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What is Schoolhouse Rock!?

When did Schoolhouse Rock! originally air?

What inspired the creation of Schoolhouse Rock!?

What was the first song created for Schoolhouse Rock!?

Schoolhouse Rock!, American television series of three-minute musical cartoons with educational lyrics created to teach children concepts in mathematics, grammar, science, history, civics, and economics. Airing on Saturday mornings as cartoon-episode interstitials during ABC network’s children’s lineup, the animated interludes are known for changing the way that children learn and are considered one of the most successful educational projects in U.S. history. Schoolhouse Rock! became a cultural touchstone for Generation X kids growing up in the 1970s and ’80s.

The show’s original run was from 1973 to 1985. In 1993, after a student at the University of Connecticut organized a petition drive to bring it back, ABC began rerunning select episodes and commissioned eight new ones that ran into 1996. In 2009, 12 new episodes were produced for home video release.

“Three” comes first

The inspiration for the show came from David McCall, president of the New York City advertising agency McCaffrey & McCall, whose son was having a hard time memorizing multiplication tables but knew all of the words to his favorite songs by Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. McCall asked the agency’s cocreative director, George Newall, if he could pair the tables with rock music—they would call it “multiplication rock”—and release it as an educational recording. In Newall’s search for a composer who might be able to help, a musician friend introduced him to Bob Dorough, a jazz pianist, composer, and vocalist known for being able to put anything to music. In a 2017 interview Dorough recalled his first meeting with McCall: “I don’t know how I lucked out. Apparently [McCall] tried other songwriters but most of them wrote down to kids. When I met McCall, he said, ‘Here’s my idea. Give it a try. But don’t write down to the kids.’ When he said that, I got a chill. I have a high opinion of children.”

Dorough returned about two weeks later with “Three Is a Magic Number,” a tune that combines examples of cultural and scientific groups of three with a catchy recitation of the times tables. When the agency’s other creative director, cartoonist Tom Yohe, heard the song, he started doodling, and the project was transformed into a set of three-minute films that were later presented to Michael Eisner, ABC’s then director of children’s programming, who happened to be in a meeting with Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones. After hearing the song and seeing the storyboards, Eisner asked Jones what he thought, and Jones advised Eisner to buy it immediately.

The “Three Is a Magic Number” cartoon made its debut on September 2, 1971, during the pilot episode of Curiosity Shop, an ABC prime-time educational show that featured puppetry, stop-action animation, cartoons, and child stars. While Curiosity Shop would only have one 17-episode season, McCaffrey & McCall’s educational project was just getting started.

“Three Is a Magic Number”
Three is a magic number
Yes it is. It’s a magic number
Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number
The past and the present and the future
Faith and hope and charity
The heart and the brain and the body
Give you three as a magic number

—lyrics by Bob Dorough

“Knowledge is power”

Schoolhouse Rock! debuted on January 6, 1973, during the heyday of Saturday morning children’s television programming and became one of the most successful education projects in U.S. history. The hand-drawn animations feature a 1970s aesthetic with a design and color palate that is more akin to comic book art than the Hanna-Barbera or Walt Disney-produced cartoons of the era. All of the songs were written by Dorough, who would become the show’s musical director, and all but two were performed by him. The first season’s theme and title were the same as the project’s genesis—Multiplication Rock—and featured 11 songs, including “My Hero, Zero,” “Elementary, My Dear,” “Three Is a Magic Number,” “Ready or Not, Here I Come,” and “Figure Eight.” The season’s music was released on an album that year, and its jazzy and rock-and-roll sound earned Dorough a Grammy nomination for best recording for children (Multiplication Rock lost to another powerhouse of 1970s educational television programming—Sesame Street).

“As your body grows bigger, your mind must flower. It’s great to learn, ’cause knowledge is power.”

Schoolhouse Rock! theme song

The theme of the seven-episode second season was Grammar Rock (1973–75, 1977), and it includes perennial favorites such as “Conjunction Junction,” “Interjections,” and “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here.” “Conjunction Junction,” written by Dorough and performed by Jack Sheldon, includes animation of rail cars hooking together to illustrate conjunctions hooking words and phrases together, an idea that Newall came up with. A scene in “Interjections,” which was written by Lynn Ahrens and performed by Essra Mohawk, portrays a child receiving a shot from a doctor and exclaiming “Yow!”

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The first two seasons were followed in the show’s original run by America Rock (1975–76, 1979), Science Rock (1978–79), and Computer Rock (1982–84). Coinciding with the U.S. Bicentennial, America Rock (also called History Rock), a U.S. history-themed season of 10 episodes, featured future classics such as “I’m Just a Bill,” “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and “The Preamble.” Memorable songs from Science Rock’s nine-episode season include “Interplanet Janet,” “Electricity, Electricity,” and “A Victim of Gravity.” The Computer Rock season is comprised of four episodes featuring the characters Scooter Computer (oddly named, as he is not a computer, but a boy) and Mr. Chips (a computer). Computer Rock was not as well received as previous seasons because of character and song title confusion (the songs “Hardware” and “Software” are about both software and hardware, for example). Additionally, the songs reference computer topics such as bits, bytes, and BASIC language, concepts that quickly became outdated.

While Schoolhouse Rock! was generally applauded for its optimistic outlook and non-stereotyped presentation of people of color, the program later faced accusations of “whitewashing” U.S. history. The America Rock episodes “No More Kings,” “Elbow Room,” “The American Melting Pot,” and “Mother Necessity,” in particular, have been criticized for ignoring or distorting America’s racist past. In 2020 the Disney+ streaming service added a warning to the cartoon indicating that it may contain “outdated cultural depictions.”

The 1990s return of Schoolhouse Rock!

In 1993, after a successful petition campaign (likely driven by nostalgic GenXers who watched the show as kids and were now entering parenthood) to bring the cartoons back into Saturday morning rotation, two new episodes of Grammar Rock were made with the songs “Busy Prepositions” and “The Tale of Mr. Morton,” and a new season with the theme Money Rock (1994–96) debuted. Money Rock’s eight episodes feature economics-based songs, including “Walkin’ on Wall Street,” “Tyrannosaurus Debt,” and “7.50 Once a Week.” Two more America Rock songs were produced in the 2000s: “I’m Gonna Send Your Vote to College” (2002), as part of a 30th-anniversary edition DVD and “Presidential Minute” (2008).

Schoolhouse Rock Live!, a musical based on the cartoons, also debuted in 1993 and went on to have an 11-month Off-Broadway run in 1995 and toured nationally in 1997, 1999, and 2000. And in 1996 Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks, an album of popular Schoolhouse Rock! songs recorded by 1990s indie and alternative musicians such as the Lemonheads, Biz Markie, Daniel Johnston, and Gen-X icons Pavement, was released.

In 2009 Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment produced Schoolhouse Rock! Earth, a 12-song DVD that covers such topics as carbon footprints, recycling, and climate change. After it was released, some customer reviews claimed that it was simply “climate change propaganda.”

Regardless of occasional criticism, Schoolhouse Rock! is best known for its attention-grabbing animation and memorable lyrics that helped children learn better than most textbooks did. The cartoons aired up to seven times each Saturday, and the repetition helped anchor the songs and concepts in viewers’ heads. During the series’ original run, Schoolhouse Rock! won four Daytime Emmy Awards (1976, 1978, 1979, and 1980). The songs from the six televised seasons, which were released as a box set by Rhino Records in 1996, were added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” recordings in 2018. In its selection of the box set, the Library of Congress noted the recording’s “infectiously catchy songs cleverly explaining important educational concepts…Parents who grew up watching the cartoons could play the songs for their children in the car, keeping the music alive and relevant for another generation.”

Laura Payne
Top Questions

What is animation?

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Who made the first film-based animation?

Who invented rotoscope animation?

animation, the art of making inanimate objects appear to move. Animation is an artistic impulse that long predates the movies. History’s first recorded animator is Pygmalion of Greek and Roman mythology, a sculptor who created a figure of a woman so perfect that he fell in love with her and begged Venus to bring her to life. Some of the same sense of magic, mystery, and transgression still adheres to contemporary film animation, which has made it a primary vehicle for exploring the overwhelming, often bewildering emotions of childhood—feelings once dealt with by folktales.

Early history

The theory of the animated cartoon preceded the invention of the cinema by half a century. Early experimenters, working to create conversation pieces for Victorian parlors or new sensations for the touring magic-lantern shows, which were a popular form of entertainment, discovered the principle of persistence of vision. If drawings of the stages of an action were shown in fast succession, the human eye would perceive them as a continuous movement. One of the first commercially successful devices, invented by the Belgian Joseph Plateau in 1832, was the phenakistoscope, a spinning cardboard disk that created the illusion of movement when viewed in a mirror. In 1834 William George Horner invented the zoetrope, a rotating drum lined by a band of pictures that could be changed. The Frenchman Émile Reynaud in 1876 adapted the principle into a form that could be projected before a theatrical audience. Reynaud became not only animation’s first entrepreneur but, with his gorgeously hand-painted ribbons of celluloid conveyed by a system of mirrors to a theater screen, the first artist to give personality and warmth to his animated characters.

With the invention of sprocket-driven film stock, animation was poised for a great leap forward. Although “firsts” of any kind are never easy to establish, the first film-based animator appears to be J. Stuart Blackton, whose Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906 launched a successful series of animated films for New York’s pioneering Vitagraph Company. Later that year, Blackton also experimented with the stop-motion technique—in which objects are photographed, then repositioned and photographed again—for his short film Haunted Hotel.

In France, Émile Cohl was developing a form of animation similar to Blackton’s, though Cohl used relatively crude stick figures rather than Blackton’s ambitious newspaper-style cartoons. Coinciding with the rise in popularity of the Sunday comic sections of the new tabloid newspapers, the nascent animation industry recruited the talents of many of the best-known artists, including Rube Goldberg, Bud Fisher (creator of Mutt and Jeff) and George Herriman (creator of Krazy Kat), but most soon tired of the fatiguing animation process and left the actual production work to others.

The one great exception among these early illustrators-turned-animators was Winsor McCay, whose elegant, surreal Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend remain pinnacles of comic-strip art. McCay created a hand-colored short film of Little Nemo for use during his vaudeville act in 1911, but it was Gertie the Dinosaur, created for McCay’s 1914 tour, that transformed the art. McCay’s superb draftsmanship, fluid sense of movement, and great feeling for character gave viewers an animated creature who seemed to have a personality, a presence, and a life of her own. The first cartoon star had been born.

Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale, with her dog, Toto, from the motion picture film The Wizard of Oz (1939); directed by Mervyn LeRay. (cinema, movies)
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McCay made several other extraordinary films, including a re-creation of The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), but it was left to Pat Sullivan to extend McCay’s discoveries. An Australian-born cartoonist who opened a studio in New York City, Sullivan recognized the great talent of a young animator named Otto Messmer, one of whose casually invented characters—a wily black cat named Felix—was made into the star of a series of immensely popular one-reelers. Designed by Messmer for maximum flexibility and facial expressiveness, the round-headed, big-eyed Felix quickly became the standard model for cartoon characters: a rubber ball on legs who required a minimum of effort to draw and could be kept in constant motion.

Walt Disney

This lesson did not go unremarked by the young Walt Disney, then working at his Laugh-O-gram Films studio in Kansas City, Missouri. His first major character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was a straightforward appropriation of Felix; when he lost the rights to the character in a dispute with his distributor, Disney simply modified Oswald’s ears and produced Mickey Mouse.

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Far more revolutionary was Disney’s decision to create a cartoon with the novelty of synchronized sound. Steamboat Willie (1928), Mickey’s third film, took the country by storm. A missing element—sound—had been added to animation, making the illusion of life that much more complete, that much more magical. Later, Disney would add carefully synchronized music (The Skeleton Dance, 1929), three-strip Technicolor (Flowers and Trees, 1932), and the illusion of depth with his multiplane camera (The Old Mill, 1937). With each step, Disney seemed to come closer to a perfect naturalism, a painterly realism that suggested academic paintings of the 19th century. Disney’s resident technical wizard was Ub Iwerks, a childhood friend who followed Disney to Hollywood and was instrumental in the creation of the multiplane camera and the synchronization techniques that made the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies series seem so robust and fully dimensional.

For Disney, the final step was, of course, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Although not the first animated feature, it was the first to use up-to-the-minute techniques and the first to receive a wide, Hollywood-style release. Instead of amusing his audience with talking mice and singing cows, Disney was determined to give them as profound a dramatic experience as the medium would allow; he reached into his own troubled childhood to interpret this rich fable of parental abandonment, sibling rivalry, and the onrush of adult passion.

With his increasing insistence on photographic realism in films such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942), Disney perversely seemed to be trying to put himself out of business by imitating life too well. That was not the temptation followed by Disney’s chief rivals in the 1930s, all of whom came to specialize in their own kind of stylized mayhem.