Schoolhouse Rock!

I remember growing up watching these animated shorts about education and politics. The one thing I think most people remember was the themes songs to these shorts because we hear them for so many years. At least five to ten years of our life. They were inspirational and especially after the Bugs Bunny cartoons that aired before these shorts were played on ABC network. My friends and I used to sing these songs and now a lot of young parents (ages 24-33) are bringing their kids up on these animated educational toons buy purchasing the home videos. This is something that can never leave that part of lives. Great Memories!!!

...other than these cartoons are my favorite pieces of animation! Schoolhouse Rock educates and entertains seamlessly at the same time, and I've learned so much more from these cartoons than anything in school. This is how we should learn everything!

Both the songs and cartoons are equally brilliant. Bob Dorough, who penned a great number of the tunes (including all of the Multiplication Rock songs, which are my favorites), is a fantastic and underrated songwriter with a sharp sense of humor to match. Lynn Ahrens also contributed some wonderfully memorable songs, my favorite of hers being "A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing."

Tom Yohe, who was a key designer for this series, was such a wonderful artist who could make the most seemingly simple characters so appealing in their own way (much like the Peanuts characters). He was the artist behind the Conjuction Junction Conductor and the Bill, among many other classic characters. Sadly, he died a few years ago.

But the best songs in the series are the ones not everyone remembers. My favorite Schoolhouse Rock song of all time is "Little Twelvetoes," and even most people who were kids in the '70s don't remember it. It's a bizarre little tune that teaches you how to multiply by 12, and the cartoon itself is even better than the song!

But almost all the songs are really super (with the exception of Money Rock. While it isn't terrible, it just doesn't compare to the classics), and check out the DVD with all the tunes! It includes a new America Rock song, and it's surprisingly delightful. All in all Schoolhouse Rock is a classic that will delight kids for generations.

Whoever came up with Schoolhouse Rock was a genius. Part of the power of these little cartoons was that they were run like commercials between other shows on Saturday morning. You couldn't help but learn. It's been almost sixteen years, but to this day, I can still recite the preamble.

This was one of the Saturday Morning spectacular of special short presentations that won Multi-Emmy Awards during its astounding run on the air from 1972 to 1986. The show was called "Schoolhouse Rock". "Schoolhouse Rock" was indeed a timeless collection of animated songs that taught an entire generation that KNOWLEDGE IS POWER! This collection of musical interludes were part of a brilliant display of incredible stuff that ABC-TV put on during its intermission session of a huge lineups of Saturday Morning brand of informative educational programming that was between the regular standards of its own animated cartoons and live-action shows that were part of ABC's Sunshine Saturday Morning programming that dominated the entire decade of the 1970's well into the early and mid-1980's. "Schoolhouse Rock" consisted of various short animated cartoons that focused on the basis,and these were put into songs as well. Subjects ranging from Language Arts,Mathematics, along with Social Studies mixed in with United States History and Current Events were the order of the day. This was brilliant as well as educational,and guess what the formula for this went well with children as well as adults. The songs that were the focus of the short animated segments were brilliant,and nowadays they're timeless classics and can be shared by all. The songs here were magical with brilliant selections that included:"Conjunction Junction","I'm Just A Bill","Fireworks", "Lolly,Lolly,Lolly","Interjections","Nouns","Interplanet Janet","Verb", "The Shot Heard Around The World","The Great American Melting Pot", "The Preamble","Elbow Room","Three Is A Magic Number","Twelve Toes", "Zero,You're My Hero,How Wonderful You Are","No More Kings",and so much,much more. When "Schoolhouse Rock",left the airwaves in 1986,and returned later for a brief period in 1992,the show really changed course. Nowadays,if you really looked at the landscape of how ABC-TV's format of Saturday Morning Programming,some of the stuff that was really good and very informative has been since long abandoned,since most of it these days is in an all-Disney style that has dominated Saturday Mornings on ABC. Boy,do we need "Schoolhouse Rock" more than ever now!

I was actually a kid during the original days of School house rock and it taught me a great deal. Women's Sufferage, Manifest Destiny, the colonization of America, and the American Revolution were so much more interesting when put to song. I know what a magical number 3 can be, and I know that AND, BUT, and OR are conjunctions. I learned about Inventions, electricity, and all sorts of great stuff. I highly recommend School House Rock for anybody who wants a trippy trip down memory lane. Oooh! Buy School House Rock Rocks too. It's a CD with all sorts of alternative artists doing School House Rock covers. Blind Melon's version of Three the Magic Number is awesome!