PropagandaRock

A Schoolhouse Rock! Retrospective

Join @shel and @junipertheory as we rewatch and review all 64 Schoolhouse Rock! songs in chronological order.


Shel might finish it here
shelraphen.com/

Originally Aired: April 13th, 1974
Written by: Bob Dorough
Performed by: Bod Dorough

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵
Animation: 📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬

I hate this song I hate this song I hate this song. Bob has decided to do something absolutely ridiculous and awful and sing a song where he speeds up and slows down his own voice to different speeds to make it sound "older" or "younger" and then overlaps all of them to "harmonize" in a "chorus" and it is so incredibly grating and awful to listen to I hate it so fucking much. What's more? It's not even a catchy song, it's annoying Alvin and the Chipmunks shit. Also, it's boring to look at, newspaper strip on a white background nonsense, and most of the actual adverbs are on screen and not in the song, and there's so so so much spoken exposition over the song which also gives inaccurate information!

Adverbs are a very controversial catch-all category in Linguistics. A lot of things get labeled adverbs which are very different, and it's very hard to pin down how an "adverbial phrase" works in the study of linguistic syntax. Furthermore, when we expand outside of English, we find it very difficult to pin-down adverbs in any consistent cross-linguistic manner. That said, while some scholars do consider the word "there" to be an adverb, since "He placed it over there" is describing the... act... of placing? The fact is that in terms of grammatical syntax "there" is a deixic noun. It is a noun which stands-in for another noun which is already known by context.

Illustration of Deixis, explaining words like here, there, now, then, etc.

"Here" and "there" are locations you know by context. They always function, syntactically, the same as the noun they are replacing. In the same way that pronouns fit into the sentence the same places you'd place someone's name, "here" will always go in the same part of the sentence as "my apartment" or "Pennsylvania." "There" always goes in the same part of the sentence as "on the table" or "in China." A neat thing about deixis is that in addition to standing in for the core noun, it also can stand in for the preposition if that's known through context as well. I don't have to say "on top of there" if you can tell by where I'm pointing that it's "on top." That said, I may do so if I want to be specific. Grammatically, I cannot place deixic nouns in the same places I'd place adverbs. In English, adverbs have very interesting syntactic rules. "I gently bit my girlfriend" and "I bit my girlfriend gently" are both grammatical; but "I bit gently my girlfriend" is not grammatical. And yet, "I ran quickly to the store" is grammatical too. So you can place an adverb between a dative verb and the dative object of a verb; but you cannot place it between an accusative verb and the accusative object of a verb.

Here and there follow completely different rules. They follow the same rules as the noun. I cannot say "I there ran," I can only say "I ran there." I cannot say "I her bit." I can only say "I bit her." But I can say "I quickly ran" or "I ran quickly." It's a deixic noun, basically a pronoun for places. Of course, not all deixic words are nouns. "Yesterday" is, in fact, an adverb.... sometimes... linguists fucking hate adverbs, and I hate this song.

Only one yikes point because of Capitalism and my fuuucckiinnnggg eaarrrsss but like, hey, it's not even an all-white cast this time.

June's Review

Music 🎵🎵

I can't give this a 3/5 because if I do someone might notice I ranked this higher then Conjunction Junction and try to kill me in my own home. But I like this song :3 I always thought it was fun. The yelling guy at the end was funny to me. Yeah it's real fuckin' annoying, but like... half the songs on this show are annoying. I do think some of the voices are Bad though.

Animation 📺📺📺

I actually really like a ton of details about this. I love the black and white store with the colored details, I love the way it cuts in an out of being commercials, I love that all the words are like Grocery Store Products. Also, as a kid for some reason the fact that both of the adults do relatively normal commercials and then the kid goes "HI! SUPPOSE YOU'RE GOIN' NUT GATHERIN'!" was the funniest shit I could imagine. Why would you be nut gathering? Why is this the first thing you went to? I love it. It is pretty basic though, and I hated the big machine that adds endings to other words, why do they have legs.

Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓

Wow! That's a lot of grammar stuff Shel wrote that's really smart! You should read it! This song mostly taught me that "indubitably" was a word which I then had to ask what it meant and was glad I knew. Three points!

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯/5

Yikes 0/5

NUT GATHERIN' 🌰/🌰

Up Next: Season 2 is over so it's time for our preliminary Grammar Rock! Round-Up! Lots of numbers. Then, uh oh, it's finally time for America Rock!



As we work on drafting our America Rock! reviews we keep falling down horrifying research holes so heads-up that once we get to America Rock! we're probably going to slow down to only one or two posts a week instead of three since these reviews are just taking so much more time per song than other seasons. Like, gd damn.



Originally Aired: March 2nd, 1974
Written by: George Newall
Performed by: Blossom Dearie

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬😬

Blossom Dearie is back, and we have our first George Newall song, who will become another regular in the writing team. Unfortunately for them, this is truly one of the most middling of all songs. The animation is... fine... the song is... fine... This poor girl had a miserable camping trip. I think the turtle friend is cute. The park ranger is body horror to me, real heebie jeebies. I think the rhyming works. There's a particularly egregious example of spoken exposition that really doesn't fit into the song. I do think the animation and music do a good job of teaching about what adjectives are and how to use them. However, and maybe this is because I'm Autistic, but as a kid the "unpack" metaphor confused me a little. What they're going for is "when you go on a trip, save lots of adjectives as souvenirs so you can unpack them and share them with family and friends when you get home" but instead I thought it was something you're supposed to do to adjectives grammatically. Also, while it's useful teaching that nouns often have adjective forms, it does not discuss that nouns have specific adjective forms. "Idiot" becomes "Idiotic" but it cannot become "Indiotary." Nor can someone have a "Boyic" face.

Speaking of inaccuracies, a small boy probably won't get smaller unless he has pediatric osteoporosis which would be really unfortu—wait, oh g-d, what, what is happening, holy fucking shit, did that girl just grow into a giantess and then squish a microscopic boy beneath her sandaled feet? I'm starting to think someone on the animation team might actually have a foot fetish and if that's the case it's very uncomfortable that they are inserting it into a scene meant to teach children about how adjectives can be comparatives like "taller" and "smaller" using the bodies of children. Also, this song in general is just really fixated on teaching us about the gender binary and how boys and girls are; as well as a "dumb/brainy" binary. For once I'm grateful everyone in this one is white because they might have gone some really racist places with this song about teaching kids how to describe other people.

June's Review

Music 🎵🎵

This is pretty middling as far as music goes. I like the lyrics, but the song is kinda boring, especially compared to some of the real good ones we've heard recently.

Animation 📺📺📺📺

When I was a kid I thought this one was kind of boring, but now I actually really love the weird watercolor aesthetic it has for some of the art. A lot of it is kind of boring and black and white, but the scenes with more color really pop here, I like them a lot. I just wish the whole cartoon did it, instead of just doing it every once in a while for effect.

Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓

I mean, it teaches how adjectives work? Sort of? Why are all the adjectives so negative, was the trip that bad? I dunno, it mostly works, but it doesn't really teach like I feel like some of them could.

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯

Yeah the whole "wait why do some nouns get ish and others get ic or such" really confused me as a kid.

Yikes 😬

Okay, I don't think someone on the crew actually has a foot fetish. I do think this may have done some things to some kids, as this looks like art I see on my timeline daily. I don't know, the vibes of this one are just weird to me. Lots of the jokes feel a bit mean.

Up Next: Bob returns for the season finale with what I think is one of the most annoying songs he's written yet.



Originally Aired: February 23rd, 1974
Written by: Lynn Ahrens
Performed by: Essra Mohawk

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬😬😬

I played Reginald in this song as a child in Schoolhouse Rock! Live! Junior! I still really like this song. It's very fun and catchy, the exposition fits the rhythm, and the song sorta fits the vibe of what it's talking about. It's just a good little folk song. I think June and I will disagree a lot about a lot of these Lynn Ahrens songs because I'm from New England and have a fondness for this sort of contemporary folk music. To a child, a lot of parts of this song are also genuinely funny. Clips from this one were used a lot in commercials for the DVD box sets. I love the girl getting an A+ and shouting "Wow!" and just lots of fun little echolalias and moments in this song.

The animation here is... I would say one step up from My Hero, Zero. It's very much that "newspaper strips on a white background" vibe but the character designs are at least fun and there's some good visual gags like the girl scaring the snake and the guy who says he's for the other team and his feeling goes from explanation point to comma when everyone glares at him. Also the typography is fun. Still, compared to everything else we've seen this season, you can tell this is not where they put the animation budget.

In terms of pedagogy... sure? It teaches the concept it's teaching perfectly well, but... why are we learning this? Similar to My Hero, Zero the concept is summarized immediately in one sentence and we have to wonder why it needs to be taught at all. In some ways, it's more about the punctuation than the actual grammar. Also, no attention is given to English's most beloved infix -fucking- which has the most complicated grammatical rules of any interjection. For instance, inter-fucking-jection is grammatical but not in-fucking-terjection. Obviously, the 3rd graders are not ready for this advanced grammar technique. Still, nothing is wrong, so full points for accuracy.

I do want to first acknowledge that the woman singing this song is a white woman who legally changed her last name to Mohawk. She is not from the Kanienʼkehá:ka nation. She was born Sandra Hurvitz. Why would she do this? This would be because her husband was Frazier Mohawk: "an American record producer and sometime photographer, publicist, circus owner, and farmer." He was born Barry Friedman in California and I can't find any evidence of him being Kanienʼkehá:ka either; and there's no explanation online for why he legally changed his name to this. So. Hippies appropriating indigenous culture and profiting off of it as a brand, neat.

Also, Hello Rape Culture! Poor fucking Geraldine, first she's sexually harassed by Geraldo "despite her objections" and then when she finally caves in, he turns into a frog because she kissed him, finally freed from his curse to be a human being. Kids, if someone shouts that interjection "No!" then you need to respect that non-consent, even if it's a "no," because the feeling's not as strong. In fact, you should really be waiting on that interjection "Yes!" before you go trying to get them to say "Oh!" and so forth if you know what I mean.

June's Review

Music 🎵🎵🎵🎵

Yeah I like this one. It sticks with you. The gags in the music are good and in this case the "speaking over the music" actually fits. It's timed well and it's really funny. And "DARN, THAT'S THE END" is something I still think of constantly. The way the one girl says WOW is actually like a permanent part of my vocabulary at this point.

Animation 📺📺📺📺

Okay, I know the animation here is cheap, but I absolutely love it. I find so many gags in this hilarious, like the animation of the snake scare or the Hurray Guy. But mostly? I LOVE the typography. It's one of my favorite things and this song does it constantly. The glowing WOW, the way the RATS shows up, the cursive HEY, it's all so great; it's also really well coordinated with the music.

Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓

This song mostly taught me that interjections were things you yell. I don't know if I can blame the song for it, but for a very long time I thought that interjections were just things you yelled.

Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯

Frogs are cute, Geraldine. I'm dating one. Maybe this one isn't, but I can't stand for this frog slander.

Yikes 😬

The Mohawk thing is pretty fuckin' weird, but I think the Geraldine thing is funny, mostly because she's very much in power the whole time. The worst thing he does is kiss her hand in a creepy way and gets yelled at for it. Still, it certainly could be better. Me and Shel over here just waiting with our big yikes numbers to throw them at America Rocks as hard as possible, lol.

Up Next: Nobody can accuse me of being the one fixated on feet after this next one.