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.

This week I commented on Emily and Brenda‘s posts.

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