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Most hip-hop fans know that Crenshaw emcee Ice Cube has had many feuds during his career, most notably with his former friends from N.W.A. However, few are aware that the Lethal Injection creator once had an awkward dispute with the children’s television presenter Mister Rogers.

It’s extremely odd to imagine the rapper engaging with the late host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. However, it was a very real disagreement, and Ice Cube shared the reason why he and the children’s entertainer butted heads in the early 1990s.

During a 2020 Instagram Live broadcast in celebration of the 30th anniversary of his debut album AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, Ice Cube took fans down memory lane to 1990 and spoke about the stories behind each track from the project. One of which was ‘Gangsta’s Fairytale’.

‘Gangsta’s Fairytale’ was about his former crew member, the late Eazy-E. At the end of the 1980s, Ice Cube fell out with Eazy-E and N.W.A’s manager Jerry Heller. The South Central lyricist had grown frustrated with the fact that Dr Dre, Eazy-E and MC Ren were happily subservient to Heller, who he believed was exploiting them and robbing them of a lot of money.

Ice Cube addressed the co-founder of Ruthless Records, Eazy-E, in ‘Gangsta’s Fairytale’, but Mister Rogers had an issue with the song. In his lyrics, he references Sesame Street, Cinderella, a few nursery rhyme characters, and Mister Rogers — strangely, that wasn’t the issue.

It turned out that the producer of ‘Gangsta’s Fairytale’, Eric Sadler, had sung an interpolation of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood for the track’s intro. This action resulted in the television host filing a hefty lawsuit.

Speaking about the experience of finding out Mister Rogers had taken legal action against him, Ice Cube told fans, “It’s a trip because, off this song, Mister Rogers sued us. He was mad because we had the Mister Rogers theme in the beginning.”

Ice Cube even unveiled that Mister Rogers was getting money from the song. More specifically, five cents per record until they removed it. Revealing this, Ice Cube told followers, “Mister Rogers was getting money from gangsta rap.”

The 2020 Instagram Live was not the first time Ice Cube had addressed his dispute with Mr Rogers. In a 2014 interview with the online magazine Medium, the emcee admitted that only 200,000 copies of the album contain the original version of ‘Gangsta’s Fairytale’ with the Mister Rogers intro.

Sir Jinx, who was also part of the interview, opened up about the bizarre debacle, adding, “If you got the version with the dude singing Mister Rogers, then it’s probably worth some money! Ultimately, we had to pay Mister Rogers five cents a record; he got paid off of that. After the first 200,000, we took it off.”

Ice Cube frustratedly told Medium that Mister Rogers approached them behind the scenes and told them to remove it otherwise he would sue them but proceeded to do so even after the removal, professing, “Actually, yeah, I remember. He told us we couldn’t use it, we took the song off the album, and he sued us anyways. I think they made us give him damages because we mentioned his name one time.”

Although it’s not strange for MCs to get involved in lawsuits, it is incredibly bizarre for a children’s TV presenter to pay attention to hip-hop, yet alone threaten a gangsta rapper and even more odd for a kids entertainer to dupe hustlers into giving him double money by suing them after getting significant concessions.