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.

“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).

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!”

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.”