Rockin' the House!

I've been taking a break from my usual SF TV DVD watching the last couple of days and instead have been watching Schoolhouse Rock. Yes, that's right. Schoolhouse Rock. I happened to catch a few of these on disc at a friend's house a little while back, and I was absolutely astonished at how warm and happy and pleasant the feeling of nostalgia that washed over me was. Needless to say, I had to pick up the DVDs for myself, and I've been enjoying them immensely.

And not just for the nostalgia value, either. Revisiting these as an adult, I suddenly realize that, unlike many things I thought were good as a kid, they actually are good. If nothing else, the songs are incredibly catchy, as the fact that I can still sing some of them twenty-plus years later certainly attests. (And as the fact that "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here" has been looping around in my head for the past day and a half can also attest.) The animation, though crude by today's standards (and, yes, very 70's-ish), is clever and cute. And the cartoons' creators get major points from me for not talking down to kids. They're perfectly willing to throw in words most elementary schoolers might not be assumed to know (like "quadrupeds" in the song about multiplying by four to find out how many legs the critters in the zoo have) and to trust kids to understand the concepts being thrown at them. ("I hope you see the pattern!" concludes the multiplying-by-eleven song, obviously expecting that the kids actually will without having it spelled out for them.) They do a good job of keeping things on exactly the right level, too. I'm pretty impressed by the song about gravity (a highly amusing 50's love ballad), for instance. It draws an analogy between gravity and magnetism (oversimplified, but valid), explains that everything in the universe pulls on everything else, and goes on to mention that gravitational attraction is bigger the heavier the objects and smaller the greater the distance between them. That's more contentful than a lot of elementary school textbooks, I think, but it doesn't go so far as to swamp unsuspecting kids with the details of the inverse-square law. I'd say that's an impressive balance to be able to strike, particularly when you're faced with having to make everything rhyme.

Admittedly, some of the American history ones are, in retrospect, a little disturbing. They do tend to portray the myths of American history rather than the facts, which I suppose is only to be expected. Gravity is bad enough, but trying to convey the subtle nuances of history in a three-minute cartoon has got to be pretty much impossible. So I'm not really inclined to nitpick them on the details. On the other hand, a piece like "Elbow Room," about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the settling of the American west, is downright... unsettling. No pun intended. Aside from a mention of Sacajewea and a breezy admission that "there were plenty of fights/to win land rights" there's nothing in the song whatsoever to acknowledge the fact that, you know, there actually were people already living there when the settlers came and kicked them out. And any song that can include the lyrics "the West was meant to be;/it was our Manifest Destiny" with a perfectly straight and unapologetic face just kind of creeps me out a little. I suspect it's the title that really does it, though. "Elbow Room" sounds way too much like Lebensraum for my comfort. I'm not exactly thrilled about the extremes to which political correctness often gets taken in our own day, but I do at least find some comfort in the fact that this stuff would assuredly get thought twice about before making its way onto the air today...