Saturday Morning's Greatest Hits
A uniquely Gen X TV staple in the '70s was ABC's Schoolhouse Rock, a series of three-minute Saturday morning lessons on grammar, civics, science, and math that ran from 1973-1985 and returned in 1994 with new installments. From "Conjunction Junction" to "I'm Just a Bill" and "Lolly Lolly Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here," these little ditties entered the Gen X consciousness and stayed there. They even got mentioned in the 1994 flop film "Reality Bites."
Tom Yohe was 34 when he, along with David McCall and George Newall, created Schoolhouse Rock. All three worked at McCaffrey & McCall, a New York advertising agency, and used their experience with the short sell to bring learning to Saturday morning TV. It all started when McCall saw that one of his sons had no problem remembering the lyrics to rock songs, but had trouble with his multiplication tables. So he thought kids might learn better if the information was put to music.
Yohe and Newall got to work, joining forces with jazz musician and songwriter Bob Dorough, who came up with the first installment, "Three Is A Magic Number." Michael Eisner, ABC's 27-year-old vice president for children's programming (now chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company), gave the project the green light and the first installment was soon on the air. It was followed by "Grammar Rock," "America Rock," "Science Rock," and the early-1980s segments, "Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips." Now 58, Yohe believes that the short length of each Schoolhouse Rock installment (three minutes) along with the number of times each one aired led to the show's popularity. The segments were never on long enough for kids to realize they were being educated. "I don't think kids would have accepted education in the half hour format," Yohe said. "Sesame Street started a year before we did [with their short learning segments], CBS had In the News, this 90-second thing. I'm sure the reason they created this drop-in format was a way of satiating the critics of children's television." The Schoolhouse Rock segments were originally dropped into ABC's Saturday morning schedule five or six times, Yohe said, allowing for enough variety to keep kids interested and enough repetitions to make an impression. By the mid-1980s Schoolhouse Rock began to get preempted by three-minute spots featuring flash-in-the-pan musical group Menudo and later by exercise spots starring Mary Lou Retton. "We were gone and it was sort of, out of sight out of mind," Yohe said. "I'd get phone calls every now and then from somebody doing their thesis on children's television and then in 1990 I got a phone call from kids at Dartmouth. They were having a senior symposium on education and asked me to participate."
Yohe's Schoolhouse Rock presentation was scheduled for a Saturday night in the biggest auditorium on campus and 900 Xers showed up for the event that turned into a sing-along when Yohe played segments on video. "That was the first time I realized what kind of impact it had on that generation," Yohe said. "That was my rebirth, my catechism. I realized, holy shit, we really affected this group because they all sang along."
At a Museum of Television & Radio seminar in May 1995, Yohe said it was the efforts of college students that helped get Schoolhouse Rock back on the air. An undergraduate at the University of Connecticut got thousands of signatures and sent them to ABC and another fan kept calling Yohe from phone booths all over the United States. "He was traveling around on his own to campuses trying to drum up pressure to put Schoolhouse Rock back on the air," Yohe said at the seminar.
By 1994, Schoolhouse Rock was back
on the air with its 44th installment, "Dollars & Sense," the
first in the "Money Rock" series. ABC didn't even order any changes
in the style. Newall said Jennie Trias, the president of ABC's
children's television division, didn't want them to do Schoolhouse
Rap, she wanted Schoolhouse Rock. "It's really a misnomer to call it
Schoolhouse Rock, Newall recalled at the seminar. "Bobby [Dorough] is
too good to stick to rock. He used whatever musical language was
appropriate for the concept [of each segment] and that's why it has
such a variety and that's why I think it has lasted."
About the same time in 1994 Schoolhouse Rock moved to the stage in Chicago with a production called Schoolhouse Rock Live! by Theater BAM. This musical production by a group of Xers included 20 songs from the '70s Schoolhouse Rock framed by an original story about a young school teacher who, fearing he won't remember what to teach his students, turns to the tube. "It's a combination of cynicism and hope," said Nina Lynn, producer of Schoolhouse Rock Live! in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. "People come because they think it's a nostalgia thing." Like The Brady Bunch Movie, which parodied the Bradys but also treated them with some reverence, Schoolhouse Rock Live! didn't make fun of its subject. "[Audiences] see we're playing it partially straight," Lynn said. "...These songs bind us as a generation, and it's nice to know there are some things we can actually feel good about."
At the same time Chicago was also home to Hooray, a take-off on the PBS show Zoom, and Saturday Morning Live, which featured actors portraying characters from Scooby Doo, Land of the Lost, and Fat Albert along with songs from Schoolhouse Rock. By the summer of 1995, Schoolhouse Rock Live! made it to Manhattan and an appearance on ABC's Good Morning America. When that happened, even MTV took notice, devoting a segment of the August 4, 1995, segment of The Week in Rock to the theatrical production. "I remember seeing 'Sufferin' Till Suffrage' and being like, 'Yeah! I love this song!'" cast member Dina Joy Byrd told MTV. "Like, I was this tiny kid who thought this stuff was so great. And I think that's how a lot of people feel. It touches a part of them." Cast member Thomas Mizer recalled the dark days when Schoolhouse Rock went off the air. "It was pretty frightening," he said. "Actually, I remember 'cause it went from Schoolhouse Rock to, like, Mary Lou Retton doing scary, like, evil gymnastics. You were expected at, like, nine in the morning to get up and be, like, rolling on the floor..."
Yohe, now vice president and creative supervisor at Grey Advertising, said he thinks the impact of Schoolhouse Rock is evenly split between educational and cultural. "I think a lot of people love it just because it brings back fun memories of childhood or sitting in front of the TV on Saturday mornings," Yohe said. "And a lot of people claim to have really learned something. And there's the recognition. You say to someone, 'Conjunction junction,' they say, 'What's your function?' That's purely a rote cultural thing, but I think it made learning very palatable."
There's another Gen X connection with Schoolhouse Rock These three-minute snippets of education were actually the first music videos. "In a way we were because we visualized music in animation," Yohe said. "This group [of people] that has grown up on Schoolhouse Rock has also grown up on MTV, we just beat them out there by 10 years. There is a tremendous correlation. It's almost like Schoolhouse Rock was the primer for MTV. Music used to be very much of an aural experience and now with the onset of MTV, it's very visual as well. We weren't the first people, Disney did that with "Whistle While You Work," but I think we're very similar to MTV in many respects."
Other tidbits that came out of the Museum of Television & Radio's "Reading, Writing and Schoolhouse Rock" seminar included George Newall's revelation that the original title was Scholastic Rock, until lawyers from Scholastic magazine heard about it. Bob Dorough also attended the seminar and told about being hired to sing Schoolhouse Rock songs at wedding receptions. The creators spoke about future endeavors, including a series called "Ecology Rock," educational CD-ROMs based on Schoolhouse Rock, T-shirts, a fan book written by Yohe and Newall, a new release of the segments on video in August 1995 (some stores couldn't keep them in stock), a boxed set of original Schoolhouse Rock tunes, and Atlantic Records' April 1996 release of Schoolhouse Rock Rocks, featuring the Schoolhouse Rock tunes sung by alternative rockers.
Finally, Yohe commented on the longevity of what is probably the most memorable Schoolhouse Rock segment, "Conjunction Junction." He said it has endured in particular thanks to the alliterative quality of the song. "We have a test where we walk into any restaurant and if a waiter or waitress is between the ages of 25 and 33, we just say, 'Conjunction Junction,'" Yohe said. "If they don't respond, 'What's your function?' they've been on Mars for the past 20 years."
