Happy 50th birthday, Schoolhouse Rock!

Thanks to a Facebook post, I learned that January 6 is not just another "day of infamy."

On January 6, 1973, sometime between a couple of ABC cartoons, a ditty called "Three Is the Magic Number" premiered. 

It was the very first segment of what we know as Schoolhouse Rock, the ABC series that taught millions of 1970's children about English, math, history, and science. 

It lasted from 1973 to 1984, and in 2009, a DVD of the Schoolhouse Rock episodes came out. I had a copy and played it for my then ten-year-old son. I'm not sure how much he learned from it (maybe more than I think) but I remember the DVD for a recording of the song "Electricity" by the group Goodness. 

A fast look at Wikipedia told me that Schoolhouse Rock started when an ad executive saw his son was struggling with learning his multiplication tables -- even though he could memorize song lyrics. So he hired a musician to write a song to teach multiplication. That song was "Three Is a Magic Number." 

A co-worker of the executive heard the song, created visuals for it, and eventually pitched it as a TV series.

The rest, as they say, is history -- singable history, in this case.

I was nine years old when Schoolhouse Rock premiered. To this day:

• when I count the number of stitches I have on a knitting needle, I count them three at a time to the tune of "Three Is a Magic Number" ("Three, six, nine /Twelve, fifteen, eighteen . . .")
• my husband will still recite the very last part of "Interjections!" ("Darn, that's the end!"
• I find myself thinking of the lyrics of "A Noun Is a Person, Place or Thing" to remind myself of what a noun is
• if I want energy, I remember, "Verb! That's What's Happening"
• "Conjunction Junction" is an earworm.

I know there were other songs about the other parts of speech, but I do not remember them as well. 

"America Rock", another segment of Schoolhouse Rock, burst onto the scene in 1975. This was the series that taught kids how a bill became a law, what the 19th Amendment meant, how the American Revolution happened, along with the arrival of the Pilgrims.

And -- and -- the piece de resistance, "Preamble". I cannot, ever since I heard the song, recite the Preamble to the Constitution without hearing the song in the back of my head, "We the People/In order to form a more perfect union . . ." 

Throw in Science Rock and Money Rock -- segments I am not as familiar with -- and you have a perfect curriculum, all set to music. 

Looking back on the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, you can spot some of the '70's influence: the bell-bottom pants on the Wonder Woman-esq main character in "Suffering Until Suffrage", the afros on the Black kids in "Verb! That's What's Happening", the Nixon-esq politician in "I'm Just a Bill" running down the hall yelling (albeit in a Southern accent), "He signed you, bill! Now you're a law!"

In thinking about "America Rock", you could make the case that their coverage of American history is problematic: the arrival of the Pilgrims glosses over their treatment of the Native Americans who were there first; "Elbow Room", about the Western expansion, also ignores how Native Americans were pushed off their land. There is nothing about slavery or the Civil Rights movement. Nothing about the wars we were in. And other sordid parts of American history that we still don't want to or like to talk about.

But the idea -- of setting education fundamentals to music and seeing what happened -- worked. 

The earworms in my brain, and in the brain of just about every other '70's kid, prove it.

Happy 50th birthday, Schoolhouse Rock!

Just my .04, adjustment for inflation.