watched “Mr. Dressup” as youngsters, myself included — rose to their feet and cheered as Chris Coombs, his sister, Cathie LeFort, and director Robert McCallum took the stage for a post-screening Q&A. The film went on to win the TIFF People’s Choice Documentary Award. And it will be seen worldwide when it debuts on Prime Video on Tuesday.

For McCallum, this renewed appreciation for Ernie Coombs, who died in 2001 after a stroke at age 73, is about more than nostalgia. It’s about values, ones that carry added import in this fractured age we’re living in: “To smile, be kind, be considerate, be compassionate, be communal,” he said.

“‘Mr. Dressup’ is a language, it’s not just a show,” he continued. “It’s a language that unites our country coast to coast to coast. Whether it’s the sound of scissors in construction paper or markers squeaking on poster board, we speak that sound … and we can share that.”

But let’s go back and consider where “Mr. Dressup” began, as the documentary does.

Coombs, who was born in Lewiston, Maine, came to Canada in 1963 as a puppeteer for another now famous children’s entertainer, Fred Rogers, who had been recruited by Frederick Rainsberry, then head of the CBC TV children’s department.

“CBC was the first broadcaster in North America to have a dedicated kids’ department over a decade before ‘Sesame Street’ hit the airwaves,” said McCallum in a video interview. “And they didn’t have millions of dollars and special councils (like ‘Sesame Street’). They had a philosophy that was guiding them … that kids were an individual audience that needed something for themselves.”

But whereas Rogers, whose “Misterogers” on CBC was the forerunner of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” on PBS, returned to the U.S., Coombs stayed. He became one of the stars of “Butternut Square,” which aired from 1964 to ’67, as a character named Mr. Dressup. And when “Butternut Square” was cancelled, Mr. Dressup got his own show.

It aired from February 1967 until February 1996, surviving and thriving despite the 1969 debut of “Sesame Street” and the departure in 1989 of puppeteer Judith Lawrence, who took beloved characters Casey and Finnegan with her. After Coombs retired, CBC continued to air reruns until 2006.

Although “Mr. Dressup” can only be found these days as a sprinkling of episodes on YouTube, it’s still firmly embedded in the Canadian consciousness. That was demonstrated in 2017 when it crushed the competition to be named “Canada’s Most Memorable (English) TV Thing” in a Twitter poll and again in 2019 with the posthumous induction of Coombs, who became a Canadian citizen in 1994, into Canada’s Walk of Fame.

Around the time that “Mr. Dressup” was figuratively wiping the social media floor with other beloved shows like “The Friendly Giant” and “Kids in the Hall,” McCallum was turning over the idea of making a film about Coombs, and reaching out to his children and other people who knew him. McCallum started a Facebook page about the still gestating project, which was how Mark Bishop, co-founder of Marblemedia, found him.

It was the perfect yin and yang, McCallum said, of his “indie, kind of guerrilla, passionate” approach to filmmaking and Bishop’s “super savvy business, although secretly fanboy of Dressup” perspective. And the “icing on that” was Aeschylus Poulos of Hawkeye Pictures getting involved to take the film to the next level of “why (‘Mr. Dressup’) was significant then and why it’s significant now, and why it will forever be important for us to consider.”

McCallum had personally watched the show into his teenage years and had begun showing it to his own kids when they were five and two. “They couldn’t get enough,” he said.

“Mr. Dressup,” McCallum added, “should not have worked … this show about this older man with these puppets who live in a tree … You don’t know what he’s drawing. You don’t know what the story’s about. These costumes aren’t high end in this Tickle Trunk thing, but it works. It’s greater than the sum of its parts. And it constantly taught you that you can use your imagination and transform everything.”

Indeed, Canadian celebrities like Michael J. Fox, Eric McCormack and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee appear in “Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe” to sing the praises of Coombs and what he could convey with something as simple as a hat or a drawing of a banana.

(And it’s worth noting that the film, like Coombs himself, gives credit to the many other people who made the TV show, some of whom appear in the doc and were in the TIFF audience.)

But as much as “Mr. Dressup” was about the power of make-believe, it also owes its success to a foundation of truth.

Coombs’ daughter, Cathie LeFort, believes what has made her dad such an enduring part of Canadian culture is “that fact that he was so genuine. And along with that was the integrity that he had. When people talk about these wonderful qualities, none of that was made up. That’s who he was … He was like that with people he met. He was like that with his kids. He was like that with his grandkids.”

The documentary, in fact, paints a portrait of a close-knit family life behind the scenes, including Ernie’s wife, early childhood educator Marlene “Lynn” Coombs, who predeceased him in 1992 when she was killed by a car that mounted a curb on Yonge Street.

Ernie was, in some respects, like any other father. “He was stern when he had to be,” Chris Coombs said, but “there was a lot of empowerment, a lot of understanding, a lot of allowing children to feel that their opinion matters,” which sounds a lot like the ethos of the TV show.

And then there were the perks that came with having Mr. Dressup as a dad: visits to the Toronto studio where the show was made; the detailed pictures he would draw for Chris to colour in; the “fantastic” Tusken Raider costume he helped Chris create; the drawings and notes that Cathie recalls him leaving on their paper lunchbags.

Both siblings have kept cherished physical reminders of their father’s job.

His famous Tickle Trunk has pride of place in Chris and his wife’s bedroom in Bournemouth, England, and contains some of his father’s costumes, his magic set and a couple of the puppets he made for his post-“Mr. Dressup” Tales From the Tickle Trunk tours.

And now, there’s another artifact of Ernie Coombs’ decades on TV: the documentary.

“Cathie and I agreed that if we had done (the film) ourselves we would have done it exactly that way,” Chris said. “It was just the perfect balance of nostalgia, sentiment, sensitivity. And it was just incredible to be in Toronto with so many people who love our dad as much as we did and for whom he represents such a massive part of their childhood.”

“Incredible” is also the word Cathie used for all the people who approached her before and after the TIFF screening to share cherished memories of her father, as well as the social media tributes that followed.

“I wonder what he would say,” Chris added of his dad. “I hope he would allow himself to feel the appreciation, to feel the love and to know that he earned it, not by trying, not by pretending to do anything but just by being himself, you know?”

“Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe” debuts Oct. 10 on Prime Video.