Post #2 – Schoolhouse Rock!
Several generations of school-aged children have seen a Schoolhouse Rock! short at one time or another. The first Schoolhouse Rock! shorts were created back in 1973, but I had seen many of the original shows in elementary school as part of my curriculum even in the mid to late 90s. These cartoons are a fun and informative look into many different subjects, and due to their simplicity, they are useful to everyone, from elementary students to a college professor who needs a quick brush-up.
The idea for Schoolhouse Rock! originally came from a man named David McCall who worked in advertising. He noticed that his children struggled to memorize mathematical tables, but they could easily memorize song lyrics. Putting two and two together, he decided to write catchy tunes about math to make it more fun and easier to remember. He recruited some co-workers and some musicians to create “Three is a Magic Number”. One of McCall’s coworkers remarked that the songs would probably be well-suited for animation, and the team brought their idea before Micheal Eisner (then the ABC’s Vice-President of children’s programming). Eisner was impressed, and allowed the Schoolhouse Rock! shorts to be aired during ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons.
Over 65 episodes of Schoolhouse Rock! have been produced since 1973. The earlier episodes covered topics such as multiplications tables, grammar, science, and American politics/history. In the mid-1980s, there were episodes that covered the new invention of personal computers. In the 1990s, the team created episodes about money, and most recently, in 2009 they created 12 shorts about the environment.
Let’s look at the embedded video above for an example. This clip is from a 1977 Schoolhouse Rock! short that deals with using pronouns, titled “Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla”. The lyrics of the song deal with the redundancy of repeating Rufus’s unusually long and tongue-twisting name, and instead using a pronoun to save time. Throughout the video, more people and animals are introduced, including the narrator, in a similar fashion. The music structure of the song is extremely catchy, and so are the lyrics. As usual, this Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon is effective because it is a fun and memorable way to learn about something many people may have trouble understanding, in this case, pronouns.
Schoolhouse Rock! was significant because it brought some fun into learning new and sometimes intimidating things. It may be very difficult for a youngster to try to understand completely foreign concepts such as interjections, or the role of the judicial branch, or why it matters. But thanks to Schoolhouse Rock!, these children are able to understand these ideas in a more engaging format. It’s likely that many children learned more about some things from Schoolhouse Rock! than they did when they were presented in school.
We remember Schoolhouse Rock! with fondness because it was a fun introduction to something we didn’t know. Instead of turning to Wikipedia to try to understand how laws are passed, we can instead watch “How a Bill Becomes the Law” and find a fun, easier to understand run-down of the basics. We can search Schoolhouse Rock!’s catalog and learn a lot of new things. It may be true that I have a limited understanding of how the electoral college works, amongst other things, but luckily Schoolhouse Rock! has a quick, fun, and easy to understand introduction to many of these poorly understood topics.
Post #1 – Plane Crazy
For my first blog post, I thought it seemed logical to start at the beginning (or close to the beginning) and look at Disney’s Plane Crazy, Mickey Mouse’s 1928 debut short. Many people assume that Steamboat Willie was Mickey Mouse’s first cartoon, but Plane Crazy was actually created six months earlier. Although Disney didn’t achieve the same level of overwhelming success with Plane Crazy that they found in later cartoons, it’s interesting to look back at this debut short to see how Mickey Mouse evolved to become one of the most recognizable figures in the world.
At the start of the cartoon, we see Mickey Mouse admiring a picture of “Lindy”, Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot who flew from New York to Paris a year earlier in 1927. He attempts to fly a self-designed plane, which crashes shortly after takeoff, to his disappointment. Unfazed, Mickey begins to modify a Model T-esque car, when Minnie Mouse enters and contributes the tail feathers of a massive turkey to use as a tail rudder for the plane. Mickey and Minnie manage to get the plane flying, but Mickey falls off, leaving Minnie alone to ride in the plane precariously, which continuously lunges at Mickey in increasingly ridiculous ways. Mickey finally regains control of the aircraft, and fails to solicit a kiss from Minnie as a reward. He decides fly the plane recklessly to shake her up, and then he kisses her forcefully. Minnie slaps him and jumps out of the aircraft, using her underpants as a parachute. Mickey steps out of the aircraft to go after her, and after looking down, he falls down into a tree and gets injured.
Plane Crazy did not initially have a soundtrack, which may have contributed to its lack of success in comparison to Steamboat Willie, as it was harder for it to really stand out of the pack and find an audience. Mickey is also less stylized in his first cartoon; he is much less detailed and much thinner than he is in Steamboat Willie. In fact, at this point, Mickey Mouse wasn’t even called Mickey Mouse, but instead ‘Mortimer Mouse’. Apparently, at the insistence of Disney’s wife, the name was changed to ‘Mickey’.
Even though Mickey Mouse’s true debut may not have been as well remembered as his later cartoons, Plane Crazy remains an interesting look into what was then a unknown and undeveloped character. It’s remarkable to see how much different and more attractive Steamboat Willie looks, not to mention how well the sound effects were incorporated, even though it was produced only six months later. It really speaks to the work ethic and level of innovation these animators had, that they were able to improve their cartoons so rapidly in such a brief period of time. It was very interesting for me to view these earlier Mickey Mouse shorts, not just because I hadn’t seen them, but because it helped show me how much animation has evolved since way back in 1928.
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