Look, if the last few years have taught us anything, it's that at any given moment, we are an early morning Twitter check away from having our pop culture heroes redefined as deviant movie monsters, but Fred Rogers seems to have been the exception to the rule. In the decade and a half since he passed away, the becardiganed icon has somehow held up when viewed through the lens of history, presumably because, plot twist, he really was just an excellent guy. And to paraphrase the great philosopher Norman Osborn, the one thing the internet loves more than a hero is to see a hero fall. 

Maybe that's why rumors about Mister Rogers' skullduggerous, clandestine lifestyle have been so prevalent over the years. The legends of his Call of Duty-worthy military service have been circulating for over a decade, sometimes bringing Captain Kangaroo into the mix in sort of a children's television Expendables mash up. Rogers' fictional tattoos almost always make an appearance. And of course, there will always be the oft-recirculated stills of Fred staring down the barrel of the camera, holding his middle fingers up to the heavens, grinning from ear to ear. Direct your outrage elsewhere, he was singing "Where Is Thumbkin?"

Rogers is far from the only children's TV personality to be plagued by internet rumors over the years. Big fat lies about the actor or actors who played Barney have made the rounds, stating that they killed themselves in the costume, overdosed, or were caught smuggling drugs in the outfit's tail. A particularly juicy story debunked by Snopes stated that the man in the dinosaur costume was a convicted child molester, and that his stint as a lavender tyrannosaurus was a part of his sentence, which makes sense in a dystopian, Black Mirror poetic justice kind of way.

And of course, there was Steve Burns, the man who facilitated Blue in his pursuit of Clues for the first six years of the program. After his departure, Burns was rumored to have died of a heroin overdose when, in reality, he was busy recording a pretty killer indie album with the members of the Flaming Lips.

Not everyone waltzes into family friendly entertainment with a squeaky clean reputation, of course. Let us never forget that Bob Ross spent several years pointing out subordinates' happy accidents in the Air Force as a hard-nosed drill sergeant.