(Likewise, when “Elementary, My Dear” taught counting by twos with a gospel-style Noah’s Ark song, it didn’t fear repercussions for bringing religion into kids’ TV.)Īnd that’s before you even get to “Science Rock.” “The Energy Blues” makes a matter-of-fact pitch for conservation that would cause smoke eruptions today. “The Great American Melting Pot” did not imagine a future president telling asylum seekers, “Our country is full.” When “Interjections” depicted a doctor giving a child a shot, it did not anticipate legislators denouncing Big Bird for advocating childhood vaccination. Today, with culture-warring politicians like the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, red-penciling school curriculums, weaponizing pronouns and hammering history teachers for “indoctrination,” the potential land mines add up. Now he’s a time traveler, from a pre-Reagan age when government activism, however imperfect, was considered a force for good. The America of “Schoolhouse Rock” was divided by Vietnam and Watergate, but it could at least subscribe to basic common facts and civic principles.Ĭonsider Bill, the underdog paper hero of “I’m Just a Bill,” longing to become a law that would keep that cartoon school bus safe at railroad crossings. But to screen “Schoolhouse Rock” as an adult is to visit a different period in cultural history, and not just because of the bell-bottoms. Rewatching the series taught me about a new subject: Time. (You can now stream the ’70s seasons, plus a brief 1980s series about computers and a clunky 1990s revival, “Money Rock,” through Disney+.) When my kids were school-aged, I got the full “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD set for them, which is to say, I got it for me. The following seasons, about grammar, American history and science, added other contributors, including Lynn Ahrens, the future Broadway songwriter thanks to whom an entire generation cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution without breaking into song. (If your voice does not break singing, “A man and a woman had a little baby,” you’re doing something wrong.) The blissful “Three Is a Magic Number” isn’t just a primer on multiples it’s a rumination on the triad foundations of the universe, from geometry to love. The lyrics were sly and funny but could also detour, like a fidgety schoolkid sitting by the window, into daydreams. The jazz composer Bob Dorough wrote the banger-filled first season, “Multiplication Rock,” surveying a range of styles from the duodecimal prog-rock of “Little Twelvetoes” to the spiraling lullaby of “Figure Eight.” Above all, there was the sophisticated music. That was the animation, psychedelically colorful and chock-full of rapid-fire slapstick gags. The facts and figures made it educational. Unlike the dutiful news interstitials that vitamin-fortified other Saturday-morning cartoon lineups, “Schoolhouse Rock” harnessed the power of comedy and ear worms. “I think you should buy it right away,” Jones said. Nostalgia for “Schoolhouse Rock” is now itself old enough to be nostalgic for.Īs Newell told the Times in 1994, they pitched the idea to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, who happened to be meeting with the legendary Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. Winona Ryder and company crooned “Conjunction Junction” and “I’m Just a Bill” in the 1994 generational-statement film “Reality Bites.” De La Soul borrowed “Three Is a Magic Number” as the backbone for their buoyant self-introduction, “The Magic Number,” in 1989. The musical shorts, which began airing on ABC in 1973, taught Generation X multiplication, grammar, history and, eventually, nostalgia. If you were an American kid around when I was (nineteen-seventy- cough), you probably have “Schoolhouse Rock” hard-wired into your brain too. It was not the last time that watching too much TV would pay off for me, but it was perhaps the sweetest. I’d like to credit hard work or the motivation of those golden fries, but in truth it was easy. When I was in second grade, my teacher held a contest: The first students to memorize their multiplication tables would get dinner at McDonald’s.
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