Rocking At The Schoolhouse

I thought about ways to tie this post into Movie Music Monday, but I really couldn’t find a way to do it. That being said, the feature will return next week. I decided to revisit one of the first topics I blogged about, as there are many new followers since 2018.

As a kid, we lived for Saturday mornings! We never slept in because we knew that all morning long we had our choice of back to back cartoons! There was Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Hong Kong Phooey, Blue Falcon & Dynomutt, The Laff-O-Lympics, The Flilntstones, The Pink Panther and many more! It was great! We’d sit and watch these shows all morning long with a big ole bowl of cereal and laugh away!

Saturday mornings, while full of explosions, anvils, and slapstick silliness, was also educational at times. I know this for a fact because one of the things that helped me in school was School House Rock. These little three minute musical features helped me learn multiplication, history, and English. I cannot tell you how many times I found myself singing those songs in school!

Schoolhouse Rock made its debut on this day in 1973. It remained a Saturday morning staple through 1985. The story of how it came about is much like that of today’s Internet sensation Miss Rachel. A caring parent wanted to help their child.

The series was the idea of David McCall, an advertising executive of McCaffrey and McCall, who noticed his young son was struggling with learning multiplication tables. He noted that his son had no issues remembering lyrics to Rolling Stones songs and thought music might help. He hired musician Bob Dorough to write a song that would teach multiplication.  The song would became “Three Is a Magic Number.”

Tom Yohe, an illustrator at McCaffrey and McCall, heard the song and created visuals to accompany it. That led to Radford Stone, producer and writer at the ABC network. He suggested they pitch it as a television series, which caught the attention of Michael Eisner, then the senior vice president in charge of programming and development at ABC, and cartoon director Chuck Jones.

The first season was Multiplication Rock. Learning the times table is one of those things that ALL kids absolutely hate! God, I hated those 60 second tests where you had to write the answers to as many problems as you could. The stress of that was awful for an elementary student. School House Rock helped!

“Three is a Magic Number” was the first to air. If it truly is a magic number, what better way to illustrate it than with a magician?

Counting by twos was illustrated by Noah and the ark. The biblical account talks of Noah bringing all the animals on the ark in pairs. So throughout this number, Noah answers his son’s question of how many animals were on the ark by counting the animals two by two as the exit the boat.

What child didn’t do a bit of daydreaming in school? To remember how to multiply 8, all we had to do is think about the little school girl who daydreamed she was a figure skater. She skates her figure 8 and the song told us how.

The most memorable one for me was counting by fives. I remember when I had to help my son learn his times tables, I sang the “ready or not, here I come” song which helped you count by 5. This little song centered around a game of hide and seek, and they had to count to 100 by fives while the rest of the kids hid. To this day, when I have to count by fives – I think of this song!

The next season was called Grammar Rock. It focused on the parts of speech. Before they taught me about nouns and verbs in school, I was ahead of the game because i’d already heard of them on Schoolhouse Rock.

English was one of my best subjects. I remember being in 5th or 6th grade and going to something called the Academic Olympics. Schools within the district had these little game show like contests with teams for Math, Science, English, and History. I was chosen to be on the English team. I certainly never had an issue with the parts of speech because of Schoolhouse Rock.

Yep! Thanks to SHR, the little girl and her dog – we knew a noun was “a person, place or thing”!

What’s happening? Verb! That’s what’s happening! The coolest “action” hero? Well, I don’t know about that, but a verb shows action….and I always remember him!

Why do I remember this? Because the music was cool. The character was cool. We didn’t even know they were trying to teach us something!!! We were learning and it was cool!

And what about describing a noun? Well all you had to do was unpack some adjectives…but watch out for the scary, hairy bear!

Adjectives and adverbs were so hard for some kids to get. I could not ever understand why. I got it pretty quickly … because of a little girl and her trip. You see, her friends ask her to describe her camping trip. She said that all she had to do was unpack some adjectives.

Schoolhouse Rock’s song about adverbs was memorable because it was just a fun little song that takes place in (where else?) an adverb store! Need an adverb – shop at Lolly’s! The brilliance of this song is it is like a commercial for the store…and they really sell it! If I really needed to go buy and adverb – I would shop at Lolly’s!! After all … they are family owned!

I still remember learning about interjections for the first time. I also learned about the punctuation that followed it. This song was full of characters – the kid with the flu who needed a shot, the gal getting asked out on a date, the fans at the football game, and others who were all full of interjections!

While all of these are memorable, probably the most memorable Grammar Rock song is about three small words and a small little train conductor. The bluesy swing song with the repetitive refrain and the amazing vocal talents of Jack Sheldon makes Conjunction Junction one of the all time BEST sing a longs. Jack is one of the most memorable voices from the series.

Ask any child of the 70’s to give you a conjunction and they will spout off “and”, “but”, and “or” immediately! That’s a sure bet!!

As America headed into the Bicentennial celebration in 1976, the series created a season called America Rock. This focused on aspects of the American government and important moments in American history. Some of the biggest events in US history were brought to life in 3 minutes of musical perfection!

Interest in American History is still abounding today. A few years ago, there was an AMC series called Turn! which was about the Revolutionary War and George Washington’s spies. Then there was an HBO series on John Adams and the role he played in the Independence of America. Let’s start around there …

No More Kings was a silly little song about the colonists coming to America and being taxed for everything. This leads to the Boston Tea Party and America wanting no part of King George (who can see what’s happening through his telescope).

What followed was the Revolutionary War. Which got it’s own song called The Shot Heard Round the World, which of course is then followed by the Declaration of Independence, which got it’s own little song … and Fireworks.

Thanks to Schoolhouse Rock, today I can still recite:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,
That all men are created equal
And that they are endowed by their creator
With certain inalienable rights.
That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Then, of course, after we declared our independence, we had to have a Constitution. Memorizing the Preamble of the Constitution was no problem for me in school … I had it set to music!

There have been many Amendments to the Constitution, and the 19th was a biggie! It allowed women to vote! It is hard to imagine that they didn’t have that right until 1920!! The right was referred to as Women’s Suffrage. School House Rock Tackled this historic occasion with the song “Sufferin’ Until Suffrage”.

Women were American’s too. They wanted the right to vote. The video for this song is part cartoon and part black and white pictures of women throughout history. It’s a rocking number that gets the point across and you can here the “victory” in her voice in this “gospel”-ish song.

Oh, we were suffering until suffrage,
Not a woman here could vote, no matter what age,
Then the 19th Amendment struck down that restrictive rule.

As I stated earlier, people are still interested in history. A couple years ago, there was a movie about the battle over AC/DC current between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse as electricity was gaining use throughout the country. I am currently reading a book about that battle. This point ties in with the next song.

Throughout history, we’ve seen many inventions that have made our world a better place. “Mother Necessity” was the character who is in this song and the “mother” of the inventors of these wonderful things. We hear of the Wright Brothers and their airplane, Thomas Edison and the light bulb, Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Samuel Morse and the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone and a few others.

“Mother Necessity where would we be indeed!”

Finally, the School House Rock showed me how the legislation process happens…with our friend, Bill. Bill is just that – a bill.

How does a bill become a law? I learned how with this song. Performed again by Jack Sheldon (Conjunction Junction) perfectly, you learn about the whole process and lengths a bill goes through to be a law. Naturally, we all feel great when he finally becomes a law at the end!

In 1985, Schoolhouse Rock left the air. It was a few years later that some new songs and new seasons came out. In 1993, two new songs were made for Grammar Rock. One was about prepositions.

Then, in 1995 an entire new series called Money Rock aired until 1996. In 2003, the creators began work on two more songs to include in the 30th anniversary collection. They were about the Electoral College and How the President is elected. Finally, in 2009, a direct to DVD collection called Schoolhouse Rock: Earth was released in response to climate change.

I hope you have enjoyed this look back at one of my fondest childhood memories. Thank you School House Rock for helping me and many other children learn so much about so many things! Now, to end with an interjection….

“Darn! That’s the end…”